Lady Gaga and Popular Music

Lady Gaga and Popular Music
Author: Martin Iddon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2014-01-03
Genre: Music
ISBN: 113407994X

This book is a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary examination of the music and figure of Lady Gaga, combining approaches from scholars in cultural studies, art, fashion, and music. It represents one of the first scholarly volumes devoted to Lady Gaga, who has become, over a few short years, central to both popular (and, indeed, populist) as well as more scholarly thought in these areas and who, the contributors argue, is helping to shape—directly and indirectly—thought and culture both in the fields of the "scholarly" and the "everyday." Lady Gaga's output is firmly embedded in a self-consciously intellectual pop culture tradition, and her music videos are intertextually linked to icons of pop culture intelligentsia like Alfred Hitchcock and open to multiple interpretations. In examining her music and figure, this volume contributes both to debates on the status of intertextuality, held in tension with originality, and to debates on the figuring of the sexualized female body, and representations of disability. There is interest in these issues from a wide range of disciplines: popular musicology, film studies, queer studies, women’s studies, gender studies, disability studies, popular culture studies, and the burgeoning sub-discipline of aesthetics and philosophy of fashion.

The Performance Identities of Lady Gaga

The Performance Identities of Lady Gaga
Author: Richard J. Gray II
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2014-01-10
Genre: Music
ISBN: 078649252X

Three years after entering the pop music scene, Lady Gaga became the most well-known pop star in the world. These thirteen critical essays explore Lady Gaga's body of work through the interdisciplinary filter of performance identity and cover topics such as gender and sexuality, body commodification, visual body rhetoric, drag performance, homosexuality and heteronormativity, Surrealism and the theatre of cruelty, the carnivalesque, monstrosity, imitation and parody, human rights, and racial politics. Of particular interest is the way that Lady Gaga's œuvre, however popular, strange, raw or controversial, enters into the larger sociopolitical discourse, challenging the status quo and altering our perceptions of reality.

Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga
Author: Matt Doeden
Publisher: Twenty-First Century Books
Total Pages: 116
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0761381538

Discusses the career of Stefani Germanotta, aka Lady Gaga, and her public social activism.

Global Glam and Popular Music

Global Glam and Popular Music
Author: Ian Chapman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2016-02-12
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317588193

This book is the first to explore style and spectacle in glam popular music performance from the 1970s to the present day, and from an international perspective. Focus is given to a number of representative artists, bands, and movements, as well as national, regional, and cultural contexts from around the globe. Approaching glam music performance and style broadly, and using the glam/glitter rock genre of the early 1970s as a foundation for case studies and comparisons, the volume engages with subjects that help in defining the glam phenomenon in its many manifestations and contexts. Glam rock, in its original, term-defining inception, had its birth in the UK in 1970/71, and featured at its forefront acts such as David Bowie, T. Rex, Slade, and Roxy Music. Termed "glitter rock" in the US, stateside artists included Alice Cooper, Suzi Quatro, The New York Dolls, and Kiss. In a global context, glam is represented in many other cultures, where the influences of early glam rock can be seen clearly. In this book, glam exists at the intersections of glam rock and other styles (e.g., punk, metal, disco, goth). Its performers are characterized by their flamboyant and theatrical appearance (clothes, costumes, makeup, hairstyles), they often challenge gender stereotypes and sexuality (androgyny), and they create spectacle in popular music performance, fandom, and fashion. The essays in this collection comprise theoretically-informed contributions that address the diversity of the world’s popular music via artists, bands, and movements, with special attention given to the ways glam has been influential not only as a music genre, but also in fashion, design, and other visual culture.

Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame

Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame
Author: Mathieu Deflem
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2016-11-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137584688

This book investigates the stardom of Lady Gaga within a cultural-sociological framework. Resisting a reductionist perspective of fame as a commodity, Mathieu Deflem offers an empirical examination of the social conditions that informed Lady Gaga’s rise to fame. The book delves into topics such as the marketing of Lady Gaga; the legal issues that have dogged her career; the media; her audience; her activism; issues of sex, gender, and sexuality; and Lady Gaga’s unique artistry. By training a spotlight on this singular pop icon, Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame invites readers to consider the nature of stardom in an age of celebrity.

Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga
Author: Elizabeth Goodman
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2010-09-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0312668406

Packed with 120 full-color photos of the new queen of pop, this volume celebrates the fashion of the edgy, wildly original Lady Gaga, catching this rocketing star at her most outrageous, most revealing, and most fashionable.

Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga
Author: Emily Herbert
Publisher: Kings Road Publishing
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2011-05-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1843582082

Queen of Pop, superstar, maverick, fashionista, Lady Gaga is one of the most recognisable and sensational pop stars for a generation. A true original, Gaga found fame the hard way, playing the grimy bars and burlesque shows of New York City, before finally relocating to Los Angeles to begin work on what would become her debut album The Fame. Constantly en vogue and always in the public eye, this is the biography of the rise and rise of Gaga, from her early life as a teenage protege, to her life as one of the most respected musicians and most recognised entertainers on the planet.

Thoughtrave: An Interdimensional Conversation with Lady Gaga

Thoughtrave: An Interdimensional Conversation with Lady Gaga
Author: Lady Gaga
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2016
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0692686916

Thoughtrave is the immediate and most detailed archive of Lady Gaga's emotional, intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual evolution, a reclaiming of her art (and humanity) from within the center of her celebrity during one of the most difficult transitions of her career: Summer 2013-Fall 2014. Lady Gaga: I don't like being used to make money. I feel sad when I am overworked and that I just become a money making machine and that my passion and my creativity take a backseat. That makes me unhappy. So, what did I do? I started to say no. Not doing that. I don't want to do that. I'm not taking that picture. Not going to that event. Not standing by that because that's not what I stand for. Thoughtrave marks perhaps the most important (and unconditional, unpublished, unencumbered) insights into the music industry, the personal battles that accompanied her transition from Stefani to Gaga. "It's one of those rare moments in life when you ask a question of someone you've admired for many years and receive the most honest of answers leading both people into a relationship that was and remains one of the most important of my life," says Baum, a professor, producer, composer, writer, editor, and activist for adjunct professors. As Baum explains to Stefani in one of the many interviews published here for the first time, Robert Craig Baum: It's uncanny for me to look back at 2008-2011 - when I was intensely meditating on the problem "Why is there any being at all?" - to find evidence of your intervention here with me...to find you, back then...before I knew you. It was almost as if I was playing the Bruce Willis character in Twelve Monkeys, overshooting my mark in time/space, aiming for this particular conversation but speaking through Ereignis (life gives) to a moment I (and many others) call "headphones on." As George Elerick writes in his Introduction to the book, "In Hand-to-Hand Battle for the Users," "The book you hold in your hands easily falls into the category of a transgression. It's as though we are breaking into somewhere we are not meant to be (like a rave) and are invited into the mind of one of today's musical geniuses. Maybe we can even equivocate the experience to that of being a member of the paparazzi. Their whole mode of employment is based on breaking social codes and entering into the lives of everyday-people-turned-rock-stars. That's what this book is, a disruptive invitation to break into the life and mind of Lady Gaga, the person, not just the persona."

Digital Signatures

Digital Signatures
Author: Ragnhild Brøvig
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2023-10-31
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0262549638

How sonically distinctive digital “signatures”—including reverb, glitches, and autotuning—affect the aesthetics of popular music, analyzed in works by Prince, Lady Gaga, and others. Is digital production killing the soul of music? Is Auto-Tune the nadir of creative expression? Digital technology has changed not only how music is produced, distributed, and consumed but also—equally important but not often considered—how music sounds. In this book, Ragnhild Brøvig and Anne Danielsen examine the impact of digitization on the aesthetics of popular music. They investigate sonically distinctive “digital signatures”—musical moments when the use of digital technology is revealed to the listener. The particular signatures of digital mediation they examine include digital reverb and delay, MIDI and sampling, digital silence, the virtual cut-and-paste tool, digital glitches, microrhythmic manipulation, and autotuning—all of which they analyze in specific works by popular artists. Combining technical and historical knowledge of music production with musical analyses, aesthetic interpretations, and theoretical discussions, Brøvig and Danielsen offer unique insights into how digitization has changed the sound of popular music and the listener's experience of it. For example, they show how digital reverb and delay have allowed experimentation with spatiality by analyzing Kate Bush's “Get Out of My House”; they examine the contrast between digital silence and the low-tech noises of tape hiss or vinyl crackle in Portishead's “Stranger”; and they describe the development of Auto-Tune—at first a tool for pitch correction—into an artistic effect, citing work by various hip-hop artists, Bon Iver, and Lady Gaga.