- Friday, Lady Gaga released her new album, “Mayhem”.
- Combined as a return to its industrial roots, the album is brighter and more funk than expected.
- In conversation, deployment and sequence of the album suggest an intentional bait and switch from Gaga.
Lady Gaga promised “Mayhem”, and she delivered – but not in the way fans and criticism could have predicted.
Gaga’s new album, Out Friday, was strongly marketed using avant-garde images, black and white aesthetics, throbbing rhythms and fantasy echoes of its previous eras. The two singles in mind, “illness” and “Abracadabra”, both obtained comparisons with the provocative pop of Gaga which made her queen of monsters in the aughts, like “Alejandro” and “Bad Romance”.
Although Gaga insisted in the interviews according to which “Mayhem” could not be awarded a specific genre, the deployment had nevertheless a clear identity – suggesting a triumphant return in shape for the woman known with “Mother Monster”.
Technically, Gaga released three songs from “Mayhem” in front of the album: First Come “Die With A Smile”, a romantic duo with Bruno Mars who dominated the world pop charts of Billboard since last August. However, the song was originally supposed to be an autonomous loosia, while “Disease” was marketed as the official single of the album.
In fact, many fans have started to wonder how a Schmaltzy song like “Die with a smile” was part of the album’s landscape – to the point where many wondered why it was included on the track at all.
One of Gaga’s producers, Andrew Watt, was even invited to report on this gap in an interview with Rolling Stone. “He was still intended for his album,” he replied with ease.
Now that “Mayhem” has finally arrived, I can only imagine how silly this question had to seem silly.
“ Die with a smile ” is not the aberrant value of the album – “Disease” and “Abracadabra” are
Where Gaga has teased “a series of Gothic dreams”, what takes shape is a woman who wakes up, the sun run through her windows. The vast majority of “Mayhem” is lively and melodic, undoubtedly inspired by the 80s, even funky sometimes.
This does not mean that Gaga does not become the complete pop-maximalist as the fans hoped. It is simply not the resurrection of the members for the member of “The Fame Monster” that we were ready to expect.
However, remarkable songs like “Vanish Into You”, “Killah”, “Shadow of a Man” and “How Bad Do Want Me” suggest the influences of David Bowie, Prince, Michael Jackson and Taylor Swift, in particular Swift, Synth-Pop Heel-Turn “1989.”
Although Swift did not have a hand in the creation of “Mayhem” as some fans were convinced that she had done so, her wise fingerprints are always visible on the album packaging.
Swift is an artist in love with all authority with a little cunning: “Each bait and switch was a work of art”, she sings in the single “Willow” of 2020. Before her new album, for example, Swifies was prepared for a meticulous autopsy on her recently deceased six years, only for “The Torred Poets Department” above all forgotten.
Of course, the “Mayhem” deployment was not all smoke screens and cross-around; “Disease” and “Abracadabra”, which made its debut at the n ° 1 of the Dance Songs / Hot Pop Songs by Billboard, are both on the album, after all. The promise of dark and pulsating pop is filled, if only briefly.
The tracklist sequence also seems to reflect the deployment of the album. “Disease” and “Abracadabra”, placed on the slopes one and two, prepared the ground. Then, we obtain “Garden of Eden” and “Perfect Celebrity”, which always throws Gaga as an impetuous electropop supplier – but an air of change and transition, perhaps even impatience, is hidden just below the surface.
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The latter is particularly instructive. Gaga taunts the public (and herself) to expect perfection, indestructibility and a harmless brand of notoriety. “You like to hate me / I am the perfect fame,” she resonates.
This is exactly the kind of satire that helped model Gaga’s personality (remember his performance as “paparazzi” at VMA 2009? How could you not?). But where Gaga was once the game to play the role – to reflect our desires for us, to “live for applause”, in her own words – now she seems angry. “Take up my face in this photo,” she said in the refrain of the song, symbolically condemning her own nostalgia bait.
Indeed, “Perfect Celebrity” is the last song of the genre on the album. After the old image of Gaga is sufficiently mutilated, she covers a news as she was her own Dr Frankenstein; The rest of the track track takes place with shimmering guitar riffs and colored shards at the first MTV.
Gaga was 22 years old when she released “The Fame”, her first album. Now, she is 38 years old, among many other things: a winner of a Grammy 13 times, an Oscars winner, a nominated at Emmy, an icon of style, a fiancée. More importantly, she said she was “really happy”.
“I hope that I may be an example that you can be a deeply artistic person and that we don’t have to romantize torture,” Gaga told Entertainment Weekly earlier this month.
Perhaps it is embarrassing that we wanted Gaga reintegration the hungry girl who had just made “Just Dance” and “Poker Face”, the girl who is looking for a kind of success with unique and invasive consequences that she could not yet understand. The story of the “return to form” is very tempting but can also be infantilizing and restrictive.
After all, who wants to relive the 22 -year -old torture when many people are lonely, news in the strains of adulthood, and fundamentally without any idea? I prefer to have space to grow.
Gaga knew it earlier than most. She has spent her entire career to change her form, rebel and reject the expectations of the industry. As “Mayhem” suggests, even until its title, there is no form to come back – only more chaos to overcome and more art to create.
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