Lady Gaga and Popular Music

This book is a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary examination of the music and figure of Lady Gaga, combining approaches from scholars in cultural studies, dance, fashion, and music. It represents one of the first scholarly volume devoted to Lady Gaga, who has become, over a few short years, central to both popular (and, indeed, populist) as well as more scholarly thought in these areas and who, the contributors argue, is helping to shape—directly and indirectly—thought and culture both in the fields of the "scholarly" and the "everyday." Lady Gaga's output is firmly embedded in an intellectual pop culture tradition, and her music videos are intertextually linked to icons of pop culture intelligentsia like Alfred Hitchcock and open to multiple interpretations. In examining her music and figure, this volume contributes both to pop cultural debates on the status of intertextuality, held in tension with originality, and to debates in women’s and gender studies on the figuring of the sexualized female body. In academic terms, there is interest in these issues from a wide range of disciplines: popular musicology, to be sure, but also film studies, queer studies, scholars of popular culture more broadly, and the burgeoning sub-discipline of aesthetics, philosophy of fashion. This book engages with a variety of approaches, from those considering principally the immanent trace of music’s sounding surface, through those examining how sound and imagery interact, to considerations of various forms of musical reception.