lady gaga vs the mcdonalds cheeseburger

a billboard near my house for the famous burger reads: ‘built for your cravings.’ that’s as close to truth in advertising as i’ve seen. the burger is designed and, crucially, consistently executed with enough fat, salt, and sugar to provide an extremely flavorful and instantly gratifying food experience, with ingredients sourced and purchased in such a way as to make it profitable even at $.99 per protein pouch. there are also mcdonalds’ everywhere —ten within three miles of me as i write—so getting a fix is easy; and mcdonalds is still the undisputed heavyweight champion of fast-food, so the branding is constant. for some folks, out of either want or necessity the burgers are a staple food, but no one could reasonably argue they’re eating healthily. think now of a lady gaga song, any lady gaga song. the preceding paragraph functions almost word for word as an analogy for the song, including the pricing in many cases. i am not denouncing either product—they’re following formulas they know will work to give people what they presumably want. i will eat the burger and listen to the song, and will not pretend to be offended by them on the grounds that there’s vastly better/healthier/more thoughtfully made food/music. of course there is, and i eat/listen to them as well. her song and their burger exist in a class of their own; ‘it is what it is’ my dad sometimes says. i submit that a lady gaga song and a mcdonalds cheeseburger--substitutions at no extra cost, for better or worse—are culturally equivalent phenomenon.