I was reading a Tumblr feed called Gays against Gaga, except in this case I wasn’t really reading it, because reading implies understanding. Like you might say “I was talking on my mobile phone” when in fact you were only making elephant seal noises.

This…amazing post caught my eye.

“As someone who isn’t a fan of the singer (sorry, I’d honestly rather dance to Ke$ha) and loathes the many times the pop star is revered as a gay icon (yeah, propagating reductive views of queer identity that only serve to reinforce heteronormativity does not a gay icon make), I’ve spent a lot of the time the past few years wrestling with the quandary that is Gaga, and I think it comes down to an interesting revelation about popular art and cultural discourse. The only thing Lady Gaga has going for her is her meta, ironic, performance-art aspect. (Yup, that really is the only thing. You can love her music and enjoy dancing to it, but even the most ardent fan has to acknowledge that her songs are reductive. Yet if they are still danceable, that doesn’t matter, because they’re ironically danceable. You can run that sort of test with any of her other appeals [e.g., her ultimately heteronormative lyrics/videos are okay because they’re camp]. It all comes back to the meta/irony/performance aspect.) However, you can’t break your meta/ironic/performance act into the mainstream without some serious dough. And whether that dough comes from some sort of gay-owned mega-company or Target, the dough must come. And therein lies the interesting revelation: Meta/irony/performance art cannot survive in the corporate world. It’s the one thing I’ve learned from all of this. I always hoped that there could be some sort of meta/ironic/performic identity achieve some high level of commercial success. And no matter how much I wanted to cut off my ears whenever her music came on at a club, I respected her persona and what she was ultimately trying to achieve. But it just can’t be done. Gaga’s failure is now proof of that. You can’t be meta in the machine; you just become a tool selling some prepackaged idea of counterculture. And I’m not saying this as some sort of specific rant against Lady Gaga, but rather it’s a general rant about anyone trying to achieve that same goal. This makes me sad. *END RAMBLE*

Wow, that’s so incredible. You know what I believe? That the author set out to write a serious piece about Lady Gaga, but then decided it would be funnier to just to write straight out stream-of-consciousness blurb off the top off his head, while using lots of buzzwords from his gender studies class, and then Gays Against Gaga re-ran it, not realising it was a joke. Didn’t Fox News do that once, reference an Onion article as part of their news commentary?