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Lady Gaga (and her music) banned from China after talking yoga with Dalai Lama

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Cultural icon. When will your (irrelevant) fave (now legacy artist, cover queen, and jazz singer)?
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2...ist-hostile-foreign-forces-meeting-dalai-lama
Some background:
Lady Gaga has reportedly been added to a list of hostile foreign forces banned by China’s Communist party after she met with the Dalai Lama to discuss yoga.

The American pop singer, who has sold more than 27m albums, met the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader on Sunday before a conference in Indianapolis.

A video of the 19-minute encounter – in which the pair pondered issues such as meditation, mental health and how to detoxify humanity – was posted on the singer’s Facebook account.
The juicy bit:
Following Lady Gaga’s meeting, the Communist party’s mysterious propaganda department issued “an important instruction” banning her entire repertoire from mainland China, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily reported on Monday.

Chinese websites and media organisations were ordered to stop uploading or distributing her songs in a sign of Beijing’s irritation, the newspaper said.

The propaganda department also issued orders for party-controlled news outlets such as state broadcaster CCTV and newspapers the People’s Daily and the Global Times to condemn the meeting.

Serving Madonna banned from The Vatican tea! ICONIC.
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Dalek

Member
This is just crazy. And also the reason why The Ancient One is played by a white woman in Doctor Strange.
 

Kinyou

Member
A video of the 19-minute encounter – in which the pair pondered issues such as meditation, mental health and how to detoxify humanity – was posted on the singer’s Facebook account.
I can totally understand China's reaction. These kind of thoughts can start a revolution, man.
 

Shig

Strap on your hooker ...
It's so wild that countries can treat innocuous pop idols like national security threats, then look in the mirror and say to themselves, "We're doing important, meaningful work here. We're the good guys."
 
Is she really banned, or is this the only way they could get a few column inches for her on entertainment websites now?

Things that are banned in China arent actually.
I am quite sure you can still buy her CDs everywhere and from what I can see her songs are still on QQ music.

All online shops still have them. Chinese censorship isn't really what it used to be.

Chinese censorship doesnt work at all. There are so many porn message boards in China, message boards about "banned" stuff etc.
If the chinese government wants to censor some news, its almost impossible nowadays, since those news are shared by millions on chinese social media.
 

Sesha

Member
The Chinese government is not googoo for Gaga.

If by cringe worthy you mean iconic... then I agree.

Is this "iconic" in the Ubisoft sense? Because if not then it's not iconic enough. I've never even seen it before not and didn't even recognize the person as Lady Gaga.

And hatha yoga, at least as we know it, is just glorified calisthenics. The air of spirituality is just a veneer (said my yoga philosophy prof in university at least).

Spirituality is just Latin for "marketing".
 
Spirituality is just Latin for "marketing".

Not really, but it can be another appealing target for egotistic consumption. It's in the same vein as 'the fitter you look the better person you are'. Image is serious business, but the spiritual life is classically an internal thing, so it's a bit of irony I guess.

Maybe if you're holding an asana for three hours it becomes a spiritual thing. Not because of anything magical about the asana but because you're generating a lot of tapas (or a kind of resiliency or fortitude, which you could develop in a lot of other ways too). But postural yoga generally isn't like that, it's just calisthenics with an orientalist flavour, the latter part of which is pretty lame. Orientalism is a vague and patronizing 'feeling' people can use to romanticize/new-ageify anything and sell a bunch of quartz or whatever else people are buying now.

did a mod add yoga to my title or am I dreaming

No that is what happened.
 
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