Lady Gaga: makes no sense, wears silly hats, but she works

PRESENT TENSE:WATCHING THE new Lady Gaga video for her song Telephone– joining the 20 million others who did so this week – once it ended, I was certain of only one thing: I hadn't a clue what it was all about. Not a whit.

It's definitely a sequence of scenes, joined by product placement, strutting and Lady Gaga's trademark pop stammering, but otherwise who knows what on earth it's about; what it's supposed to be about; what anyone thinksit's supposed to be about.

One thing is clear: it's not aimed at straight Irish men in their middle years who refuse to wander on to a dance floor unless it's for a cod-accented cover of The Proclaimers' I Would Walk (500 Miles). On the other hand, there are parts of the video that are aimed at men of any age.

The video is, she said, a “commentary on being overfed communication, advertisements and food in this country, it kind of makes sense by the end”. It does? Really? Because it seems that perhaps its greatest selling point is that it makes no sense at all, that it leaves you with your brow knitted and your brain begging you to take a break and go and experience something more soothing – you know, like a hyperactive child on a xylophone, or something.

The video is an assault, so that watching it is like being the target of a pop-culture cluster bomb. It is almost 10 minutes long, and has some semblance of a beginning, middle and end, but it is otherwise a sequence of fragmented references to Madonna, Michael Jackson, Quentin Tarantino, lesbian prison flicks and – most importantly – her own oeuvre, all held together by two things: product placement and Lady Gaga’s impressive self-awareness.

Its commercialism is obnoxious; the stuff of Wayne's World'sextended gag about obvious product placement. Ten products appear in nine minutes, so glaring that they you can still see the logos for several minutes after you close your eyes.

Lady Gaga has, it would seem, become a master at knowing how to plug herself into a brand and ensure the brand then plugs itself into her bank account. Among those featured products is Polaroid, who in January announced that Gaga would become “creative director and inventor of speciality products”. Ah yes. At any given moment she might be found at night, over a soldering iron and a computer screen, building a prototype, screaming at her assistant: “Not now, Igor!”

To joke about Lady Gaga, though, is a dumb exercise because she is clearly in on the joke. Its soundtrack – occasionally noticeable – is yet another Lady Gaga song of a grinding tempo that sounds like every Lady Gaga tune so far, yet is somehow marginally, but crucially, different enough to fool you into admiring its freshness.

And yet, what is most impressive about the Telephonevideo is that, despite everything, it works on you. It wears you down. It refuses to let you look away and refuses to let you ever believe that it's anything other than a grand joke. Neatly, this encapsulates everything about Lady Gaga. She makes no sense on so many levels; is abrasive, brutal, overwrought. She is Grace Jones and Madonna and Christina Aguilera if they were to emerge from the matter transporter in The Fly. She wears ridiculous hats and worse shoes and looks you straight in the eye only when it's down a camera lens. And she makes songs that, when examined in their component parts, should consist of two parts mental-irritation to one part ear-bleed.

But they don’t. Instead, like Lady Gaga herself, they force you to sit up and admit that as a package it works despite itself; that they are a force of pop-culture nature. Lady Gaga continues to bash away at your resolve, like a precocious child looking for your attention, so that no matter how much you try to ignore her presence, when you finally decide to listen you find yourself nodding your head while thinking, “I know that telephone hat looks ridiculous, but it really does match the gimp outfit”.

She has been a star for some time, but this week may have marked her moment as the megastar, when there are few among those even way outside the orbit of the target market who don’t know her name, her videos, her style or her songs. And when journalists write long and mildly embarrassing deconstructions of her appeal in order to figure out why they dance like a square whenever she comes on the radio.