MP3s, rebundled debt, and performative economics: deferral, derivatives, and digital commodity fetishism in Lady Gaga’s spectacle of excess

Abstract

Lady Gaga’s rise to fame in the wake of the global financial crisis highlights the contradictions of late late capitalism in both the financial sector and the music industry. Both Gaga and second level economic units like derivatives rely on deferral, parody, and an ever-widening gap between the material and the figurative, the signifier and the signified, the locus of value and the exchange of money. Both thereby also offer the public a hidden opportunity to clearly see the disjuncture between the common belief in capitalism as a natural system and the reality of its social construction.