You try to introduce a topic of conversation to get the party started but inevitably most of your efforts turn into flat souffles. Indeed most of those attending seem more interested in taking home the table decorations than participating in the conversation.
However interesting people do turn up occasionally and engage in a dialog on stuff you have long forgotten. Hence the idea of a slow motion Dinner Party… make that Mad Hatters Tea Party… where conversation threads operate in parallel often disconnected universes.
Today its been Who profits from the 6 degrees of separation?, The Pepsi Refresh Social Marketing Campaign Metrics and What Lady Gaga can teach Google about the Mobile Phone Business.
Looking back on the 6 Degrees of Separation. Yep, needs more work but then again it’s hard to beat How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer.
The Pepsi Campaign? I would enjoy having a one on one with the Bonin Bough to get his take on how things panned out for PepsiCo.
What about Lady Gaga?
Well Gabriela Badica thinks
She’s an icon, yes. And she certainly knows much about marketing, branding and selling. And maybe Warhol would have loved her pop-art moods and imagery. But, in spite of that, she’s not an original. She’s just very, but very smart.
Yes, she’s creative, but being creative doesn’t necessarily mean being an original. She’s just cracking a mirror and then she’s rearranging the pieces in a totally new way (pretty much what the Dadaism teaches). Or she’s simply doing what Jim Aitchison writes down in one of his books: “I would define creativity as taking a set of familiar elements and rearranging them in an unfamiliar way so that the audience recognises both the familiarity and the unfamiliarity. In other words, present something the audience will recognise as themselves, their lives, their dreams, but with a twist, so they’re actually a bit startled by it, or will get an extra insight from it. So it’s not just a mirror, it’s a mirror that’s craked.” (Cutting Edge Advertising)
I think her most incredible smart idea was to let people see in her whatever they want to see. This way, some will see only a shallow pop diva, some others will dig out meanings in her and her songs.
Gaga seen as a business is a success. But Gaga seen as quality music… let’s just say I don’t think that 100 years from now people will wake up one morning and realize they miss “Let’s have some fun this beat is sick/ I wanna take a ride on your disco stick”.
Me2, but I must admit I continue to find Lady Gaga fascinating. Though probably not for the same reasons her 24.7 Million Facebook Fans and 7.8 Million Followers on Twitter do. So probably more interesting than fascinating.
For me Gaga is more than Pop Shock. Gaga is a manifestation of what you might call Modern Rococo [MoRoCo]. A rich parody of Modernism in much the same way Rococo is remembered as a rich parody of the Baroque period.
She – much like Bowie or Warhol and to a lesser extent Madonna before her – represents the high water mark of Modernism as a cultural phenomenon up to this point in time. A fauxionary pastiche of past musical and visual styles mashed together into a veritable parade of long forgotten spectacles and horrors (e.g. Boney M’s “Ma, Ma, Ma Baker” in “Poker Face“).
Everything we have seen since the birth of Modernism in the late 1890′s finds itself re-envisaged and mashed up in Gaga. She is simultaneously everything and nothing at all. A collection of images that in reality is a collection of mirrors. It is these mirrors that permit the illusion of depth when in fact there is nothing at all… which of course suggests she has consciously created this construct which means we have an infinite loop of questions and ideas embodies in a single personality. Both shallow and rich at that same time.
As I say, for the moment at least, the ultimate MoRoCo construct.
She has taken Bowie’s ideas of deconstructing and turning advertising message theory on its head to the next step (i.e Advertising is like a rote learning experience. The message is largely irrelevant its the repetition that cuts through the noise and gets the message across. Bowie regularly kept changing the message. So too did Bowie’s contemporary in Elton John. As did the Beatles before him. This is what allowed them to evolve from an early 60′s dance band into Sgt Peppers and beyond).
By changing the message every time she reappears she doesn’t have to cut through the noise. Her fans and the media are just waiting to see what’s next.
What is interesting is, although SHE (Lady Gaga the message) is in constant flux, the message “GAGA” remains the same.
That the music is little better than bad disco shredded into incoherent fragments of noise makes the total package even more interesting… if only marginally entertaining.
DADA GAGA It is wonderfully circular. If not quite a 100 year cycle.
For anyone thinking media or marketing Lady Gaga is an object study in how it is done in a MoRoCo world.
Forget the music. Enjoy the spectacle. Go check out GAGA STIGMATA and try to understand why the delivering “Shock of the new” today is really little more than mashing together the “Horrors of the past” into a fauxionary pastiche.
January 29th, 2011 → 4:09 am
[...] For Nigel’s opinion, please pay him a visit here. [...]
August 21st, 2011 → 7:48 pm
[...] 2.0 or what I like to call the So.Me for example. Here is a post-post-modern (i.e. Modern Rococo: MoRoCo) mash-up of old ideas about the value of networks, influence, conversations and listening wrapped [...]