Camille Paglia uses such a stock formula that it's difficult to tell when it's her or an unfunny parodist writing: select a target for ire by finding someone with more talent, relevance, success, or decency than Paglia, attack that target with a combination of banal observations and reactionary politics disguised as intellectual musings, and top it off with some nostalgia for a time when Paglia was able to convince large numbers of people she was the first person to notice that Madonna is interesting. She doesn't veer from this winning formula for a second with her lazy and predictable screed denouncing Lady Gaga. Paglia's so dedicated to recycling her own work from the past 20 years that she doesn't even bother to find anyone whose career began after 1981 for a point of negative comparison, even though there are many available candidates.

It's fun to compare Paglia's unoriginal bile to Lady Gaga's touching and humble acceptance speech at the Video Music Awards last night. As you noted, Jessica, Gaga really stole the show by using her time on stage to reach out to fans who find comfort in her work and to push back against Don't Ask, Don't Tell. It really must burn Paglia's ass to know that a bunch of Gaga-worshipping teenagers grasp camp and Postmodernism with an ease that escapes Paglia, the purported expert. It leaves Paglia sputtering about how Gaga is a failure as an artist because she doesn't turn on Camille Paglia, the arbiter of all things sexy.

But of all the amusing aspects* of Paglia's reactionary refusal to get the big deal over Lady Gaga, my favorite has to be her stubborn inability to grasp the importance that pop music can have in the lives of fans, even though she's spent her entire career claiming to be a champion of the value of pop music.  Which leads to Paglia contradicting herself within a single paragraph:

Gaga is in way over her head with her avant-garde pretensions. … She wants to have it both ways – to be hip and avant-garde and yet popular and universal, a practitioner of gung-ho “show biz.” Most of her worshippers seem to have had little or no contact with such powerful performers as Tina Turner or Janis Joplin, with their huge personalities and deep wells of passion.

The person here who wants to have it both ways is Paglia.  She both wants to claim a contradiction between "hip and avant-garde" and "popular and universal" but also to praise older artists for being able achieve exactly this balance. I humbly submit that the main difference between pop artists who manage to bring genuine insight to large audiences then and now is that the artists that Paglia loves were relevant when she was young, and the ones she hates are the ones that are coming out now, when Paglia is an aging, cranky reactionary. But in true Paglia fashion, she's going to need 6,000 words and a big check in order to tell Lady Gaga to get off her lawn.

*Including taking a potshot at a megastar for making a lot of money. I breathlessly await Paglia's next insight, perhaps dramatically announcing that a lot of nerds work in Silicon Valley.

Tags: camille paglia, lady gaga

When I see a headline like "Time to take Susan Boyle seriously," I tend to follow the written instructions, which in this case meant digging up Boyle's version of "Wild Horses" that inspired Ann Powers. I'm billing the LA Times for the dental work to fix my newly popped cavities, right after I put Sticky Fingers on my turntable to wipe out the memory of this travesty. Now, I don't hate everything that achieves a certain level of popularity—I'm a fan of Lily Allen and think Beyonce's a pretty good singer—but I'm still an adherent to the old-fashioned belief that popularity doesn't make up for crappiness.

This no doubt makes me a snob, an elitist, and a hater of democracy. Powers praises Boyle's saccharine, unimaginative oversell of the classic Rolling Stones by praising its lack of irony, its "mask of sincerity," and adherence to all the hallmarks of cheese so beloved by whitebread America that wants to avoid anything challenging. I flatly cannot understand why popularity should mitigate one's dislike of "art" that's so artless. The great thing about the explosion of pop music in the past century is that it collapses the distinction between the individual stamp of being an artist and having popular appeal. The Stones were great pop music, after all.

I'm not made of stone. I watched the video where Boyle overcame prejudice based on looks to prove herself an able singer on Britain's Got Talent, and found myself rooting for her. But let's face it. That she's a competent singer doesn't make her a star, and it has everything to do with her voice and nothing to do with her looks.

A critic guilt-tripping the audience for not thinking much of scrappy Susan Boyle's actual art feels very ... familiar. The pressure to indulge illusions about Boyle's talent reminds me of every time liberals get labeled "elitist" for laughing at creationists, suggesting that Ayn Rand was not a good writer, or scoffing at Sarah Palin. The right wing populism card has been routinely played since Richard Nixon waxed unpoetic about the "silent majority." At least in politics, the idea that being popular mitigates the undesirability of being all wrong has some justification, because it takes being popular and not being right to win. Of course, "popular trumps right" doesn't do much for a nation's well-being, as the Bush administration demonstrated, but you can at least see why the idea is attractive.

But why on earth should this attitude apply to aesthetics? God forbid you get caught hauling around a record by Hot Chip or Yo La Tengo instead of joining Boylemania—someone might call you a "hipster." I can't quite put my finger on when the populism of mediocrity started to overtake the desire to be considered someone of taste, but now that we have an LA Times record critic praising Susan Boyle because she's just mediocre enough to hit the big time, I have to say it's time we started a movement to reclaim the terms "snob" and "elitist."

Photograph by Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images.

Tags: elitism, Music, rolling stones, Susan Boyle

My husband has been in love with Bruce Springsteen longer than he's been in love with me. Bruce's lyrics were the soundtrack for our courtship (I came for you, for you, I came for you), our long-overdue wedding (So you're scared and you're thinking that maybe we ain't that young anymore), the many years of our marriage (This life, this life and then the next, with you I have been blessed), and his own work (sick of sitting round here trying to write this book). He rarely misses a Springsteen concert and can recite tracks, covers, and lyrics for any occasion. It was no surprise to me then that he came home from last night's D.C. show pumped and happy as a schoolboy. At the Verizon Center, he'd run into many similarly infatuated friends trading stories of set lists, the E Street Café, and who got to hang out with the band (Rahm Emanuel back stage with Bruce and Patty!). I love my husband but this is a facination we do not share. Though I am fond of The Boss, I don't go to concerts. I can't deal with the crowds, the late hours, or the intense middle-aged hetero man crush of the audience. I was not born to run. Disappointed when I told him several years ago I was done shouting lyrics at a tiny figure on a far-away stage, my husband recovered quickly and now happily scrambles to score a single ticket for every tour. I go to bed early and he goes out dancing in the dark.

Tags: bruce springsteen