"This is my prayer/I'll die living as free as my hair"

There is a virulently vocal and excitable section of the population of the American population anticipating the full release of Gaga's new album. (Barring any destruction of the current world order beforehand). As a case in point, consider this pre-release:



Thanks to the power of social media, one of Gaga's tweebs (showing here) could react to "Hair" on a platform that allowed him to write "directly" to his Mother Monster:

@ladygaga cannot listen to Hair without crying. no jock judging me is gonna stop my freedom. i'm as free as my hair. bubble dreams < 3
19 May

Unexpected or no, Gaga (who has over 10 million followers and has only tweeted 764 times since March of 2008) almost immediately replied:

@gagaforgaga2010 you sound like you're on the right track baby. But you can cry AND dance. Fever dries tears.
19 May

Cue euphoric reaction.

What I'm trying to get at here is the manipulation of raw power in this Gaga<->fan dynamic. The basic interaction is the following illusion. One "could" petition the angel from afar; the telescopic refractions of Twitter hyperbolize the distance (I-am-but-one-of-10-million-who-adore) between fans and the object of their desires while simultaneously and disorientingly allowing the vertigo of "touching" her (I-can-address-a-tweet-to-Gaga-and-wonder-if-she-sees-it).

Yet by responding (even to an infinitesimal proportion of such tweets), Gaga transforms the Freudian wish-fulfillment from the realm of dreams and the unanticipatable to the realm of the actual and expectational. The new mindscape is related to the previous by a chiasmus; the fan-subject is no longer one lost among the legions, but one among many worshippers for whom the thought constantly resonates: "It could happen to me!"

The Devil doesn't affect heads of state but rather possesses the historical no-man subject. Gaga's cult of personality (scenario of power?) similarly magnifies her hierarchical status by personalizing the vertical bonds of power between fawning fanatics and Goddess. In no way humanizing Gaga by its personal value (as opposed to, say, a paparazzo's photographs), the interaction heightens the paradoxical sublime of her near-but-far-away cult body.

I'm the spirit of my Hair, it's all the glory that I bare.