Lady Gaga Analysis

According to Jeffrey Cohen, monsters and culture they were born in are interlinked and in no way could be read separately.() This progressive idea of ‘reading cultures through the monsters they engender’ can be greatly supported by the evidence of the texts available for the analysis, almost demanding to be read and processed accordingly. Lady Gaga, being a perfect monstrous product of the century, represents one of the most infamous monsters in the history of the beasts – the Fame Monster. To support this statement, the texts, visual performances and persona of Lady Gaga will be examined to explain the monster they represent and reflect on its origin, legend and meaning. For this purpose, the theoretical corpus will consist of texts by Cohen

For the sake of the argument it is important to completely distinguish these two people and focus primarily on Lady Gaga as the embodiment of the Fame Monster. However, certain instances of acknowledging Germanotta’s existence and influence to certain extent are to be encountered. All in all, having an alter-ego always implies a kind of interdependence and mutual appropriation. The reader is kindly advised to be aware of this fact and still being able to make sound judgment.
Cohen’s article on seven theses of monster culture provides the reader with a list of ways in which monster cannot be categorized. The seven theses appear to be a solid base on which a monster can be analyzed though. For this reason, all seven theses will be stated consecutively and commented on to provide some kind of category for ‘that which cannot be categorized’.
Thesis 1. The monster’s body is a cultural

The monster always escapes.
We see the damage that the monster has done, but the monster itself always vanishes to reappear somewhere else, in another moment of history, culture, body. () A similar concept is being offered by a law of conservation of energy: the energy cannot be generated out of nowhere as well as it cannot just disappear. Can fame?
A concept of ’15-minute fame’ has been introduced by Andy Warhol who included the words "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes" in the program for a 1968 exhibition of his work at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden.() Though the actual idea might as well belong to other people (Nat Finkelstein for literally saying ‘famous for fifteen minutes’ while shooting Warhol, or Marshal Mcluhan, media theorist, for offering the theory from which the expression was believed to be generated), () the outcome is non-debatable, fame is fluent and finite. The crucial point is that it does collide with the second thesis, the fact that monster never dies. The suggestion is to reimagine this concept, going for ‘fame generates fame’