Why New Music Artists Have To Subvert Social Norms

‘All Publicity is good Publicity.’ Why do new music artists have to subvert social norms to stand out? I will create a music video that subverts social norms and hegemonic values in order so that the artist featured gains attention by shocking the audience. In April 2008, an unknown artist’s first ever single went straight to the top of the charts in over 5 different countries, sold 419,000 digital downloads in one week, spent the next 5 months in the Billboard Hot 100 and to date has sold over 7.7 million copies. Lady Gaga’s single ‘Just Dance’ propelled her from a ‘no one’ into a star known across the world. She is now the most followed person on twitter, with over 50 million followers, and has over 10 million friends on Facebook
– breaking the record number of friends. The music industry is one of the hardest in the world to get into, and once inside staying in the eye of the media is crucial to success, which is shown by celebrities, such as Kanye West, interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. Though the press reported it negatively and he was thrown out of the VMA awards whilst Taylor was given the full support of the audience, the video of his stage invasion went viral across the internet. Thousands of websites quoting him and internet memes appeared online and social media spread Kanye West’s name across the world, his image now completely ruined. This could have been the end of his career, but using the new publicity he had gained he started using twitter and gained thousands of followers. He wrote many apologies to Taylor Swift, started a Ustream account and began giving away free songs gaining more fans over many social networking sites. His music video to his song ‘Power’ now has 9,901,604 views on YouTube. A 15 second mistake which resulted in bad publicity arguably could have been the best thing that ever happened to West in his career. To keep media attention on themselves, music artists need to shock and surprise their audience which is something Lady Gaga is exceptionally good at. Her post-modern outfits, referencing artists like Britney Spears and Madonna, keep her audience interested and waiting for her next move. Publicity stunts, which Dictionary.com defines as “an event staged to get public attention… for marketing purposes”, are exceptionally good at gaining attention from the media and allow the target audience of the music act to gain social interaction (Blumler and Katz) when talking about the stunt. As an audience we want bad news. After ****[blabla people took a survey and the result was]***. This is backed up by research on the number of negative news stories on the front page of celebrity news website TMZ. It shows that 80% of the news is negative regarding suing, deaths and arguments between celebrities. In this capitalist society the main aim of the companies behind the newspapers is to sell and make money and so they print what audiences want to read, which research shows to be shock stories and negative news. For example, The Daily Record describes X-Factor’s Frankie Cocozza as X-Factor’s bad boy contestant. This bad boy image gains most of the media attention with his “fun” lifestyle, choice of wannabe rock-idol clothing and limited ideas of morality. As the audience of the show, we liked this ‘bad boy’ image and that is arguably one of the reasons he stayed in the show so long. So when the 18 year old continues to strive to meet our expectations of him the next step on the ‘bad boy’ to-do list was drugs. As judge Gary Barlow says, “we all played our part in what’s happened with Frankie. None of us is guilt free.” The newspapers are often filled with bad news with few achievements or positive deeds ever mentioned which is all the consequence of what we enjoy to read. Arguably, fulfilling our desire to read shocking or negative stories is the role of a celebrity. From a Marxist perspective, the point of getting in to the music industry is to beat all other bands, make money and become famous.
These are three things a Marxist would disagree with as it shows social competition, capitalism and the desire to be better than everyone else. In a capitalist society, these are all things that we are encouraged to strive for, which is why music competitions like the ‘X-factor’ and ‘American Idol’ are so successful. But getting into these post-modern programs is very difficult and whilst competing on the show the artist’s style and music is changed as Matt Cardle (X-factor winner 2010) said he had to “massively compromise himself”. So if you want to sing your own music and get inside the industry as your own person then you have millions of others to compete against. In a survey on MySpace.com in 2008, there were a total of 8 million music artists registered. Add that to the thousands of newly created bands in the last three years and the world is suddenly full of millions of artists no one has ever heard of. Out of all the aspiring artists in the world, only a very few become famous and get their songs in the charts. These artists have to find a way of standing out and getting public attention. One way that has helped many artists get noticed is by going against social norms and so separating themselves from a crowd of people all following society’s expectations and so blending into the background. One artist that has appeared from nowhere, and stood out from the crowd is Lady Gaga. It can be argued whether her popularity is based more upon her fashion sense than her music, but nevertheless she sells albums and makes money in the music industry. Lady Gaga is well known for her wild, exaggerated outfits, like the dress she wore to the MTV Music Awards made of meat. Photos of her appeared in the newspapers and many people argued on online forums and chat rooms over her reasons for wearing the dress. All this brought attention to Lady
Gaga after one night of wearing an outfit. Her outfit cost $100 which is cheap for Gaga and her eccentric garments. Consumerism is shown here because, to gain attention, Lady Gaga had to buy accessories and clothes instead of just allowing her singing talent to get her publicity the news and magazines. After the meat dress incident also got more publicity from her meat outfit and modelled in a meat bikini for fashion magazine Vogue.
Another artist that often betrays social norms is Katy Perry. She started off as an average girl singing Christian music and going by the name Katy Hudson. When her music failed to reached a large audience she changed her act completely and got straight into the charts with a new name, Katy Perry, and her song ‘I kissed a girl’. The song, which discusses homosexuality, breaks social norms and so stands out amongst other unsuccessful singers. She also uses her back story of coming from a very Christian family as a stunt to encourage publicity and shock from her fans. Her less than Christian clothes, actions, songs and husband, go against her parents beliefs in life and they have often tried to ‘make her see the light’.
To gain attention by breaking hegemonic values some male singers choose to wear make-up. Men are expected to be masculine and make-up is considered feminine and so gender roles are crossed. In our society, everything is carefully defined as either male or female but Judith Butler’s queer theory says that “gender is a performance; it's what you do at particular times, rather than a universal who you are”. These men that dress as woman for attention, for example Boy George, get fame and attention drawn to their music through the gender they become when performing. Sometimes women also dress as men but Lady Gaga has taken this one step further. Lady Gaga has created an alter-ego named Jo Calderone, who has done modelling in Japan’s Vogue and also performed at the 2011 VMAs without once breaking out of character.