I feel like there’s a germ of a novel in this somewhere.
Apparently the number of 20-something female pop-stars are striking up intellectual “friendships” with elderly marxist philosophers is greater than one. I was surprised to have heard that the number was greater than zero, actually. First, Gaga gets with Zizek, and then Ke$ha gets with Fredric Jameson.
Both of these might be untrue, however – I later found a refutation of the Gaga-Zizek flirtation which I failed to bookmark.
I can’t decide how I feel about this. I’ve always admired Jameson hugely, and his books are among the most important influences on my own (oddly continuing-to-be-non-existent) PhD thesis on Cervantes. Do I respect him yet more because he’s so hip and trendy, even now in his doddering late 70’s? Or does this just seem too weird?
How do I feel about Ke$ha – I never really noticed her music before, but I don’t per se dislike it, either. Is it possible she actually understands Jameson, and appreciates him… intellectually? Fascinating. I already suspected that she was not a total intellectual lightweight, based on some interview with her I remember scanning through, a while back. Anyone who exists in the current rap/hiphop/pop mileu but manages to cite Dylan and Banksy as influences can’t be utterly empty-headed.
From her website: “I think people can stand to take themselves just a little less seriously. I’m fighting the war against pretention.” Does one fight against pretension by hooking up with pretentious philosophers? That’s appealing. Then again, one could fight pretension by simply creating the rumor that one was hooking up with a pretentious philosopher, almost as effectively, right?
Something about the Vanity Fair article I linked to above reads like a hoax. Yet… one hopes it isn’t.
Really, it makes me want to write a novel. Well… many things seem to make me want to write a novel, but this strikes me as a gold mine of pop-culture references and abstruse marxist philosophy, all stirred together with seedy scandal or tender romance (or both – as a side-note, wouldn’t it be interesting, for example, to novelize the Weinergate scandal as a sincere or angsty romance?).
At the risk of imperiling my blog’s essential G-ratedness, here’s her 2009 video for “Tik Tok.”
