Lady Gaga's 2013 hit "Do What U Want" gives carte blanche to her lover. But Lady Gaga makes a distinction not always drawn out in contemporary pop—at least not in the same way.
"Do What U Want" draws a line between the sexual and romantic use of Lady Gaga's body and access to her soul. "So do what you want / What you want with my body" may be the song's continuous refrain, but Gaga's verses distance her from the body.
"You can't have my heart / And you won't use my mind but / Do what you want (with my body) . . . / You can't stop my voice cause / You don't own my life but / Do what you want (with my body) . . ."
R. Kelly, Lady Gaga's interlocutor in the dialogue, scarcely picks up on the significance of Gaga's declaration. He's more than happy to oblige her request—to "do what I want / Do what I want with your body." He doesn't even express frustration at lacking access to Gaga's heart, still less to her mind.
Gaga's lyrics bring together the stereotype of modern romance—R. Kelly's flat dream to be "Back of the club, taking shots, getting naughty"—and a complete rejection of the faux eroticism of modern romance. We shouldn't expect any less from the composer of "Bad Romance"—the only modern romantic anthem to accept that licentiousness brings consequences which cannot be shunted aside.
Gaga stages her rejection of modern romance with an indication of her awareness of the philosophical problem at stake. "Yeah / Turn the mic up," says R. Kelly or someone in the background—Gaga's points might go by silently otherwise. "I feel good, I walk alone / But then I trip over myself and I fall / I, I stand up, and then I'm okay / But then you print some shit / That makes me wanna scream." Gaga replaces the fall of Thales with a self-caused stumble. She wasn't unaware of the human things as Thales was. Rather, she was all too aware, and the song expresses her philosophical awakening.
Her libertinism masks her scorn for the body. She is a Platonist after all.
Or rather Gaga suggests that ordinary romance, the love-songs of Katy Perry or Ariana Grande, suffers from a kind of twisted Platonism. Looking down on the body doesn't necessarily lead to asceticism. You can disregard the body by valuing the soul, or you can extract whatever you can from the body for the time being.
Katy Perry's "Dark Horse"—a sophomoric commentary on the Chariot allegory of Plato's Phaedrus—is the critical parallel of "Do What U Want" in almost every way. Instead of R. Kelly, Katy Perry dialogues with Juicy J. But instead of giving him carte blanche as Lady Gaga does (while retaining the most sacred things), she insists that Juicy J "make me your one and only / But don't make me your enemy, your enemy, your enemy." It's either one or the other for Katy Perry—"It's a yes or no," she says, "no maybe."
But what is the "all" that Perry demands her interlocutor give? She is, after all, the dark horse of the irrational appetites. So the "all" she wants isn't the hylomorphism of body and soul. It's body alone that she wants. She happens to think that's all there is.
Only Ariana Grande, still early in her philosophical development, has begun to explore the same tension identified by Gaga. She, too, explores the body and soul in dialogue with a contemporary rapper (in this case, Iggy Azalea) in her song "Problem."
While putatively a reversal of Jay-Z's "99 Problems," Ariana Grande's "Problem" is quite different. It's not only, as the song says, that she realizes she's got "one less problem without ya" (a refrain spoken by her now-lover Big Sean). When Iggy Azalea draws out the implications of Ariana's thesis, she says "Iggy Iggy / To biggie to be here stressin' / I'm thinkin' I love the thought of you / More than I love your presence / And the best thing now / Is probably for you to exit."
"Problem" is then no mere celebration of reclaiming the power of separation and flaunting its use. It's the precise frustration laid out by Gaga, the tension between body ("your presence") and soul ("the thought of you").
The insights aren't Ariana's but Iggy's, however. "Head in the clouds," says Ariana Grande, "Got no weight on my shoulders / I should be wiser / And realize that I've got (I've got) . . ."
If like Gaga's Thales Miss Grande retrieves her head from the clouds, she might discover the problem of body and soul, and the pseudo-Platonism, the "angelism," the disembodied body-exploitation of the age.
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