The Iron Law of Gaga

Sometime last summer, my friend Matt or I formulated the Iron Law of Lady Gaga. It was "either you know who Lady Gaga is or you have retirement savings but not both." This was inspired by Matt's observation, after too many nights spent at some of Austin's douchier establishments, that there was a certain side of pop culture that virtually everyone in a particular subculture is familiar with. There are quite literally ten to twenty songs that are on repeat on your local autotune-FM station. At this particularly moment, some of them are by Lady Gaga, the Black Eyed Peas, Ke$ha, Jay Shawn, etc. You can literally familiarize yourself with all of them in under two hours. Anyways, this was before all of the articles intellectualizing Lady Gaga.

After formulating the Law of Gaga, we tried it out on groups of older people and it seemed to hold. I shared it with my parents. Within a week, they had each called me to tell that they had either gotten into a discussion about Gaga or seen her on TV. Isn't she outrageous. Since I will not be able to support my parents in their retirement, I am forced to declare the Iron Law of Lady Gaga does not hold. Less frivolously, as The Last Psychiatrist
would say, "if you're listening to it, it's meant for you." So Gaga the phenomenon after Summer 2009 is a different beast than Gaga the musician as of Summer 2009.

How to correct the Iron Law of Gaga? There's delving into the Gaga phenomenon which I'd rather not do at length. (My take: She writes pretty good songs. Someone was bound to hybridize Daft Punky dance-lite with R&B, and she does it well. The attitude expressed in her songs towards nightlife, dating, men, women and the way that it seems to resonate is kind of interesting. The things she says about her songs are not.) You could revise it to "Either you know the ten to twenty songs currently on repeat on your Top X radio station or you have retirement savings, but not both." This does not have the same resonance as the original formulation.