The Eleventh Muse

This month, one of the Gods of the Month over in Neos Alexandria is the Muses. (Here is the Neos Alexandria page on the Muses.) The Muses are generally thought of as a collective, but the number of Muses in the collective or the identity of whatever number there is varies a great deal based on what source one reads. (It varies almost as much as the “canonical list”–no such list ever existed!–of the “Twelve Olympians” does!) In the first poem in The Phillupic Hymns, which was an invocation of the Muses, I tried to encompass this diversity in my treatment…to see if I was successful or not, you’ll have to read the book, which means you’ll probably have to buy it. You can do that here. Or, you can just read that poem here, but keep in mind that the spacing and formatting isn’t entirely correct there, alas.

But, just as various people have been suggested as, or have laid claim to, the title of “the fifth Beatle,” so too have a number of people over the years been suggested as “the Tenth Muse.” The most popular of these, of course, has been Sappho of Lesbos, who certainly deserves the title. She is given further poetic favor by the legends which say that Orpheus, after he was dismembered by a group of maenads, had his head float out to sea and eventually to Lesbos, where it inspired Sappho. So, as far as I’m concerned, we need seek no further for who the official “Tenth Muse” is other than or outside of Sappho.

What, therefore, of this Eleventh Muse who gives her epithet to the subject of my post here? As the Tenth Muse was a human, likewise I think any further Muses after nine would have to be human as well. So, I believe I have identified the physical incarnation of the Eleventh Muse, who is alive and thriving among us today. (While Julia Balbilla would certainly be a worthy contender, and a good guess in the present context, we don’t have enough of her poetry to really make that judgment, and she is somewhat obscure in the poetic records during and after her time, which means she didn’t meet with widespread fame because of her art, for good or ill.)

This modern Muse is a rather obscure artist known as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, and she has a few albums out and some very catchy tunes that I think you’ll enjoy, if you’ve never heard them before.

I’m rather stunned that not very many people have heard of her, to be honest. I mean, with a name like that, she sounds like royalty, and should be a household name. Alas, though…

Well, if you’re out-and-about, and happen to be in a record store, or see concerts advertised, or happen to see a television or a news stand, you might catch word of her.

Her stage-name is Lady Gaga.

I’m very willing to admit that I am quite late to the punch on this one–I hate it when that happens, but better late than never, eh? I don’t get out to clubs much (or at all, really), I don’t watch MTV, and I don’t listen to the radio, so while I had heard of her in various places long before now, I never heard any of her music until May of this year, when I was at the medieval congress in Kalamazoo. Her song “Bad Romance” was on, and about halfway through it, I figured out, “Oh, this is that Lady Gaga song.” Then, I kept hearing her come up in more and more places, on television shows I was watching, in conversations, and so forth. Instead of ignoring all the attention the media was giving her, I started to look. After hearing a few of her songs, and seeing the great admiration that very alternative musicians I greatly admire were lavishing upon her, also thinking she is as fantastic as everyone else seemed to, I decided she’d be well worth exploring further.

I finally obtained her album today, and have been listening to it an awful lot…and singing along (loud!) with it…and dancing around the room looking stupid…for a half hour! Those who know me know that I don’t do a lot of singing along, even when I’m alone (not that they’d know that!); and I certainly don’t do much dancing around the room either–not because I don’t like to dance, but because I just don’t have the energy a lot of the time now. But, there I was, dancing around to her songs, the dogs looking at me really strange, and one of them trying to join in with me a few times–bless!

I feel especially stupid that I never copped on to this, considering the high profile she’s often had in the blog of my good and dear friend Sannion, who has written of her later on in this post, as well as here (though he never fulfilled his promise there, alas!), and a few times elsewhere on the various internet presences he has. But more on my dear friend in a moment…

In October, the inspiration hit me that for PantheaCon ’11, for part of the sacred drama we’ll be performing, one of the songs would have to be Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro,” only with altered lyrics. One of my great failings is that I am utterly awful in terms of coming up with tunes for songs, hymns, etc.; one of the only ones that I can claim as entirely my own, with no inspiration from any other source, is Ignis Corporis, which I first performed in late ’05 for the Sancti on Foundation Day (though an ex-boyfriend who was quite the composer–and still is!–helped in creating the second variation of it early in 2008). However, I’m quite good with lyrics, and I’ve enjoyed either writing lyrics for songs (with no definite tunes), or altering and/or adding lyrics to existing songs, for most of my life. (In respectable musical circles, this is known as contrafactum.)

So, I’ll give you a little bit of a taste for the “chorus” of the altered version of the song–it will be sung by Antinous (who is dead/deified at the time), and it is to Hadrian, and the song is called “Hadriane” (the Latin vocative of Hadrianus):

You know that I love you, man,
Hot like Egypt’s desert sands–
At this point you’ve gotta choose,
So much to lose…

Don’t cry for me, Don’t cry for me, Hadriane
Don’t mourn for me, Don’t mourn for me, Hadriane
Don’t let them slice into my guts,
Just build a pyre ‘n’ light me up!
Don’t cry for me, Don’t cry for me, Hadriane
Hadriane, Hadriane,
Hadri-Hadriane, Hadri-Hadriane
Hadriane, Hadriane,
Hadri-Hadriane, Hadri-Hadriane

You get the idea…

Also, we’ll be using the little bit of the chorus of “Bad Romance” in the same drama, with the following lyrics:

Oh-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o, Oh-o-o, they’re in a god romance!
Oh-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o, Oh-o-o, they’re in a god romance!
Ave, Gaudete! Ave, Antinoe! Ave, Hadriane!–in a god romance!
Ave, Gaudete! Ave, Antinoe! Ave, Hadriane!–in a god romance!

Yeah. This is high-quality stuff here.

But seriously, now: the tunes are just utterly and completely spellbinding and catchy, and people will recognize them and be able to follow along easily, if given the words. So, that’s one of the many advantages of using them.

Beyond that, though, Lady Gaga is a rather admirable person for a variety of reasons. She is an out bisexual, and despite the critique that I have read a lot of bisexual women giving her, nonetheless to actually admit this in any way is not a bad thing for overall bisexual visibility. Furthermore, she’s not only queer, she is also a very vocal advocate for queer rights, and was actively campaigning for the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in months past–so, hurrah for that as well!

As much as I love Lady Gaga’s songs themselves, I would like to give a few videos and links here to some fun covers that I like. The first is by Unwoman, my favorite SteamPunk cellist/singer in the world (whose original songs you should TOTALLY check out)!

Here’s a fun version of “Alejandro” done by Harmonica Pierre, a 75-year old Belgian watchmaker who was on America’s Got Talent this past summer.

And, while we’re doing NBC talent/”reality” shows, here’s a Lady Gaga medley (“Poker Face,” “Paparazzi,” “Just Dance”) by The Backbeats from the recent show The Sing-Off, which is an a capella group competition (sadly, they didn’t win…they had the only female vocal percussionist in the competition, and she rawked!).

Speaking seriously again, though, I think Lady Gaga is the daughter of Hermes and Dionysos–hey, if Dionysos can have two mothers (Persephone and Semele) and one father (Zeus), then surely someone else can have two fathers! But, who would her mother be? Interesting question…

I’ve said on several occasions that I also think Sannion is the son of Dionysos and Hermes, but his mother is very clearly Aphrodite (or possibly Ariadne, particularly if she is syncretized to Aphrodite, which she was in some places), as I made rather clear in a recent post about a dream I had. But, I think Lady Gaga’s mother would have to be Artemis, of Ephesus specifically–who’s a bigger bull-ball-buster than her? (I say that with the utmost admiration, of course!)

So, of course, this means that Sannion is Lady Gaga’s half-brother! That’s very interesting indeed, wouldn’t you say? I guess no one will be more surprised about this than Lady Gaga herself, particularly if Sannion shows up to a family reunion at some point…?!?