文/Jessie湯
“It’s just me, and people will see that what’s underneath everything is still me.” -- Lady Gaga
因為女神卡卡（Lady Gaga，本名Stefani Germanotta），全球許多年輕人吃飯夾起肉片時，心中不禁會想，把許多肉片編起來套在身上，不知道是什麼感覺？為什麼呢？以下摘錄自《今日美國》（USA Today）：
Lady Gaga, who came under fire recently for wearing a meat bikini on the cover of Vogue Hommes Japan, wore a raw meat dress at last night's VMAs (the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards). It was one of many outfits she wore throughout the night.
Gaga said, "It is certainly no disrespect to anyone that is vegan or vegetarian. As you know, I am the most judgment-free human being on the earth. However, it has many interpretations but for me this evening. If we don't stand up for what we believe in and if we don't fight for our rights, pretty soon we're going to have as much rights as the meat on our own bones. And, I am not a piece of meat."
女神卡卡在近期一場紐約演唱會快結尾時，出現在舞台上，胸部和胯部佈滿「sparkler-like contraptions」（像仙女棒的奇異小玩意兒），噴出悶燒的小火花。她大聲喊道：「You tell them I burned the place!（你們告訴他們，我把這地方給燒了！）」It was a straightforward repudiation of hypersexualized imagery. There was nowhere to touch without getting hurt.
沒錯，「驚世駭俗」這四個字，女神卡卡絶對當之無愧。環顧當今流行樂壇，女神卡卡讓流行音樂界探索新美感認同的空間變得更寬廣。她的衣著、想法或許荒謬，卻讓她獨領風騷；她的創意、表演或許激昂，卻令人印象深刻。不管你喜不喜歡，女神卡卡的作風已經讓傳統的界線為之鬆動。
《紐約時報》（The New York Times）分析了女神卡卡在流行樂壇所掀起的狂潮：
Lady Gaga’s fingerprints are all over the revised images of Christina Aguilera（克莉絲汀）, Rihanna（蕾哈娜）, Katy Perry（凱蒂．佩芮） and Beyoncé（碧昂絲）…These performers might not cite Lady Gaga as a direct influence, but her work has nudged loose conventional boundaries. The space for women in pop to try out new aesthetic identities hasn’t been this vast in some time.
And it’s freeing（解放）, this expansion of musical liberation into spaces visual as well as sonic, instinctual as well as intellectual, performed as well as lived.
Purists（純粹主義者）complained that she was fabricated（加工品） – a dull gripe（無聊的牢騷）. More important was that she helped restore a sense of theater to pop.（流行音樂的劇場感）
卡卡賣弄肢體與雙峰的煽情表演，意象何在，隨人解釋，難以斷言，但創造這類荒謬主義式、後情色劇場感覺的執照就是卡卡風格。What it means is anyone’s guess, but the license to create such absurdist, post-sexual theater feels particularly Gaga-esque.
但卡卡也不會總是一個勁兒的搞怪，At times, the singer, almost never seen without an outfit that suggests the creation of a mad inventor, appears only in flesh-tone bra and panties. She said, “It’s just me, and people will see that what’s underneath everything is still me.”（這就是我，人們會看到，在所有包裝下的仍然是我。）
這種赤裸，這種新的自信，是朝感性跨出的一大步，亦或，皮膚只不過是另一種表演服裝？
有趣的是，你透過卡卡語不驚人死不休的表演，理解到的不是一個瘋子腦中光怪陸離的世界，相反的，你會得到對周遭世界的答案。例如，you go to a club and wonder who all these kids are. They don't seem to have jobs. How can they afford to be here? Her song "Beautiful, Dirty, Rich" explains that scene. It's about the New York prep-school party kids she grew up with. It's where she came from.
女神卡卡成名後，很多人拿她跟過去流行文化搞怪女王比較，也有不少言論指責卡卡是一個抄襲者（copy cat），抄襲美國歌手瑪丹娜（Madonna）和雪兒（Cher）。
報紙評論員說：「In many ways, Lady Gaga’s is a bastardization（粗俗化）of the Madonna model. From the start of her career Madonna was a savvy pop trickster, using outrageous imagery as a distraction while smuggling ideas about religion and social politics into her music. Most of the Gaga generation, however, is interested in distraction as an end in itself.」
也有網友說：「I wouldn’t say Lady Gaga copied Cher, but sometime Gaga would "remind" me of something Cher had done.」
面對指責，卡卡的回應輕鬆而簡短：
“I think what Madonna and I share is that we’re both fearless, we both have a lot of nerve.”
"I never thought I'd be asking Cher to hold my meat purse."（註：卡卡在頒獎典禮上請雪兒幫忙拿一下真肉做的皮包，言下之意充滿對前輩的尊敬）
你喜歡卡卡嗎？還是覺得她簡直是一個瘋子？《時代雜誌》（Time Magazine）一名記者曾如此描繪他對女神卡卡的想法：
“I first heard the name Lady Gaga through a mutual friend. He couldn't stop talking about her. Then I heard her music, and I thought, Wow, I love this kid.”
“People forget how young she is. She is barely 24 — much younger than I was when I became famous. It's very tough being where she is right now. People are pulling her in all different directions. It's hard to navigate that. Try to imagine what you were like at her age, if you still can. I can't wait to see how she grows and what she decides her next act will be. She only has two albums out, but already she is inspiring other artists to go further in their own work.”
“When I see somebody like Gaga, I sit back in admiration. I'm inspired to pick up the torch again myself. I did an interview with her once, and she showed up with a sculpture on her head. I thought, How awesome. Being around her, I felt like the dust was shaken off of me. I find it very comforting to sit next to somebody and not have to worry that I look like the freak. She isn't a pop act, she is a performance artist. She herself is the art. She is the sculpture.”
(本文同步刊於99/10/9工商時報”世界公民weekly”)
歡迎訂閱”世界公民weekly”電子報：請點此訂閱。
留言列表
