In the long-standing feverish celebrity culture of the US, pop singer Lady Gaga has scaled new heights. She recently displaced Oprah Winfrey at the top of Forbes magazine?s Celebrity 100 list, and Amazon.com used her latest album as a 99 cent promotion, designed to challenge Apple?s dominant iTunes and its looming iCloud music services. The Amazon promotion garnered a Wall Street Journal headline, ?Lady Gaga Wars.?
Now Lady Gaga plans to extend her fame to South Asia. In an interview with the WallStreetJournal.com, she said, ?The reason I?m going to India now is because I can. I didn?t have the money or the resources before to travel and bring all of my things with me and reach an entire new territory of fans.? The entry strategy includes several Bollywood-style remixes of her songs, and employment of a firm that specialises in producing and distributing entertainment content aimed at South Asians all over the world.
Points to note about the Lady Gaga foray: she is already global (being popular in Europe, Australia and so on), and this new effort is explicitly aimed at an ?emerging market? (as the WSJ interviewer put it); another facet of globalisation is the focus on South Asians wherever they are, so that South Asia is a state of mind rather than a location; and the real purchasing power, at least for now, may be with South Asian migrants rather than those in their native lands.
According to Lady Gaga herself, though, it?s not all about money. The 25-year-old spoke of taking a message of ?liberation?, of being courageous and fighting for one?s identity. Clearly, she is not thinking of the complexities of religion, language, caste and class, or of the economic inequalities that mark India, Pakistan and other countries in the region. Lady Gaga was a Catholic schoolgirl who discovered herself in the cultural frontier of lower Manhattan. Liberation here is mostly about individualism, about choosing to reject certain societal constraints and norms. Not surprisingly, this is a youth message, one that appeals to a broad cross-section of young people, at least those above a certain income level. And Lady Gaga is sincere in her views, expressing them deliberately in her lyrics, a sincerity that endears her to her fans.
Put Lady Gaga, with her bisexuality, frank lyrics and outrageous dress and moves (much of this a great match for Bollywood), next to the Taliban, and one can visualise quite starkly some of the largest ideological conflicts that have been waged and will continue to be waged as globalisation evolves. Of course, Lady Gaga is not going to Pakistan?South Asia in its fullest ability to respond to her can only be the South Asia that is outside the region. But it was not long ago that India?s film censors kept a close eye on the dress and physical proximity of movie stars, before Bombay gave way to Bollywood. It is hard to say where this will end, but India?s women, its lower castes, its gays and lesbians (their rights being one of the pop star?s main causes) are all still well short of liberation, even if that doesn?t mean joining Lady Gaga on stage in similar outfits.
Perhaps situating Lady Gaga in a global culture clash is too portentous. There are other aspects of her meteoric rise that are less ominous but hold important lessons. First, she has perfected a cutting-edge, mass-appeal form of performance art, combining ?music, fashion, art and technology?, according to a reviewer in the Sunday Times. She herself says she sees colours when she composes music, and simultaneously envisages the clothes she will wear performing what she is writing. She is delivering the product as complete experience that many marketers dream of as their Holy Grail. Second, she has epitomised the creation of a personal brand and the use of online social media. With over 30 million people who ?like? her on Facebook and close to 10 million followers on Twitter, in just a few years she has established a fan base that would also be the envy of marketers.
The richness and reach of Internet-based social media are perhaps the really new element in all of this. The Beatles were once so popular that John Lennon ironically said they were ?bigger than Jesus?. The Beatles also went to India, not to expand their fan base, but to seek higher truths. India was not much of a market then, in any case. Lady Gaga may want to offer some higher truths of her own to India, as she seeks to conquer a major emerging market, and rack up a few million more Facebook ?likes? and Twitter followers. She may even inspire a few Indians to follow in her footsteps, in a form of knowledge transfer different from merely imparting technologies and business methods. Globalisation marches on.
The author is professor of economics, University of California, Santa Cruz