Lady GaGa is of the unusual persuasion. In case we forget how unusual GaGa is she likes to remind us by making clothes out of things that are in fact not clothes. They are often unflattering and not normally even shaped like clothes. Sometimes she wears a telephone on her head. People have ceased to pay much attention to what GaGa has adorned herself with over time. It appears this has caused her some kind of image crisis, forcing her to constantly rack her brains trying to think up a more unusual outfit than her last unusual outfit, which was pretty unusual, probably.
Yesterday GaGa attended the VMA’s (which is an award ceremony just for music videos, i.e. pointless) in a dress made entirely of meat. Raw meat. All bloody and probably smelling like dead animal. There was a steak on her head. Just slapped on there.
Blatant attention seeking acts such as this generally wind me up and cause one of those rage blackouts that I have. This one did not, though, for I am still struggling to get my head around the wearing of meat as a dress. I’ve spent the whole day wondering how such a dress would feel. Is meat a breathable material when used for clothing? Was she all sweaty beneath the meat? How did the meat stay stuck on? The sweatiness could have caused the meat to slip. Perhaps it was glued on. So many questions. (I don’t have much to do with my time.)
Clearly this gesture was something GaGa dreamed up in order to get people talking, provoke strong reaction and so on and so forth. It worked well, ten points to you Miss GaGa, but you did have to sit in meat for the duration of the award ceremony, did you not? I am struggling to see who the real winner is here.
PETA are suitably enraged by the wearing of a dress made of meat. PETA are annoying though, all self-righteous and loving the world. This makes me side with anyone they might be complaining about, whether they’ve tortured twenty kittens, set a dog on fire or (gasp) worn a coat made of FUR. PETA get too worked up over the cows. I think they just need to spend more time drinking tea and they’d feel much better about it all.
Is the meat dress fury justified, anyway? I’m not sure it is. The main criticism is the fact that GaGa wasted the meat. People waste meat often. If GaGa had worn old meat, would this have been OK? Who’s to say she didn’t feast on the meat at the end of the ceremony anyway? I mean, she is somewhat eccentric. I don’t think I’d be entirely surprised if tomorrow she announced that she lived on a diet of sweaty meat, believing that by wearing the meat as a dress first you might get to know the meat better, allowing for easier digestion once one finally has the dress for dinner.
Why is the meat dress so much more outrageous than wearing leather shoes?
The wastage of meat does not trouble me. I am a carnivore and fully aware that my steak was once a living, breathing animal with a face. It’d be hypocritical to get all irate about the wearing of steak as a dress. I ate beef for dinner. I could’ve sewn the pieces together and fashioned a small scarf if I’d felt the need. It would make little difference in the grand scheme of things, seen as how the cow is actually already dead and probably not watching me from cow heaven in order to ensure that the pieces of his corpse are ingested as dinner, like what he wanted.
The thing which one did find a trifle exasperating was the absolutely abysmal message GaGa claimed she was trying to promote through the wearing the meat as a dress. This fruitcake claimed that it was a protest about the US military’s attitude to homosexuals. Yes, that’s right, by wearing steak as a dress GaGa was helping gay soldiers. The modern day Mother Theresa. Perhaps she thought that when she mentioned soldiers people would just start clapping and wailing sounds of encouragement, because this is what Americans do whenever the words ‘servicemen and women’ are mentioned, thus getting the entire American public on her side no matter what she is wearing as a dress. (This is true. There was a military chap on my American Airlines flight last year. We all had to clap for him. I think he was just going on holiday.)
Quite short, wasn’t it.. the meat dress. Didn’t actually cover her bottom like how conventional clothes do. I wonder what she meant by this bit. Probably some kind of statement about meat and bottoms. Or perhaps the promiscuous butcher is a big look this season. Or she ran out of meat half way through.. hmmm
The best part of the entire meat dress scandal has got to be the idiotic interpretations ‘experts’ have come up with, taking the dress made of meat seriously and not dismissing as the publicity stunt it clearly is. GaGa, when she shut up about the soldiers, said the dress was open to many interpretations (which loosely translates as PLEASE TALK ABOUT ME). Foolish folk have however taken the bait.
Here are their expert opinions...
Andrew Groves (fashion chap) thinks that “what she's doing is quite subversive - it's a commentary on the fashion and the music industries and I think it's very clever.” Interestingly Groves does not divulge what he believes this commentary to be, simply that it is one.
Laurie Penny (feminist writer i.e. nutcase) claims “it's a clever play on women being viewed as chunks of flesh, as pieces of meat, as things to be consumed." Wasn’t Lady GaGa supposed to be a man last year? Have we forgotten about that now?
Dr Richard Noble (Goldsmiths artsy type) has claimed that “it taps into the artistic tradition of the memento mori or the still life. The still life, after all, is a meditation on mortality and the state of decay. You have the flowers and the vegetables, but all the corrupting elements as well." This sounds suspiciously like most justifications for cabbages and half-eaten bananas as ‘art’.
What will you wear next, Miss GaGa?! I don’t know if I can handle the suspense. I imagine the next logical step would be for GaGa to cut bits of meat off of herself, in a Saw movie style, and make a top hat and tails out of it. Then the world would be truly impressed.
From Alexandra
