The release of Lady Gaga's single Judas at Easter hasn't caused much of a stir. Has religious controversy in pop music run out of steam?
Speculation over the Christmas No 1 is a well-loved annual tradition, but spare a thought for its forgotten sibling, the Easter No 1. Despite Easter involving a Sunday, from a pop perspective it's nowhere ? the province of evangelical groups trying to hoof the likes of Delirious into the Top 10. Even Sir Cliff won't get involved. Raise a glass this Easter, then, to Lady Gaga, whose Judas is that rarity ? a shot at the Easter charts that actually has something to do with the season.
In this respect it's Gaga's answer to Like a Prayer. Madonna's impassioned meditation on sex and faith was released a month before Easter, and was topping charts worldwide by the time Holy Week came round. The similarities don't extend to the music, though. Judas comes across like a demented remix of Bad Romance ? verses of angry metallised shouting, which lurch into a chorus straight out of the Boney M playbook. It's a mess, but an oddly energising and enjoyable one ? something that sounds quick and scrappy from an act forever in danger of appearing too calculated. It also seems to fit into a minor tradition of quasi-blasphemous Eurodisco ? or maybe it's just that Army of Lovers' preposterous 1992 hit Crucified sounds so immense that I want it to be a tradition all by itself.
Whatever its doubtful charms, Judas hasn't created much of a storm. The biggest Gaga story this week has been her bizarre album artwork ? the singer's face Photoshopped on to the front of a motorbike ? and her new single has been met with a comparative shrug. Nobody seems particularly bothered, let alone offended, by it. Which is odd, because your first impression of Judas is of a record desperate to be talked about.
This week's destruction of Andres Serrano's Piss Christ by French fundamentalists suggests that in the wider culture, controversial religious art can still be a flashpoint for anger and confrontation. The combination of pop, God, flesh and sin ought to, on paper, get people excited. But Judas hardly fits the bill ? perhaps it's too confused to be a talking point, or simply not good enough. Or perhaps the idea of religious controversy in pop has run out of steam.
The glory days of doubt in pop were the 1980s ? not just Madonna, but the "satanic panic" around heavy metal and classics of agonised sixth-form theology such as XTC's Dear God and Depeche Mode's Blasphemous Rumours. The XTC track jettisons the band's typical knotty cleverness for a direct lyric and a winsome children's chorus. I find the results toxic, but it became their best-known song in the US. It's no coincidence that doubt-ridden pop such as this found an audience when rock was at its most generally messianic, in the years directly after Live Aid when the world's problems could apparently be solved by a furrowed rock star brow and a beseeching lyric.
Sincere longing for redemption is part of pop's DNA, something it inherited from gospel. What happened to rock in the 80s, though, was that its feelings of religiosity ? the sense of scale and awe, as well as that yearning for salvation ? turned into something quite abstract. The catalyst was U2: thoughtful Christians whose music pulsed with an unfulfilled sense of something vast and just out of reach. But that something might not have been God; it might have been America, or rock music itself.
Religious feeling in rock turned into a mirror. By the 90s yearning was an end in itself, a kind of spiritual effects pedal applied by bands such as Verve and Spiritualized to puff up their music. Even by 1992, what was striking about that Army of Lovers single was that its intentional kitsch seemed more refreshing and honest than the unintentional kind rock had sunk into. In short, religious imagery in pop ? whether used to resonate or shock ? feels exhausted, and there's not much Lady Gaga can do to shift that. Which means that the best pop song about Judas remains Jesus Christ Superstar by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Heaven help us.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/apr/21/tom-ewing-lady-gaga-easter
No comments:
Post a Comment