Mark Simpson on the Camille Paglia vs. Lady Gaga Feud

My bitch is better than your bitch! And she wore that dress before yours did! My bitch would kick your bitch's ass!

This is the kind of thing the older generation -- my generation -- has begun to say ever more loudly about the younger generation's first bona fide superstar, Lady Gaga. David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Grace Jones, and'crossing ourselves and throwing salt over our shoulders'Madonna all did it years before Gaga, and so much better.

The world's most famous gay Madonna fan, Camille Paglia, was recently given four pages in the U.K.'s The Sunday Times Magazine to say this, 'demolishing' Lady Gaga, aka Stefani Germanotta, as an 'asexual, confected copycat who has seduced the Internet generation.' Paglia is a worthy critic indeed, and her mocking epithet 'the diva of d'j' vu' is bound to stick like chewing gum rubbed in a hated schoolgirl's hair. But after reading her impassioned assault -- which, for all its fascinating history of female Hollywood stars, seemed to boil down to 'she's not Madonna, and I don't fancy holding her meat purse' -- I found myself liking Lady Gaga more rather than less.

Paglia's essay was further proof of Gaga's importance. As I like to say to gay friends of a certain age who rail almost daily against Gaga on Facebook, for someone so shallow, so talentless, and so derivative she certainly seems to hold your attention. The passionate hatred Gaga provokes is all part of her remarkable potency. When was the last time pop music mattered? When was the last time you cared? Until Lady Gaga came along, just a couple years ago, pop seemed thoroughly pooped. Some nice tunes and haircuts here and there and some really excellent financial institution ad soundtracks, but really, who thought pop could ever trouble us again as a total art form?

Gaga has single-handedly resurrected pop. Or at least she's made it seem like it's alive. Maybe it's a kind of galvanic motion -- those pop promos sometimes look like Helmut Newton zombie flicks -- but boy, this is shocking fun. And yes, her persona is something of a pint-size Bride of Frankenstein, assembled out of Photoshopped dead star body parts. But isn't everyone nowadays?

Of course she's not David Bowie or Madonna. It's not 1972 or 1984. Instead, we're a decade into a new, blank, digital century when creativity is curation. The pop past weighs heavily on our shoulders -- but Gaga wears it so lightly and sprightly on her tiny frame it's inspiring. In the flickering, shape-shifting shape of Lady Gaga, tired old postmodernism never looked so frisky. And it turns out to be really good on the dance floor. The 21st century didn't really get going, or have a decent soundtrack, until Ms. Germanotta came along with her Gagacious beats.

But the older generation's resentful backlash against Lady Gaga -- how dare the kids think they have a proper star to speak for them! -- is well and truly underway. Paglia's piece was well-timed and has already prompted a host of copycat columns around the world complaining about Gaga the tiresome copycat. It had to happen, of course. She is now so huge as to be completely unrivaled in pop cultural terms -- the most famous woman on the planet: too big and tasty a target for the press not to chew up.

That mesmerizing meat dress she wore to the MTV Video Music Awards -- where she picked up eight trophies, including Video of the Year for 'Bad Romance' -- displayed a spooky kind of prescience. The inevitable lip-smacking Gaga backlash seems almost to be a predetermined part of the Gaga plot. And to those who like to tut and roll their eyes over the meat dress and intone 'It's been done before, dear,' please remind me again which year it was that a female artist, let alone the biggest artist in the world, accepted an MTV award, or any music award, dressed as a rib-eye?

Gaga 'wants to have it both ways,' complained Paglia in The Sunday Times, 'to be hip and avant-garde and yet popular and universal.' But isn't that what really great pop -- pop as a total art form -- tries to do? Put images and concepts into contexts they're not supposed to inhabit? Like the pop charts? Isn't that what Madonna at her best was doing? Yes, it's probably ultimately a doomed project, but if there's anything that approaches avant-garde for the masses, it's that meat dress at the MTV awards, or that jaw-dropping video for 'Bad Romance,' complete with smoking skeleton and sparking bra.

In the indignant roll call of the artists Gaga has 'ripped off,' one who is rarely mentioned is the Australian-born performance artist Leigh Bowery, who died in 1994 of AIDS-related illnesses. Bowery defied gender, and pretty much any category you care to mention, with his stunning, hilarious, and terrifying body-morphing outfits, sometimes fashioned out of his own (ample) flesh. Like Gaga, he had a very keen sense of humor about what it means to be human and set out to sabotage conceptions of 'sexiness.' Famously, he once lay on a divan in a shop window in a London art gallery preening himself for a week.

Gaga, however, is reclining in the shop window of the world. Paglia's accusation that Gaga is 'asexual' spectacularly miss the point that Gaga is postsexual. She's post'the now boringly compulsorily 'sexy' world that Madonna helped usher in, bullwhip in hand, which is now as burned-out as that 'Bad Romance' skeleton. Gaga isn't asexual or even particularly androgynous -- she's transexy. She's deliberately overexposing 'sexiness,' making it as transparent as her skin sometimes seems to be. Instead of just rubbing herself up, she's showing gender and sexuality up by taking them to grotesque extremes. Even if she sometimes looks like Dali doodling his ideal inflatable doll.

But I doubt any of this will persuade those of my generation who have decided to spoil the younger generation's fun and let them know how ignorant they are. After all, that's the only kind of fun we oldies have. Even if her detractors' dreams came true and Lady Gaga was publicly burned at the stake in Central Park, they still wouldn't be happy. 'Oh, look at her!' they'd say, rolling their eyes. 'She's so tired! Joan of Arc did that in 1431. She had much better hips. And she did it in French!'

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