I have a rule that my teenage daughters are not allowed to download any songs from the Internet to play on their iPods until I’ve given my approval.  Do you know what I call the wires that come out of an iPod and connect onto the small earphones that go into a teenager’s ears?  Pipelines.  Here’s what travels through those pipelines: (1) sewage that is pumped directly into our children’s brains (and imaginations) that will eventually corrupt the way they think and behave; or (2) meaningful music that can help our children to ponder and appreciate some of the beautiful things in life.

I think my daughters dread having to go through the exercise of sitting next to me while I listen to the songs they want to download.  I’m always happy to provide a running commentary.  I don’t just listen to each song; instead, I look up the song on YouTube and find the music video for the song.  Then I watch the video while listening to the “music.”  If I can’t understand all of the words, I search for and find the lyrics to the song and read them while the song is playing.

Since I play an active role in determining what music my daughters are allowed to listen to, they usually fill me in on who the latest up-and-coming stars are.  A couple of months ago while I was having lunch at a local restaurant with Georgette and my teenage daughters, one of my daughters commented about a song that was playing over the speaker system inside the restaurant.

The “music” that was playing happened to be a hit song by Lady Gaga.  After pointing out the song, my daughter commented: “Even though she’s a freak, a lot of the Catholic girls I know love her and can’t get enough of her music.”  Prior to that, I had heard the name “Lady Gaga” on several different occasions, but I can’t tell you where or how I heard it – just that I had heard the name.  The only thing I knew about Lady Gaga was that she was a musician who had some of her songs playing on the radio.

About a month or so after my daughter called my attention to the Lady Gaga song, I stumbled upon a short summary (on the Internet) of a magazine cover story about Lady Gaga’s meteoric rise to fame.  A couple of weeks later, I saw a headline on an Internet news site that linked to a Forbes Magazine article that featured a list of the “Celebrity 100: The World’s Most Powerful Celebrities.”  The Forbes article identified Lady Gaga as #4 on its Celebrity 100 list, and stated that she earned 62 million dollars last year.  Here’s what Forbes had to say about her:

A newcomer to the Celebrity 100, Lady Gaga broke down the door to fame with outlandish outfits and quirky videos, including one that featured her and Beyonce poisoning an unappreciative boyfriend.  Bringing in an estimated 31 million with a 106-date tour that grossed 95 million, Lady Gaga is also a marketer’s dream, teaming up with Polaroid, Virgin Mobile, Monster Cable and Viva Glam.

The Forbes article really got my attention.  Sixty-two million dollars in income for one year?  For what?   I went to YouTube and typed in “Lady Gaga.”  The first music video that came up was Bad Romance, and the counter below the video showed that over 238,000,000 (238 million) people had viewed the video.  When I saw the number of views my immediate thought was, “That can’t be right.”  The most popular videos on YouTube rarely reach 20 million views.  When I looked at how many views were registered for some of the other Lady Gaga videos, there was another video that had over 100 million views.

I watched the Bad Romance video.  Even though I wanted to bail out after 20 seconds, I thought: “No, I’m going to watch the whole video.  I want to see what hundreds of millions of teenagers throughout the world see in this woman.”

If I had to use one word to describe the video, it would have to be: “Demonic.”  There was not one thing of value in the entire video.  It was impossible to pay attention to the music itself because of all of the bizarre images that were shown.  Toward the end of the video, Gaga and her troupe were shown dancing in front of a man who looked as though he was interested in Gaga.  At one point, a fire erupted and started burning out of control.  The end of the video showed Gaga lying on a bed with the charred skeletal remains of the man.  Everything around them had been burned and Gaga had flames coming out of a part of her body, apparently to show that she was the one responsible for killing the man.  

Time Magazine recently listed Gaga as one of the top 100 influential people in the world.  Forbes Magazine listed her as the second most powerful musician in the world.  She currently holds the record for having the most fans on Facebook – over 10 million – which is more fans than Oprah has on Facebook.

Lady Gaga (real name: Stefani Germanotta), is 24 years old.  As a young girl, she attended a Catholic school.  She attributes part of her success to the fact that she had her heart broken by a boyfriend when she was 19 years old.  Her experience with her boyfriend (a heavy metal drummer) was so traumatic that she refuses to talk about it.  Her “music” shows an obvious hatred (and revenge) toward men.  She is openly (and proudly) bisexual, and is a strong proponent and supporter of “gay rights.”

One of the acts for her recent “Monster Ball Tour” (her fans call themselves “little monsters”), included a man attacking her on stage and chewing on her throat, causing blood to spurt onto her chest, after which she was left to die on stage in a pool of blood.  (Sounds like good wholesome family entertainment doesn’t it?)

What alarms me most is the unprecedented popularity of this 24 year old misfit.  Fifty years ago, she would have been put away in a mental health institution.  She is extremely dangerous to the minds and souls of her obsessed “little monsters.”  It does us no good to take our children to church on Sundays and send them to “good” schools if they’re regularly consuming (through their eyes and ears) the poison that is being fed to them by this evil woman. 

A few years ago (2007), this “lady” was playing gigs at obscure downtown bars in New York City – bars with names like “Mercury Lounge” and “The Bitter End.”  Now she’s playing in the bedrooms of hundreds of millions of teenagers throughout the world.

You need to pay very close attention to what your children are viewing and listening to on the Internet, their iPods, and their mp3 players.  The last thing you want to do is “wake up” someday to find out that your teenager has turned into a “little monster” who has adopted the behavioral habits and moral code of Lady Gaga (or any of the other diabolical divas that now populate our landscape). 

You have now been put on notice.  Please act accordingly.

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