Picking up where Paparazzi left off, Lady GaGa’s new Telephone video featuring Beyoncé was released late last week. The official explicit version will pass 20 million views today. It opens in a women’s prison as lady Gaga is led to her cell by a pair of butch prison guards. Thus begins her reappropriation of the women-in-prison “lezploitation” genre:

The genre’s two high points were the early 1950s and early 1970s, and it is no coincidence these golden eras followed periods of major feminine empowerment. World War II put women into the workplace—and the male subconscious coped by unleashing a string of femme fatales and bad girl exploitation movies. … The past three decades have seen women-in-prison films decline into direct-to-video self-parody and worse, mainstream dullness (anyone care to revisit Brokedown Palace?). But Lady Gaga’s pop impresario genius has been to take this most transparently base and male-centric of exploitation fare and use it for her own ends. Thanks to her dense, witty cut-and-paste exploration into fame and female sexuality, she has done something unprecedented for fans of the women-in-prison genre: She’s restored its taboo and made it intellectually respectable at the same time.

While Alyssa Rosenberg and Alex Blaze object, I wonder how Joan Nestle, co-founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, might see the video. Nestle remembers the Women’s House of Detention in the Village in 1960s New York. In it she found connections between deviance, punishment and unrepentent desire:

The hot summer weekend nights that I stood and watched and listened to the pleas of lovers, butch women shouting up to the narrow-slitted windows, to hands waving handkerchiefs, to bodiless voices of love and despair, “Momi, the kids are okay,” marked me then and still do. Here, my sense of a New York lesbian history began, not a closeted one, but right there on the streets. […]

I stood those days, convinced I was a criminal too, on my way to my haven, a policed place where deviants were kept under a watchful eye, but given a small patch of freedom. From one urban street scene to another, my city was alive with freaks.

In the bar, with that subversive sense of humor that undercuts hardship, the Women’s House of D was called the “Country Club,” and friends were always asking after someone’s woman who was incarcerated. The prison was a presence in our lives—a warning, a beacon, a reminder and a moment of community.

GaGa’s moment of community happens when her simple lyrics, clean beat and extended bridge verse-rap chorus move us out onto the dance floor. Her video is a dark, exuberant melange of gender, race, deviance and desire. Of course, Fox News sees only lesbian filth. GaGa says she’s going for something deeper:

There was this really amazing quality in ‘Paparazzi,’ where it kind of had this pure pop music quality but at the same time it was a commentary on fame culture. In its own way, even at certain points working with Jonas really achieved this high art quality in the way that it was shot. I wanted to do the same thing with this video – take a decidedly pop song, which on the surface has a quite shallow meaning, and turn it into something deeper.

One thing is indisputable, Lady GaGa is a bright shining example of how to succeed as a mega-star in a webby world:

Lady Gaga, along with her record company, is evolving the album in the form of software as a service. Considering the content of her hit new video, Telephone, it is fitting that she would use software to tackle the hard problem of getting paid by amazing fans. On her path to global dominance, the site, LadyGaga.com has innovated the next generation of brand management for artists. To do this, she creates a join between Google’s YouTube, Apple’s iTunes, Twitter, and Facebook. Way beyond having a an Twitter account, LadyGaga is hosting an interface party, and you’re invited. She’s a performer who is inventing ways to create the value of using multiple platforms to juice the network effects. … With the help of Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Apple she will connect to more platforms than ever before, with fewer clicks and passwords.

Give her no flack for product placement; that’s part of her art. A breakdown of the method to Gaga’s madness:

* Wonder Bread: Unpaid. Used in a sequence showing Gaga poisoning diner customers, because Gaga wanted to contrast the poisoning with an all-American brand.

* Miracle Whip: Paid. Used in the same scene-and for the same reason-as Wonder Bread; seems to be part of the spread’s new, edgier campaign.

* Diet Coke: Unpaid. It was Gaga’s idea to curl her hair with Diet Coke cans in the video as an homage to her mother.

* Virgin Mobile: The cell phone in the video is a nod to the company, a mobile sponsor of Gaga’s Monster Ball tour.

* Polaroid: Camera and photo booth featured acknowledge Gaga’s role as Polaroid’s creative director. [more here]

* Heartbeats headphones [link] and Beats laptop [link]: Unpaid. An extension of her partnerships with Interscope Music and Hewlett Packard.

* PlentyofFish.com: Unclear. Possibly the weirdest deal of the bunch; result of the dating site’s partnership with Interscope.

Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 P**sy Wagon appears at his insistence. Says GaGa:

We were having lunch one day in Los Angeles and I was telling him about my concept for the video and he loved it so much he said, “You gotta use the P**sy Wagon.”

Aylin Zafar’s deconstruction finds the real substance beneath every scene in the video. The GaGa look alike in the prison fight sequence is her twin-like 17 year-old sister, Natali. Excerpts from a Ryan Seacrest GaGa interview. Out.com has a highly recommended interview with Heather Cassils, the woman who makes out with Gaga in the prison yard. Below, the making of… A safe-for-work video:

Gaga is a hard worker; at the end of her concert in Auckland, New Zealand, she almost passed out on stage during a performance of ‘Bad Romance.’