In times to come, my children will ask me about this day.
“So, when did you get over it?” This is what my children, whose names will be Skippy, Tall Boy, and Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor Doyle, will ask me.
“Well, Skippy, and also the rest of you,” I will reply, “which ‘it’ are you asking me about? For truly, I have gotten over many things.”
“Oh, you know,” they will say to me, “the Lady Gaga thing. The thing where you, like 99% of all people who listen to Lady Gaga, convinced yourself that you were doing so because it was ‘funny’ and ‘absurd’ and recognizing the absurdity of it in some ironic fashion could allow you to listen to it without being A Person Who Listens To Lady Gaga. I mean, now that Lady Gaga is our President-for-Life, and rules us all from a besequined flying saucer orbiting the Earth, from whence she issues fearful edicts, we all listen to her, for it is Law. But you were among the holdouts! At what point, dear our mother, did you come to recognize that appreciating this business ‘ironically’ was not only worthless – any critique of the discourse is absorbed into the discourse, and also talking about how Lady Gaga is a ‘top-secret performance artist’ is pretty useless when ‘top-secret performance artist’ is the key plank of her very marketing platform, yea, and also something she says of herself in many an interview – but also way more annoying than just saying that the nonsense-syllable hook on ‘Bad Romance’ is kind of unavoidable and you might as well give in?”
“You’re kind of a windbag, Skippy,” I will then say.
“Oh, but you get our meaning, mother,” my children (of whom Skippy, for some reason, will be the leader and spokeschild) will say. “I mean: you hung on to ‘ironic distance,’ as a means of processing Gaga, through the Jude Law ‘Poker Face’ recitation. And through the Christopher Walken ‘Poker Face’ recitation. And through the Eric Cartman ‘Poker Face’ cover on South Park. And then all the assorted people on the Internet being like, ‘you know what would really be funny, though? Is if William Shatner did a cover of that song,’ because clearly nothing is funnier than a dude who has based his career on a single joke (when I cover songs, or say things, they have a distinctive and stilted cadence!) repeating his single joke in the form of a joke that several other people have made already. And through all the other and various instances of people relying on ‘Poker Face’ or Lady-Gaga-related ‘irony’ as humor, including you yourself, in the face of the fact that everyone else has made that joke already and DAMN. At what point, we are asking, did you get over that particular ‘irony,’ and recognize it to be unfunny, and hack, and lazy, and a distinctive signifier of false knowledge and superiority, when in fact it doesn’t make you smarter than anyone else who is making the same joke, and the reasonable thing to do is just say that Lady Gaga makes herself some catchy pop songs and the outfits are kind of amazing – though she’s also done some real stupid stuff in her time – and there is nothing wrong with appreciating her on that level, not really, not at all?”
“Oh, that,” I will say. “That, I got over at around the time that Rush Limbaugh got possessed by all those demons at the Miss America pageant.”
[FOR THOSE WHO CAN’T SEE THE LINKED VIDEO FOR ONE REASON OR ANOTHER: It is of Rush Limbaugh, Miss America Judge, participating in a group Miss America Judge Dance-Off to “Poker Face.” A dance-off from which Rush Limbaugh emerges as the, um… winner? I guess? It is kind of indescribable, although “frequent out-of-control alarming fist-pumps that make me think he might actually be dying” goes some ways to explaining it. And it’s not in the post because it is from TMZ and my thoughts on TMZ are, EWWWW.]