Conveniently, Maxim’s interview with Lady GaGa in their July 2009 issue comments on pop art and the active aim of being shallow.

The Lady GaGa experience is a tough one to wrap one’s head around. Is it high art? Cap? Straight-up cheese?

Warhol said art should be meaningful in the most shallow way. He was able to make commercial art that was taken seriously as fine art, to use something simple and shallow to take you to another planet. That’s what I’m doing, too. When you listen to a song like “LoveGame,” is it communicating my soul to you? No. My music isn’t me jerking my dick off all over a piano trying to feel something. I make soulless electronic pop. But when you’re on Ecstasy in a nightclub grinding up against someone and my music comes on, you’ll feel soul.

Not every piece of work has to be cerebral or challenging. Often times the primary goal is to be fun and evoke simple joy. Doing anything more on top of that will just weigh down the experience, forcing the audience to work when all they ever wanted was a quick fix.

Think about punk music. Though many bands have some sort of political agenda the music itself is a raw expression of passion.  The instrumentation is generally pedestrian and more or less sounds the same between songs.  It’s banging and thrashing, screaming and shouting.  But regardless of the particulars, you get the sense that whatever the band is singing about, they feel very strongly about it and want you to get riled up with them.

Songs boil down to being delivery mechanisms for emotions, feelings, and moods.  What’s so wrong about “shallow” games that act in the same way?