Sometimes I wonder if Lady Gaga is on a kamikaze mission to destroy the institution of pop music from within. She's a sputtering, explosive cultural force that chews up our own fixations and spits them back out at us before we even know how to process them. I've always considered her to be more of a multimedia performance artist, a creator that uses pop music as just one thread in a complex, ongoing work instead of producing it as the final work itself. Her materials also include fashion, fame, the fickleness and rapidity of internet culture, and gender politics. Maybe I'm giving her too much credit, but something tells me the dame knows exactly what she's doing.

The recent devolution in the quality of her music and videos suggests, to me, that kamikaze slant. We're not talking about an artist that had one hit, one video that happened to be in the right place at the right time, just happened to hook the attention of the jittery public eye. We're talking about a whole string of those videos. Gaga rose on a number of easy, irresistible club pop tracks with videos depicting a slightly surreal variety of nightlife. We recognized the parties; we were both confused and intrigued by the great danes, the glowing mannequins, the alien fashion. Her early videos treaded the line between familiarity and strangeness so well as to become addictive. The songs themselves were nothing special, but demonstrated, at least, a mastery of an existing genre. 

Then there was "Bad Romance", whose video currently has more views on YouTube than there are people in the United States. The song and the video might be the peak of pop music as we know it. It might be the most driving, enormous hook ever written. I don't know. It captured people in a way a pop song really hadn't before. Even people who snub what the club kids listen to on any given day heard it and saw the video--perhaps repeatedly. Even music snobs admitted, perhaps begrudgingly, that it was a competent track. The video, with its chameleon Gaga and Russian slave auction, hooked everybody. They might not even have known what it was about, what the imagery meant, if anything. It was pure media cocaine; exhilarating, addictive, and without substance. 

She's never topped that. I don't think she intends to. Her later work fell on a linear downward slope. You had the beautiful imagery and vague blasphemy of "Alejandro". You had the first real anthem (presumably for the queer among us) "Born This Way" and some more staccato club fodder in "Judas". And her latest "You and I" is not only grammatically incorrect in its lyrics (cringe) but entirely musically bland and accompanied by a completely incomprehensible video. She's a mermaid and a robot and a man and I don't even know. The music sounds like something Shania Twain might have put out in the '90s. It's trash. And the video features too much art vomit to focus on any of it at one time. There's no thematic or even aesthetic consistency, just a jumble of ideas that never come to fruition.

But see, that's exactly the logical end of pop music. Lady Gaga understands the medium better than any of us. She knows she's making bad art--she always has been, really, but now she's made it really very obvious. The fame monster isn't just an album title; it's a construct that chews up our interests and tries to sell them back to us, that flails around just trying to find the one thing that will scoop up the attention of millions. Lady Gaga knew exactly how to secure that fame. Now that she's done so, she's using that pedestal to illustrate the mechanics of her own media. It'll be a fascinating collapse from the top--and maybe she'll even take the whole machine down with her.