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[Sour Candy]

This is such an interesting read and well written!

Thriller” had a massive impact on the pop universe, but its interest in the grotesque wasn’t fully adopted by the genre until decades later. Between 2008 and 2011, a few key events redefined the pop star image—many executed by Lady Gaga and her creative team. Gaga’s contributions to pop’s gory makeover are considerable: The meat dress. The blood-slicked, disembodied organ in “Alejandro.” That freaky, flesh-scaled mermaid in “Yoü And I.” But it started with Jonas Åkerlund’s “Paparazzi” video, an early (and fairly mild) excursion into the macabre. Gaga falls to her death, splitting her head open on the pavement. Cameramen snap away as fresh blood oozes from her skull. A number of shots depict women who have just died: from saran wrap suffocation, hanging, and a bullet between the eyes. At the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Gaga performed the song as fake blood streamed down her abdomen. Rather than an artfully-placed trickle, the red spilled onto her legs in a rush. She smeared the rest across her face.

It was also in 2009 that Gaga’s admiration for fashion designer Alexander McQueen, a provocateur and champion of the grotesque, became public knowledge. In October of that year, McQueen staged his collection Plato’s Atlantis by transforming models into reptilian creatures teetering on hoof-like platforms. Arriving weeks later, Gaga’s freaky visual for “Bad Romance” saw her sporting subdermal implants down her spine and posing in the finale piece from Plato’s Atlantis: an iridescent, scaled minidress fashioned from domed paillettes. The singer wore it like a second skin, stalking through the video like a bipedal lizard woman. That collection was the last to premiere during McQueen’s life. Four months later, the designer hanged himself in his London home.

McQueen’s death had a profound impact on Gaga; she penned “Born This Way” shortly thereafter, claiming in one interview that his spirit wrote it through her. In the song’s video and accompanying images, she accented her face with angular prosthetics identical to the makeup in Plato’s Atlantis. Her 2011 Born This Way album dropped the same month the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, a career retrospective and eulogy for the designer. It was one of the most popular exhibitions in the museum’s history, attracting over half a million visitors in its three-month run. The show repulsed and intrigued viewers, but more importantly it exposed thousands to McQueen’s morbid fixations, and his unparalleled ability to make them exquisite. “I find beauty in the grotesque,” he once said. “I have to force people to look at things.”

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-pop-musi...ory-aesthetics/