Music art: Gaga

Music is art and art is music. I suppose all creative expression might be art.  I am going somewhere with this.  Promise. I was thinking today about Lady Gaga and other popular music 'artists' like her.  Assuming that we can say that anyone is like Gaga.  Madonna maybe.  Anyway, most popular music artists have a style, indeed they are styled.  They employ people to style them or they style themselves with paid for guidance.  But for some, it seems more than styled, for some the way they look in a public arena seems to be art.  Self art, if you will.  For example, if you Google Gaga (ha), almost every picture of her seems to make a statement of some kind.  It isn't always clear what that statement is but visually speaking, she is saying something.

For example, check out the image below.  Gaga is holding her, ahem, boobs and a huge blue ball sits between her legs.  I have no clue what statement is being made but I guess at something sexual / metrosexual.

The image below is rather scary. Maybe it was her Halloween guise.  Spooky.

The next image is erm interesting.  Suggesting a machine-human symbiosis perhaps? Or maybe just a naked lady sitting on a uncomfortable chair for the purposes of selling records.

In the final image below, we see Gaga wearing strange pyramid sculpture shoulder pads.  Homage to Madonna's pointy boobs perhaps?  There are those that would suggest that the pyramids point (tee hee) to Illuminati origins. Who knows.  Either way, it's an interesting choice of outfit.

Yes Gaga is definitely more than styled.  She is art.  Moreover she is odd art.  I find myself wondering what her fans buy into.  I feel it's more than the music. They buy into the whole package.  The visual, the carefully packaged 'attitude', the controversy and so on.  If Gaga just presented music alone, it would probably be Ga-who not Gaga.  No one would have a clue who she was without the self-art stuff.  As things stand, I think even my parents have heard of Lady Gaga.  Im not sure that they could whistle one of her tunes though.

The Gaga package and other pop packages, makes me wonder if it is impossible to have the music without image.  Perhaps in order to achieve super music orientated fame, you must become a sort of conceptual art or at least be superstyled with attitude.............