You know, I’ve been reading about Lady Gaga’s broken career for over a year now. So when I heard she was getting into the VictimBux game, I wasn’t exactly surprised. In fact, it’s probably the smartest move she could make right about now. She’s not exactly old (29), but she’s been in the public eye for so long, and with such intensity, that it’s going to make a musical comeback extremely difficult, especially if she keeps putting out stuff similar to her latest works. It not like this is coming from the right-wing media, either. The Huffington Post did a story on her failing career early last year…
Lady Gaga was the biggest pop star in the world. And not just circa 2010. In the post-tabloid, instant-access landscape of the manufactured celebrity figure, there has never been a more rapid rocketing to mega fame than Gaga’s rise about five years ago. She had six No. 1 hits over the course of a single year. She sold 1.1 million copies of “Born This Way” in its first week alone. Beyonce played her backup on “Telephone.” Now, her off-brand engagement to Taylor Kinney (he proposed with a heart-shaped ring on Valentine’s day!) is barely news. She’s duetting with Tony Bennett and it’s unclear who is benefitting more from the collaboration. What happened?
Well, SJW bullshit happened. I mean, she was always an ideologue, but she at least let that part of her take a backseat to creating music that people would enjoy. It wasn’t even her flat-out bizarre behavior that made people turn away. That was part of the original charm, after all. It was when she let the political outweigh the artistic that she truly got into trouble. If you’re gonna preach at people, you better at least make sure the music is good. It can be done. Gaga just doesn’t have the talent to do it, however.
So it only makes sense to feel some strong human sympathy for Lady Gaga, whose ambitious and costly new record ARTPOP is, we are told, the year’s most important flop.
No one gives a fuck about Lady Gaga anymore. Last week, she released her 11-minute, 46-second epic “Artpop Film” for the track “G.U.Y,” and almost no one gave a shit…
But now, Lady Gaga just seems… boring. The arbiters of think-piece material don’t seem to care about her anymore, and even more worryingly, nor do the social pages and gossip blogs.
She did win a Golden Globe the other night for some guest spot, but as many of you may know, they are notoriously corrupt. Her record label probably purchased that award for her so she could get some free publicity. Apparently, she has a new album coming out soon (SHOCK), which I’m sure no one will give a shit about (again). But as I said in the open, she’s now gone into the online harassment game with…guess who? Intel. OF FUCKING COURSE!
Vox Media is also tied up in this snow job, and that’s not very surprising, either. They make their money writing about trash like this, so why not make a direct investment? It’s pretty shrewd, to be honest with you all. I mean, read this shit for yourself…
The Hack Harassment initiative — launched in partnership with our sister site Re/code, our parent company Vox Media and Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation — is an attempt to find solutions to Internet harassment, starting with a series of hackathons through the first half of 2016. Held both online and offline, the sessions will involve members of the tech industry, the media, the nonprofit world and academia. They’re designed to raise awareness and find potential technological solutions to harassment, which will be presented at the Code conference that starts May 31. For a problem that has inspired a lot of talk and few real solutions, it’s still just talk — but its organizers promise that more change is coming.
Hack Harassment? Wow, so clever! They don’t say how much Intel is dropping into this, but I bet it’s well into the millions. Gaga is sinking her claws in so that she can someday go around and give (paid) lectures on phoney-baloney bullshit for the rest of her days, assuming the music thing never get rehabilitated. Maybe it will and maybe it won’t. Personally, I don’t like the odds. Either way, this is a smart move by her and the advisors around her. VictimBux just might be Gaga’s ticket in the not-so-distant future.
