While on a recent Google search for Lady Gaga’s video “Telephone,” I happened on an indignant article on the Web site silive.com, entitled “MTV, Lady Gaga, and why Telephone video really should be banned.” The premise of the article was the uproar over the video’s scandalous sexual and violent content is missing the point. The real reason that “Telephone” should be banned, the article argued, is that it is stuffed with product placements. Music videos should be “clean of cynical pandering and full of passion, hard work, and talent.”
And we should watch these clean and full-o‘-passion videos while riding flying unicorns over rainbows and fluffy white clouds.
In his belief that sectors of popular culture can or even should be kept “clean” of consumerism, it’s this article’s author who is missing the point. The hyper-exaggerated product placement in “Telephone”-of Wonder Bread, Miracle Whip, Virgin Mobile and more-is not some scheme on Gaga’s part to compromise her artistic project in exchange for making an easy buck. Gaga’s artistic project is to comment on “being overfed communication and advertisements and food in this country,” as she explained to Rolling Stone. She is among the few who have realized and acted on the fact that at this point in the evolution of American advertising, there is no turning back.
Advertising is everywhere. It’s not going anywhere and it’s only getting stealthier. Today Americans are exposed to an average of 3000 advertisements a day, 5000 in urban areas. This may seem outrageous at first but becomes plausible once we consider ads on buses, billboards, Web sites, even printed on eggs and the sick bags in airplane seatback pockets. Advertising is a multi-billion-dollar industry, which means that millions and millions of people go to work every day to think of ways to get inside our heads so that we get out our wallets. And we think that banning a music video that in fact satirizes this phenomenon is going to help? Or that the well-intentioned but delusional anti-advertising grassroots organizations out there can turn back the tidal wave?
Instead of fighting advertising by banning this or that, we have to neutralize its effects by rendering it ridiculous. Because it’s everywhere, the solution is to make it more everywhere-to call it like we see it, rather than let it lurk half-detected everywhere we look. Which is where Gaga comes in. Instead of exacerbating the problem of overconsumption, she exposes it. Yes, she is an icon of it, but unlike so many other celebrities who avow their “authenticity,” she admits it, celebrates it and revels in it, while acknowledging consumerism’s soullessness. When it comes to the media maelstrom, awareness is the only real hope we have.
Weinberg sophomore Hayley MacMillen can be reached at [email protected].
