if you touched it, it would quiver and burst like an overripe blackberry

@leastimportantperson

Yep. Whenever I see that inflated pout, I think "Is it worth it, Lizzy? Is it worth it to be in pain every time you sing?" It's like she's The Little Mermaid of manufactured pop stars.

@leastimportantperson The lips look good until they start moving and then it's all Real Housewives territory from there...

@parallel-lines Seriously! The first thinkg I thought of her was: I don't like her fake name and I don't like her face. And then I thought: That's mean, she can't help her face. AND THEN I was like: Yes she fucking CAN.

@melis This is basically my fear/strange desire.

@parallel-lines I can't get over how similar her lips are to Julia Roberts and it's all downhill from there.

@The Lady of Shalott I think the prevailing impression is that her career started because of her rich dad, and that now a record label is trying to market her to people who don't like to think they're following a major record label's wishes. On top of that, she denies having lip injections and a nose job and acts pretty blase about having a singing career, so people hate her. I think one or the other wouldn't be a big deal, but combined, she's a perfect internet target.

@Faintly Macabre The Internet is a weird and strangely wonderful place. I am intrigued.

@Faintly Macabre My vague understanding is she started as Lizzy Grant, or something, and didn't get anywhere, and then started going by Lana Del Rey and got a huge makeover and all of a sudden, boom. Which is a time-honored tradition, of course, but it really happened in front of everyone, because the internet.

Also, having heard her sing a little bit, she doesn't seem very talented at all to me. And what talent she has is not at all developed or under her control. Career-making makeovers are fine, as long as there's some there there (see: Rita Hayworth).

@miwome Oh, yeah, that's the other bit I forgot--everyone can see her original persona/lips, and she hasn't done the best job of making the repackaging convincing. (Which is one of the big things for me--her original face was so pretty! Whhyyyyy!)

I think she has some talent, and her voice is unique, but she really, really needs singing lessons to use it properly. Right now it's like a middle-school Florence Welch.

@Faintly Macabre That's my thingggg. As somebody who sang for years and has actually given a couple of (very very basic) voice lessons, it's painful to hear how much she has no idea what she's doing, without enough natural skill to get by. I don't understand why nobody has made her put in the work (shock, horror) she needs to be, um, competent.

Note that I'm not saying a "rough" voice is never okay--Bob Dylan + voice lessons would be CRAY. But hers in its untrained state is not working for her.

Sigh, I should probably not be this serious about things of this nature.

@The Lady of Shalott Read the other two dozen posts about her on The Hairpin, or Jane's link to two pretty insightful articles about her yesterday.

@leon.saintjean First of all, Klosterman!! Yes. Secondly, entertainers creating personae is not a new thing, see every Classic Hollywood post ever, basically. Right? Or do you mean something different?

@miwome - Oh, totally agree people have been creating personae forever. I think the difference is, in classic hollywood, people had to pretend the persona they inhabited was who they were.

In the 60s/70s (see: Jones (aka Bowie), David) we began constructing personas which, while obviously not authentic, we at least kind of 'pretended' were. KISS always wore the makeup.

Until the 80s came. Then "Madonna" acted like a "whore" and just blew the fucking dichotomy up. In '83 for Lick It Up the band unmasked. Conceptualism / Postmodernity began to reign supreme.

The early 90s were a wave of backlash against this. From Kurt to C.R.E.A.M. we acted like authenticity was what we wanted again after our first decade long experiment of allowing ourselves to pretend. Part of the reason the 80s were so tacky and aged so poorly was that we didn't know how to live yet in a world of pastiche.

Finally the internet blew the lid off everything. With all truth so instantly accessible, it became impossible to have a super-convincing lie. There was always a high school yearbook photo of your frizzy-phase, a forum where as soon as somebody googled the name of your Jazz-Rock band they would see that you were named after a fictional dildo from Yokohama. Any random girl you met could be a 45 year old creep. Everybody could lie a little bit, but nobody could sell a lie forever.

All of our sides became exposed, and we started to realize how bifurcated, trifurcated, etceterafurcated our 'selves' really were. Who is the real me? The guy who comments and discusses feminism on this blog? The dude who had long hair and used to jump off amps w/ his bass and suck the nitrous out of reddi-whip? The startup employee or the guy at Union Pool at 3AM on a Saturday?

All of them I guess, or none of them. WHAT the persona is LDR constructed doesn't matter, as long as it was an obvious construct we were going to do our little fucking internet thing to it. How is it even 1% different than GaGa? For years and years and years, there was a tween pop singer and we didn't even know what was Miley Cyrus and what was Hannah Montana. You build a wall because people want to tear it down.

Authenticity is for crying alone in your Jameson when a pet dies, or the first 30 seconds after you cum. Everything else is bullshit and that's delightful. But for the first time ever, we're being forced to confront it subtly all of the time. And people like LDR cause these massive fucking reactions because they shove it right in our faces.

The fakery is more painful because parts of it aren't fake. She might not be a "gangster nancy sinatra", some of the things that make her "beautiful" might not be real - but some of it is real to. Which parts?

She forces us to confront the fact that half the shit around us is completely phony, and half is legit, and we can't even really tell anymore, sometimes even when we're the subject, which is which. It makes people uncomfortable.

Plus, it's a helluva a parlor game.

@leon.saintjean - i'm terribly embarrassed i wrote 'to' instead of 'too'.

@leon.saintjean Actually, I'd argue that at this point Lady Gaga is much more in line with David "I'm gay and always have been" Bowie in the tradition of being really serious about inhabiting the entertainment persona all the time in a way that approaches "reality," or at least a loss of distinction between the persona and the person.

I guess I more or less agree with you in terms of why she makes people in general so mad, although I would have phrased/come at it differently--people, especially the slightly indie audience I think she's meant to appeal to, don't like having it made obvious how much of their own taste or willingness to buy into something is about the packaging. It's the same thing as what you're saying, really.

That said, none of that is what bothers ME about her. What bothers ME about her is that while she has a potentially interesting voice, she has no earthly idea what she's doing with it from a technical standpoint, and while that works for some people, it really doesn't for her. It's painful for me to listen to her, from a purely aural standpoint.

@leon.saintjean See I dislike LDR, because her music is really dull and unexciting (and calculatedly so, like a musical Kardashian sister, living off all those clucking tongues) and her PR strategy is working like gangbusters. She's the female Asher Roth - everything about her is meticulously orchestrated to instigate argument around everything that's not her music. Hopefully, like Asher, her album bombs and we never have to deal with her again. I think that's what's going to happen, because she's not in TV, her audience is going to be asked to pay for something that has nothing to do with the dialog around her.

Fuck Chuck, tho. His recent Grantland article on Tuneyards was both lazy and misogynistic in the worst Bearded Rock Critic ways.

@leon.saintjean How is it even 1% different than GaGa?
Plenty different! In that Gaga claims ownership of herself and her image. Which is what was so refreshing about Madonna, at least from a feminist perspective. Madonna was ballsy and provocative, at least up until the Sex era, when she broke her own spell and revealed that her brazen sexuality was all about the boys. LDR skipped that first part and went right for the pandering. The most entertaining part of this whole debacle (the only thing, really) has been watching ladyblogs twist themselves up trying to decide whether or not the male gaze-y bullshit is feminist in the context of her music. Just in case you needed any evidence of the uselessness of feminist cultural criticism of pop culture in 2012.

@Danzig! - I guess why I'm excited by LDR is that I have this theory of critical mass of personality overkill. One of these days we'll get so burnt out on this authenticity game shit won't matter - its like internet pics of college kids sucking on beer bongs our pulling out their wang at Mardi Gras. Right now it's a new weird thing, we debate the people who are part of the new thing. Sooner or later, it's gonna be old hat. Every applicant for every job is gonna have an errant dick pick or tit shot floating around somewhere, every pop product is gonna have some early Youtube Vid with a three-fake-names title and a whole different sound and hair color.

Eventually, we'll just drown in the mess of unforgettable, undeniable collective past. We'll internalize what the cognitive sci cats already know - the "self" is just a construct, and it's continuity is an illusion. People will ignore the old instagrams and new looks, and we'll evaluate job applicants on their merit and pop stars on their ability to make us shake our asses.

My hope is it all happens sooner rather than later, the permanence of history is going to teach us to live in the now and the visibility of all aspects will help us look only at those we really want to see.

And I'm actually with you on the Klosterman. Anybody who laughs at tuneyards five years from now doesn't know how to fucking jam.

@leon.saintjean @Danzig! Aw. I really like a lot of Klosterman's essays from back in the day. Haven't kept up with what he's doing now, but this makes me sad.

@miwome - He's become "Gen X Guy" so bad it hurts. I'm (born in 82) right on that cusp, so there's so much in SD&CCPs that rings true, so much in IV I love.

But it ages poorly. Not to knock his cohort - most of my faves are from that Generation. But he's....it's become too much 90210 mentality. I might have wanted to be Dylan McKay at one point, but I really embrace the now too. I always feel like CK is clutching a little too tight to Singles, Appetite for Destruction, and when Nick-At-Nite was still on Nickelodeon. It's weird, we're too young to start acting that old....I hope.

@miwome I kept trying to articulate what was so aggravating about the piece but this article made the rounds and did it for me. Breaks down the problems, part by part - http://www.collapseboard.com/blogs/scott-creney/scott-creney-reacts-to-chuck-klosterman%E2%80%99s-article-about-tune-yards-pretty-much-exactly-the-way-you%E2%80%99d-expect-him-to/

@leon.saintjean You know, I agree with you about the obsession with authenticity being boring and that's why I adore David Bowie, but the reason this particular inauthentic pop star grates on me (and, I suspect, the reason why she grates on a lot of feminists) is that she's inauthentic in the exact way that she needs to be to pander to straight males who want to picture those lips wrapped around their dicks. And that, to me, is a lot more boring than authenticity.

I have nothing against her personally (apart from not liking her voice/songs), and I don't have anything against any individual woman who goes out of her way to cater to the male gaze, because there's no perfect way for any woman to eat the shit sandwich we were given. But what she represents -- that altering yourself completely cynically to fit the straight male ideal will bring you personal and professional success -- that I have something against.

@Danzig! Wow. Yes. That article is fucking terrible. (Klosterman's, I mean). I can sort of recognize the writer I remember from the collections I liked, but it's like he's sort of brain-dead. It's actually a little scary, partly because now I'm all, "Was I wrong? Was I all high at the same time?" and partly because--and I think this is more likely--the real thing here is, what the hell happened to Chuck Klosterman?, and it's scary to think a pretty smart, funny person who writes pretty well could turn into this.

@leon.saintjean I guess for me his whole Gen X schtick worked okay (in those compilations you mentioned), partly because I am not Gen X, I'm younger--I dunno, I think I'm a Millenial? 1988 vintage, anyway--and it was a sort of useful window into what that particular ethos was about. But there's a reason I don't really feel the need to reread the books.

@applestoapples The best quote I ever saw about that nickname was from Maura Johnston, I think: "NANCY SINATRA is the gangster Nancy Sinatra!"