Pop. Eating Itself.

There's something strangely compelling about Lady Gaga.

Now, some readers may remember that this website was largely about popular culture, before it mutated into... um... whatever it is now. If there's a reason, then it's largely that I just lost interest in what pop culture was throwing in my direction. Particularly, that goes for music; slowly, the contents of the charts became inhospitable. Not that I was a big fan of pop music, except for the Sugababes, obviously - however, it did articulate something understandable, something that reflecting the society that gave rise to it.

My only contact with music (of the "popular" variety) these days is through the snatches of it I hear on daytime radio, or videos I see in shite pubs. Certainly, in the last four or five years, pop music has changed drastically. It's now harsh, angular, and unknowable. That unknowability - inscrutability, if you like - is more or less the only interesting thing about it. Certainly, listening to Lady Gaga seems to be the ultimate culmination of this trend. Hence the fascination, which has little or nothing to do with the ugly squawking sounds that she makes.

The music, resplendent in its sheer ugly banality, is more or less impossible to comment on. It would be easy to leave things there, but that misses how pop operates in our culture. These people aren't musicians, not really - they're low-rent video installation artists more than anything, a trend you can trace back to Grace Jones if you're so inclined; similarly self-aggrandising attitude and inscrutability, except that Jones seemed at least vaguely aware that there was a world that didn't include her.

If you watch the two of them on mute (I'm really trying not to talk about music here), you can see a strong parallel. And yet you can also see why the parallel is more or less completely absurd, which is maybe why Lady Gaga is curiously fascinating.

Jones was all personality. Distinctive makeup, harsh angular features, she looked like she could kick the shit out of you if you dared to question her right to be there.

Lady Gaga, on the other hand... having now viewed a frightening amount of her videos (i.e. 5), and even I can see that she ticks the diva boxes. She's got more bling than Mr T's jeweller; her outfits are flamboyant to the point of absurdity, and she changes them more often than Beyoncé but wears them all with panache; the dance routines are impressive, in that "pyramid of women all doing the same angular thing" choreographed way which is now accepted as the "proper" way of dancing.

And yet, I haven't got the faintest idea what she's actually like, to the extent that if I had to spend a week with her, I wouldn't pick her out if she only wore jeans and a t-shirt. Most of the sense of "character" you get from pop stars is artificial anyway, but they certainly bother to put up the front. This is deliberately different; the artifice is designed to look like artifice, and when interviewed (see, I said I found her fascinating) she oscillates between bland aphorisms and plain-speaking common-sense.

Certainly her latest video, for Bad Romance, is shocking because we briefly see her without any make-up at all. It's the first hint of vulnerability we've ever seen from her. Lady Gaga inhabits the all-new pop world, in which vulnerability is frowned upon, and bad-ass sloganeering combined with bullying lyrics is a badge of empowerment. She works in a climate where Janis Joplin would get beaten up by the cool kids, and Dusty Springfield's son of a preacher man would have published her diary on Facebook.

So instead we get Poker Face, which is specifically tailored to show that Gaga is a bad-ass super beeatch who don't take no shit from no man, and is more or less the only song of hers that I actively despise. Bad Romance, where a crap relationship is portrayed as a competition between the man and the woman. Paparazzi, effectively about how the personality of pop stars is irrelevant; we're plastic but we still have fun. Riiiiight.

She also has a voice that's entirely unrecognisable. Synthesised to the last and buried under production, it could literally be anyone singing those songs. I thought that Poker Face was the first Lady Gaga song I'd heard; actually, it was the fourth, but I'd never imagined them to be by the same person. Her style, or tone if you like, something which you just expect to just be there in any singer, is simply absent. We now seem to have come through the era of the boy band, but even those guys were recognisable in their blandness; dammit, you could tell when Boyzone were singing a song without being prompted by the DJ.

So the interest lies in the lack of any personality at all. Somehow, she seems to know this. She buries herself in the artifice, hides in the makeup, and makes sure that we never get near a young woman called Steffani Germanotta. So her most telling song remains Let's Dance; a woman who's off her face, has lost everything, doesn't know where she is, and just keeps dancing because she doesn't know what else to do. Lady Gaga is the personification of a culture where "personality" is reduced to a USP, where "music" is an unimportant facet of a media phenomenon, where the ostentation and opulence of celebrity is all we expect. She looks at us, unflinching, and says "This is what you wanted, all along."

It's not music. It might be art, somehow. More than that, though, it's the essence of the last decade. Gaga is the vengeful face of the culture we inhabit, cavorting as it goes down in flames. Don't tell me that's not something worth looking at.