An interesting take on Lady Gaga from a feminist

[sapphi_snake]

freebs2 said:

I'm not interested those lectures about "sexiness", the problem here is that a musical artist should sell music, not sex, or a conceptual rapresentation of it. I don't like Lady Gaga but I don't consider Madonna or Britney Spears or even hip-hop stars any better. The interest about artists should be driven by music, but now it's only a matter of brand image, the most important things in a musician career were albums and live concerts in the past, now the succes is mostly driven by singles and videoclips.

I blame the major musical labels for this, since they started to have interests in other entertainment medias we have started to see popstars increasingly more trasgressive and outrageous,we see them more often in TV shows, serials , in movies (50 cent,eminem,madonna, disney's popstars...), there are many talk shows on TV and radio, were people talks about their image or thier "fake" life. At the end we don't have a musician anymore but a magnet to draw media attention, a tool to easily create (trash) entertainmet of every kind. And anytime someone demonize them on newspaper or tv at the end he helps them in their career keeping the media attention high.

You'd have to go way back to find a situation like the one you describe. I'm sure Elvis and the Beatles were a lot about image and not all albums and live concerts also.