Customized Lady Gaga Barbie dolls, designed by a 29-year-old Beijinger

I’ve made no secret of my hatred for Graydon Carter’s society rag Vanity Fair, so guess what happened when I opened its September 2010 issue? I sliced my finger open on a subscription card; not off to a good start. I was only interested in this issue because of the feature story devoted to Lady Gaga, who you may know as an artist of particular interest to me.

Vanity Fair’s profile on Gaga has little to recommend it save some exquisite photography from Nick Knight (which nevertheless fits perfectly into my Vanity Fair Cover Nudity Theorem). The piece comes off as an insubstantial primer on Gaga for the fearful and clueless; I’m sure the cover blurb “Should you worry?” was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek but the article seems to take it at face value. To reassure its readers of Gaga’s corporatist credentials, the article starts off with a barrage of pull quotes from top music executives, as if they could be trusted to be the arbiters of anything of importance.

However, the Vanity Fair article manages to bumble into inadvertent insight with the title “Lady Gaga’s Cultural Revolution,” a configuration of words with the right balance of senselessness and pretension. Yet there’s a bit of truth there—it’s a title that wouldn’t fly in the PRC, but by recalling one of the most traumatic and important events that shaped modern China, it makes one think about Gaga’s influence in that country.

The Gaga phenomenon has a worldwide reach, but the response to it is always local. Amid the recent explosion of academic interest in Gaga and her work, there’s been an intriguing exploration into how Gaga’s status as a native New Yorker has shaped her artistic development, and how she’s been influenced by, and in turn influences, the Byzantine cultural sphere of that city. (It’s a point Vanity Fair touches on with thinly veiled condescension when it breathes a sigh of relief that Gaga wasn’t one of those unwashed tourist-bumpkins continually invading their city.)

But let’s talk Gaga area studies: her reception in Beijing is necessarily going to be different from her reception in Manhattan. Mobs of adoring fans may look the same from a distance, but their perceptions as they engage with Gaga will be entirely different. In the West she exists in well-developed, sophisticated and jaded media spaces. Chinese pop culture, on the other hand, is in a period of rapid transformation, and injecting Gaga into the mix has had some interesting results.

While it’s not the whole truth, it’s a useful generalization to say that Chinese media consumers and producers take a great deal of their cues from Western media, gleaning the broad strokes and amplifying them. Modern Chinese pop music builds on the foundations laid in Hong Kong and Taipei, which were heavily influenced by American and British styles. International response to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon led to a decade of domestic and for-export wuxia fantasy epics, and probably made the formerly-realist director Zhang Yimou the man he is today. For now and into the near future, there is a premium in China on what American trendsetters think.

The Gaga phenomenon, which originated in a combative and conflicted American media environment, is entering practically uncontested into China. The result is what I only half-jokingly call Total Gaga Dominance. In my stay in Beijing, her work was ubiquitous; constant play on the radio and at bars and clubs goes without saying, but I’d get a haircut and hear “Bad Romance” over the speakers while someone’s phone rang to the tune of “Paparazzi.” My local supermarket put The Fame and The Fame Monster on loop over their PA system and left it like that for five months. Unscrupulous concert promoters can claim Lady Gaga’s going to be performing and sell out in hours. There’s even a talk show host on Chinese television named “Lady Guagua” whose star is unsurprisingly on the rise.

Elizabeth Lynch of China Law and Policy noted this too, musing that this may come from the accessibility of both Gaga’s music and fashion. She also delightfully points out that

Lady Gaga is so popular right now that her name is barely ever translated into Chinese characters, much to the chagrin of Chinese officials (if it is translated, it is usually translated as 雷帝嘎嘎 ["Lei Di Ga Ga"], meaning “Thunder Emperor Gaga”).

Language has a great deal of power, and the fact that Gaga goes untranslated in Chinese culture puts her above a host of other foreign celebrities. Lynch also notes—and I’ve seen firsthand—that the current Chinese net expression of surprise is not “OMG” but “OMLG”: Oh My Lady Gaga. In the officially atheist People’s Republic of China, Lady Gaga has replaced God.

Pop culture and commercialism serve as social glue; in early 20th century America, Hollywood pictures created an idealized version of the American that the working classes, especially a generation of recent immigrants, could aspire to. This weakened the cultural hold of ethnic enclaves and reduced the isolation of certain social groups by giving them a common language and set of desires. Although there were large swaths of the population excluded from these developments, they still had a noticeable effect.

The same developments are happening in China right now. American writers in China, such as Peter Hessler and Leslie T. Chang, have examined the conflicts generated by the massive social upheaval caused by the past decade of Chinese industrial development. Although the average Chinese citizen has intense loyalty to China as a national idea, there is still a great deal of parochialism and provincialism in play; China’s unity disguises the fact that it is heavily regionalized. Although Mandarin is proclaimed as the official language, it may not necessarily get you far with the locals in southern Guangzhou, or even heavily commercialized and modern Shanghai. (A friend of mine mentioned that on a trip to Shanghai, she received a much better reception speaking her decent-to-good English as opposed to her flawless Mandarin.) And these are urban cores we’re talking about—rural China is fractured into thousands of isolated villages with their own dialects and flavor of culture.

But millions and millions of Chinese are traveling to the cities to work, and they’re experiencing the full force of mass media, pop culture, and commercialism. One of the consequences of pop culture’s attempt to reach the largest audience possible is that it transcends provincialism, and a generation of working-class Chinese is rejecting their parents’ old ways for the perceived values of modernity, glamour, and sophistication offered by urban culture. And if pop culture is social glue, Gaga’s the stickiest of them all. There are more people in China studying English than the entire population of Great Britain, and for them Gaga’s lyrics are surprisingly easy to sing along to. She carries foreign glamour and no cultural baggage; her beautiful alien aesthetic seems divorced from anything else her fans have ever known, and thus a place to build a new culture and identity.

In the new Karate Kid film, Chinese actress Han Wenwen performs an energetic dance to Gaga’s “Poker Face.” The funny thing about it is that it doesn’t feel like a forced needle-drop—it’s emblematic of something real in China. Han’s standing in for millions of Chinese girls doing the same dance.  In a sense, Gaga’s values are the values of a new Chinese pop culture. At the moment, Gaga is irrepressibly cool in the PRC, and this moment is very, very important in a lot of ways. When she finally deigns to perform there, the reaction will be intriguing, to say the least.