Yesterday, I was reading through a blog post that claims Nicki Minaj has undergone surgery to change her appearance and was previously a lesbian. The claim was made to deliver a moral judgement: Minaj is fake when she should be keeping it real.
Wonderfully, almost all the reader comments that followed protested the argument rather than its details, calling it boring and meaningless if true. To her credit, Nicki Minaj has written the following fantastic line for the song Monster by Kanye West: “and if I’m fake I ain’t notice cause my money ain’t.”
This is not unlike the debate that drove so many online exchanges last year: is Lady Gaga a hermaphrodite? To that artist’s credit she released the absolutely fantastic video for the otherwise mediocre song “Telephone” in which two prison guards (both female, natch) strip Lady Gaga nude as if to humiliate her, prompting one guard to then comment: “I told you she didn’t have a dick.”
It takes a moment to unwind the genius of that move. Responding to the “normative violence” of the crowd, Gaga creates a nine minute music video in which she is imprisoned by guards but uses the opportunity to call out the desire implicit in claims about her intersexuality, casting the guards as butch lesbians who in turn corroborate that she does not have a penis. (Following the signifier in this exchange is like tracking the ball in an Olympics-level table tennis match.)
Like the fans defending Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga asserts that claims about her real identity are boring and meaningless if true. That both of these artists are in their 20s and have amassed fame (or, in Gaga’s case, become so famous as to redefine the meaning and value of fame) is testament to the high quality of our art.
We may not yet be prepared to marry our politics with our art but if and when we do the conversation will be far more nuanced than the current trends in political discourse might suggest.