Black Jesus † Amen Fashion

Jesus is the new black

Lady Gaga wrote this song, which is exactly the kind of catchy but mindless song designed to be played at fashion shows, or possibly strip clubs. You’d think at first ‘what a dumb song’. Then you realize, she really means it. Jesus is the new black, fashion is the new Jesus, amen. Gaga takes fashion very seriously. Very, very. I just watched a documentary on Anna Wintour, who just about runs the entire multi-billion-dollar fashion industry single-handedly, and not even Anna takes fashion this seriously. For Lady Gaga fame and fashion are religion – plus she’s Catholic. No wonder designers love her. She’s the only person in the world who’ll wear ten-inch heelless platform boots to take out the trash, she’s beyond supermodel or movie star. That in turn inspires us little monsters to be our most fabulous selves. She truly believes in dressing up as more than ‘dressing up’; it’s a means of spiritual enhancement, self-expression, and artistic creation – it’s the way to become your self. Lots of us have adhered to that for a long time before there was a Gaga, but it’s nice to have a hero who mirrors it. I suspect Gaga has a bit of a messiah complex. She’s well aware how much her fans look up to her and makes it her mission to…to do something, I’m not sure what exactly her mission is, but she’s working at it very hard. She’s got a clear gleam of crazy in her eye. I don’t know how directly autobiographical her videos are, but they’re obviously stemming from some personal truth, and to judge from the new one, she might well be mentally unstable in the clinical sense. She’s in good company if she is. She’s putting herself on the line, for what grand end we don’t know yet, and that’s an element of danger and authenticity long absent from the fame arena.

Get In The Swing

“I ain’t no Freud, I’m from L.A.” sings Russ Mael whilst flouncing about in tiny shorts. Why Sparks never caught on in America I can’t imagine. Maybe because Americans like their pop stars less flouncy? Then there’s another one where the shorty shorts are different color. Throughout, Russ looks cherubic and fey, Ron looks like an  Springtime For Hitler understudy. And fey. In 1975 the world desperately needed a parody of all those horny glam rock sagas, with a lesson about salmon tossed in. Sparks made their name with glam rock parodies, then went on to parody disco and electronica. With the distinction that everything they did could easily stand on its own, and was in fact frequently much better than whatever it was making fun of in the first place.