I’ve never gotten the Lady Gaga craze.
 

I’ll be the first to admit, some of her songs are pretty catchy; I’ve danced to “Poker Face” at my share of parties. But I’ve never considered changing my religious preferences on Facebook to “Gagaism” and I’ve never once referred to her as “fierce.” She’s turned out a few good hits, but I’m not yet ready to ascribe to her mystical powers.
 

Her music videos have always disturbed me. Between the trippy shots of her in ridiculous outfits and the not-so-subtle masochistic vibes, they produce a guttural repulsion in me. I can’t explain why, on an intellectual level, I find the “Bad Romance” video so upsetting, but whenever I watch it something somewhere inside me feels abused.
 

So I should have avoided Lady Gaga’s new video, “Telephone,” featuring Beyonce. But too many people were talking about it and I couldn’t help myself.  I sat at my computer and watched all nine minutes and 32 seconds of it.
 

It was as viscerally jolting as I’d expected. The video begins with Lady Gaga in prison. Two guards rip off her clothes and one remarks, “I told you she didn’t have a d—.” Then Beyonce bails Lady Gaga out and they go on a road trip in the “Pussy Wagon” to poison a bunch of people in a diner. For kicks, the two engage in a bit of homoeroticism.
 

Even if you ignore the fact that the action on screen has nothing to do with the lyrics, it’s still a stupid video. In just nine and a half minutes, Lady Gaga manages to get naked, put on glasses made of lit cigarettes and prance around in a leopard skin outfit that even the most shameless cougar wouldn’t be caught dead in. Beyonce proves that beautiful pop divas look just as silly as everyone else in black lipstick. Extras dance with baguettes and drop half-chewed food from their mouths. It’s as if Lady Gaga and Beyonce wrote down on little scraps of paper every way they could think of to shock people, put them in a hat, drew them out in random order and filmed the result.
 

This video has little entertainment value and no artistic merit. But millions of people have watched it. Many, like me, have expressed disgust. Many others have loved it. For some reason, they are drawn to the video’s illogical sequence of events and raw shock power.
 

Our generation grew up in the age of the Internet, when outrageous and degrading images became just a mouse click away. We watched people humiliate themselves on “Fear Factor” and “The Biggest Loser.” We listened to shock jocks like Howard Stern say outrageous things. We laughed at jokes about Helen Keller and dead babies. A tidal wave of pornography and iconoclasm washed over us until we became numb. Shock has become our drug and we require ever-stronger hits to achieve our high.
 

In the wake of that overdose came Lady Gaga. She gave us the spectacle of degradation. She showed us videos of herself vomiting. She chained herself to a pole by her hair. She wore a dress made of bubbles. Now she’s been stripped in prison and committed mass homicide. The images no longer even make sense; the more incomprehensible they are, the more they feed into viewers’ hunger for the grotesque.
 

Past eras have been defined by their art. Greece had Sophocles and Plato. The Renaissance had da Vinci and Michelangelo. Will the 21st century be remembered as the Age of Gaga?

Nathaniel French is a junior theater major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].