Over the past few years, we are meant to have witnessed the death of the monoculture. The collapse of a single, shared experience of dominant cultural figures into niche interests and specialist communities enabled by technological advances has been discussed, dissected and bemoaned by critics and commentators for more than half a decade. The shared meal in the common household of society has been superseded by a smorgasbord from which individuals can pick and choose according to their tastes and whims.
It's no surprise that much of the discussion has come from pop critics: is there any field that would be affected more than one that simultaneously trades on transience and relies on myth-making and star power? Pop, after all, is a youthful art form, still easily dismissed in favour of high culture; its proponents' trump card has long been that its megastars - Madonna, say, or Michael Jackson - are worthy of serious attention because their overwhelming cultural dominance outweighs their inherent disposability. It's a somewhat self-hating tack that does a disservice to both those figures and to pop as art - but it does explain the keenness of the critical profession to declare artists "important cultural figures" and not just talented music-makers. (These days, the importance is often for search engine optimisation purposes, with certain artists' names facilitating those all-important page views.)
Are "important cultural figures" possible without a monoculture? It's a chicken-and-egg question - but certainly, in 2011, predictions of the demise of the shared cultural experience feel a little hasty. There's the popularity and rapid proliferation of internet memes, for one thing; from another angle, the suspicion that the monoculture probably wasn't as across-the-board as nostalgists like to think. (Did grandmothers really care about MTV?) And then there's Stefani Germanotta, aka Lady Gaga, who has revived the possibility of a dominant pop star in an era when that no longer seemed possible: video releases as drop-everything cultural events, hits so ubiquitous and catchy that this correspondent's own mother is able to sing Bad Romance (the first pop song in living memory that this applies to).
Gaga's own importance is certainly a concept that the lady buys into. Initially, the gap between her rhetoric and her output was glaring. In interviews, she would happily place herself in the same company as luminaries such as Andy Warhol and Grace Jones, all the while opining loftily on her contribution to their lineage. On record, though, no matter how much Lady Gaga tried to push the angle that her music was a self-aware parody of vacuous pop, there was little substantively different between her own club-pop - from the wasted party girl persona to the lowest common denominator dance beats - and the equally brash, campy Pussycat Dolls.
It's to Gaga's credit that she widened this gap so comprehensively with 2009's The Fame Monster mini-album, a collection of eight tracks so strong and forceful that even her most vociferous critics wound up caving in. Even beyond its singles and the videos, The Fame Monster also offered tantalising glimpses of the range of Gaga's talent - and where she might go next: "Speechless", the dramatic, bluesy ballad that she took to performing at awards shows at a burning piano; and the deeply odd "Teeth", probably the only moment on record where she has been as unfathomably strange as she likes to think she is. The critic Tom Ewing coined the term "imperial phase" to describe that period when it seems as though a pop megastar is unable to put a foot wrong: unquestionably, 2009-10 felt like Lady Gaga's. As befits an artist in an age of rapid turnover, she had arrived at this status unusually early.
The Fame Monster may have blindsided critics with its quality, but 18 months later, Gaga's powers appear to be slipping. The first indications that all would not go to plan came with the reception of her third album's title track, "Born This Way": in sum, this supposedly original talent and self-proclaimed visionary had, for a much-anticipated lead single, appeared to do little more than lift, uncredited, the melody and chord progression of Madonna's 1989 hit "Express Yourself". Worse, its lyrics - an attempt to craft an anthem of inclusion and self-empowerment - were ham-fisted and, what with the references to "chola descent" and "you're Orient", not exactly couched in unproblematic language themselves.
These are faults that recur throughout the album, much of which is derivative - in basic, obvious ways, not in the shamelessly cannibalistic sense that pop tends to thrive on - and prone to tripping over its own good intentions. "Fashion of His Love" bears a striking resemblance to Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)". The squealing, burning-rubber synths of the second single, "Judas", reprise the trick that served Gaga so well on "Bad Romance"; the piano-driven soft-rock epic "You and I" is an obvious attempt to reprise "Speechless".
Meanwhile, for all Gaga's fixation on artifice, the most striking aspect of Born This Way is its sincerity. Quietly, she has made something of a reversal of her original raison d'être: the deliberate fixation on the superficial, played for winking irony and dressed up as pop art, on The Fame. For all of Gaga's theatricality, Born This Way is slathered in good intentions - but she's at once too specific and not specific enough to make it thematically coherent. She spells out her causes in neon capital letters - this is an album for "degenerate young rebels" and marginalised misfits everywhere. But Gaga walks a fine line between romantic idealism of these archetypes - allied to her more propulsive melodies, she can capture genuinely anthemic feelings - and merely retreading subculture clichés. It's an approach somewhat reminiscent of Pink, another pop star who largely eschews subtlety.
Gaga's strategy of peppering her songs with as much religious imagery as she possibly can is more egregious. She seems to desire the notoriety of being blasphemous (albeit in an age when few in the West are shocked by it), but seems to have little to say about religion itself beyond vague manipulations of its icons. Compared to, say, Madonna or Tori Amos, whose specific criticisms of the limits of their religious inheritances were unavoidable throughout their work, Gaga comes across as a lightweight; she veers from blithely and meaninglessly titling a song "Black Jesus † Amen Fashion" to declaring that "God makes no mistakes" on the title track.
These criticisms are not, however, an emperor's-new-clothes indictment of Lady Gaga; rather, they are indications of an immensely talented performer and songwriter who, still relatively early in her career, appears to have slightly misfired under the twin pressures of heightened public expectation and her own ambition.
Born This Way is no masterpiece - but when it works, Gaga is still able to demonstrate what makes her special. She can overwhelm like few others, whether with pounding arrangements or powerhouse vocals, or simply the force of her hooks. Gaga's voice rises from "Government Hooker" like a disembodied horror movie hand reaching out to grab you by the throat. On "Americano", she turns the unpromising pop cliché of flamenco guitars and Latinate signifiers into a demented, sinister dance of death simply by ramping the tempo and electronic fuzz up as high as she can. A glorious sax solo from the E Street Band's Clarence Clemons is the perfect, overblown climax to the urgent peaks of "The Edge of Glory".
It can be wearying if one isn't in the right mood, but the endorphin-driven rush of Born This Way is no mistake. These are songs designed to make the listener feel strong, invulnerable and 73 feet tall - and what Gaga doesn't always manage with her lyrics, she achieves with her sound. It is also confirmation of a key thread running through the record: Born This Way is less an attempt to be all malleable things to everybody (as one might expect of a pop star in her imperial phase), and more a pact of loyalty with Gaga's devoted, cultish fan base (the Little Monsters, as she calls them). Unusually in an era when cross-pollination in pop is par for the course, Born This Way is a remarkably self-contained album, Gaga turning to her community of fans and speaking to them in a common language.
The tension between the idea of this community and the inherently individualistic thrust of Gaga's be-yourself self-empowerment is at the heart of the album's best, and most interesting, song. "If you're a strong female, you don't need permission," glints the pre-chorus of "Scheiße" over whiplash synths. But it's the doubt Gaga goes on to express in the chorus - "I wish I could be strong without somebody there … I wish I could be strong without the scheiße, yeah" - that exposes the fragility underlying the diktat. What Gaga seems to be frustratedly lumping together is everything she ostensibly thrives on: her drama, her rhetoric, her outfits, her community. It's simultaneously the acknowledgement that they are necessary and the desire to be free from that need. For once, Gaga seems genuinely conflicted - and it's a mark of how compelling she is that this is where she's also at her most identifiable.
Alex Macpherson is a regular contributor to The Review.
Tips for job-seekers
- Do not submit your application through the Easy Apply button on LinkedIn. Employers receive between 600 and 800 replies for each job advert on the platform. If you are the right fit for a job, connect to a relevant person in the company on LinkedIn and send them a direct message.
- Make sure you are an exact fit for the job advertised. If you are an HR manager with five years’ experience in retail and the job requires a similar candidate with five years’ experience in consumer, you should apply. But if you have no experience in HR, do not apply for the job.
David Mackenzie, founder of recruitment agency Mackenzie Jones Middle East
Maestro
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The Outsider
Stephen King, Penguin
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Our legal consultant
Name: Dr Hassan Mohsen Elhais
Position: legal consultant with Al Rowaad Advocates and Legal Consultants.
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THE SIXTH SENSE
Starring: Bruce Willis, Toni Collette, Hayley Joel Osment
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Rating: 5/5
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Our legal consultants
Name: Hassan Mohsen Elhais
Position: legal consultant with Al Rowaad Advocates and Legal Consultants.
The alternatives
• Founded in 2014, Telr is a payment aggregator and gateway with an office in Silicon Oasis. It’s e-commerce entry plan costs Dh349 monthly (plus VAT). QR codes direct customers to an online payment page and merchants can generate payments through messaging apps.
• Business Bay’s Pallapay claims 40,000-plus active merchants who can invoice customers and receive payment by card. Fees range from 1.99 per cent plus Dh1 per transaction depending on payment method and location, such as online or via UAE mobile.
• Tap started in May 2013 in Kuwait, allowing Middle East businesses to bill, accept, receive and make payments online “easier, faster and smoother” via goSell and goCollect. It supports more than 10,000 merchants. Monthly fees range from US$65-100, plus card charges of 2.75-3.75 per cent and Dh1.2 per sale.
• 2checkout’s “all-in-one payment gateway and merchant account” accepts payments in 200-plus markets for 2.4-3.9 per cent, plus a Dh1.2-Dh1.8 currency conversion charge. The US provider processes online shop and mobile transactions and has 17,000-plus active digital commerce users.
• PayPal is probably the best-known online goods payment method - usually used for eBay purchases - but can be used to receive funds, providing everyone’s signed up. Costs from 2.9 per cent plus Dh1.2 per transaction.
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What is graphene?
Graphene is extracted from graphite and is made up of pure carbon.
It is 200 times more resistant than steel and five times lighter than aluminum.
It conducts electricity better than any other material at room temperature.
It is thought that graphene could boost the useful life of batteries by 10 per cent.
Graphene can also detect cancer cells in the early stages of the disease.
The material was first discovered when Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov were 'playing' with graphite at the University of Manchester in 2004.
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Engine: 2.7-litre 4-cylinder Turbomax
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Transmission: 8-speed automatic
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”