JAZZ: Going Gaga for all that jazz

SHE has taken tea with Julian Assange, spoken out against homophobia and fracking, and shared the LennonOno Grant for Peace with Pussy Riot and investigative writer John Perkins.

But in SA last weekend, Lady Gaga refused to accredit South African news photographers for her Johannesburg concert, robbing them of the right to a livelihood and the public of honest (un-Photoshopped) images. Those pictures you saw the next day were issued to newspapers by the company Live Nation.

This is not the first time the Gaga organisation has restricted journalists: it also happened on the Austrian leg of her tour, which journalists consequently boycotted. The organisation shows scant real respect for some aspects of freedom — despite profiting from South African free-speech protections after religious conservatives here lobbied for Gaga’s show to be banned.

Pop megastars often attempt to shackle the press worldwide. The artist’s image must remain consistent with her marketing, so interviews are sometimes scripted and usually chaperoned, and photographs are digitally airbrushed.

A tour is a vastly lucrative property, and various aspects — for example, the right to the future revenue from all images — are tied down or sold off before any tour contract is even finalised. Yet few South Africans outside the media will have known of the censorship.

The South African National Editors Forum statement of protest scored few column inches, and headline-writers still drooled "Spectacular!" and "Wow!" after the show.

Gaga is merely another pop commodity, but the regularly supine and fawning attitude of showbiz columnists to such restrictions opens a very dangerous door.

There will be justifiable furore if only sanctioned images from Mangaung are permitted. Yet Gaga’s publicists hang from the same low branch of the evolutionary tree as the thugs smashing reporters’ cameras at political conferences.

All these attempts at control, of course, look positively medieval in a digital era where anyone with a smartphone can grab and transmit images. Yet because of their broader implications, it is sad when few journalists anywhere interrogate whether Gaga’s noisily publicised views on human rights are anything more than another tissue in her carefully managed packaging.

Jazz artists in general love to talk about their music and prefer to play rather than preen. None of this week’s live music will be tainted by such restrictions — and the music is enjoying a flurry of activity before all but coastal venues close down for the holiday season.

Read more on: http://za.news.yahoo.com/jazz-going-gaga-jazz-031608088--finance.html