Tonista

How to sell out the cool way

Interesting take on the rise of Lady Gaga.

We’ve abandoned dogmatic No Logo, but we’re not really pro-logo either. We just want logos that look and sound the way we want them to.

Maisonneuve | Lady Gaga’s Pro-Logo Video

As I mentioned on my twitter account, the Telephone video is the most interesting, fun and watchable that I’ve seen in ages. It used to feel like all the adventurous film was in music videos. Now most videos feel as formuliac and insipid as the music the are trying to sell. That is, when I get to see the videos in the first place. They all seem relegated to the ghetto of triple digit programming, while cheap reality programming is on the so-called music stations.

Yeah I know, wah-wah-it-was-better back-in-the-good-ol’-days-bitter-fogey-cake. Though what I really want is less old retreads and more something new, good and different.

Telephone has some classic references, but it looks new, and it definitely looks different and it’s got the budget to do some seriously playing around. It’s also blatantly commercial, but doesn’t seem corporate - no suit committee sat around trying to package “cool”. It feels like Gaga tricked the suits into forking over money without no creative control, which most know is tricky at best. I think the article above was right about the ad placement. We’ve finally arrived at a point where we’ve accepted advertising as inevitable and enjoyable even, as long as we like the package. Maybe we’ve just accepted that in these patronless days, companies with products to sell are the artist patrons now.

Mad Men taps into this by celebrating the golden age of the Madison Avenue ad man.  In fact, it cuts right to the notion that the ad is the art itself. Creation of this type of ad chic as art. Conveniently leaving out the dreck, of course, but romanticizing reality is what advertising does best.

Lady Gaga’s telephone video isn’t really notable in that it uses product placement to fund her vision. She’s not the first of course, to have accepted embracing the commercial to make art or just do their jobs, if you think “art” is too precious a word. Warhol was particularly notable for it. It does seem notable in the gleefulness of the mutual using, sort of like the Trills in Star Trek, two organisms living in symbiosis. They can survived just fine alone but are so much better when they work together.