Gaga: The McDonald’s Of Avant-Garde
Back in the day, the McDonald’s chain used to update its signs every few years to offer a running tally of how many burgers they’d sold, before giving up and just leaving it at “billions and billions served.†Lady Gaga may soon have the same problem. She’s the first artist whose videos have been viewed on the web more than 1 billion times, according to a video analytics company called Visible Measures. By their count, “Poker Face†is her most popular video, having been dealt up 375 million times, followed by “Bad Romance,†which has been streamed 360 million times, and “Just Dance,†which has boogied across 273 million monitors.
In other words, she crossed the billion-videos-streamed mark with just three clips. That’s not even counting fresh tallies yet to come in for “Telephone,†her nine-and-a-half-minute on-screen teaming with Beyonce, which ought to stoke several hundred million women-in-prison fantasies all by itself. And Gaga’s just getting started, having released only an album and a half to date. Any bets on how few years it’ll take till she’s a video-view trillionaire?
Once upon a time, conventional wisdom would have suggested that the path to becoming America’s sweetheart would not involve eschewing warmth for provocation and wearing a succession of dangerously futuristic hats, masks, glasses, and shoulder padsthat would all poke any suitor’s eye out. But guess what? While everyone was concentrating on Idol and complaining about pop culture getting blander, the avant-garde won. By Visible Measure’s metric standards, America’s strangest star has become its biggest. If only Andy Warhol were here to savor the moment… and to appreciatively rub Gaga’s pointy white headdress.
