{"id":1235910,"date":"2025-03-13T15:06:33","date_gmt":"2025-03-13T15:06:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/?p=1235910"},"modified":"2025-03-13T15:06:33","modified_gmt":"2025-03-13T15:06:33","slug":"mayhem-reviewed-lady-gagas-return-to-form","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/mayhem-reviewed-lady-gagas-return-to-form\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cMayhem,\u201d Reviewed: Lady Gaga\u2019s Return to Form"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In the spring of 2011, Lady Gaga, then twenty-five years old and on the cusp of releasing her second full-length studio album, \u201cBorn This Way,\u201d did something unexpected\u2014at least for a pop star of snowballing fame. I\u2019m not talking about the way she\u2019d shown up at the Grammy Awards that year, nestled inside a giant plexiglass egg that was paraded into the venue atop a rustic palanquin. By that time, Gaga was already notorious for pulling such stunts; arriving inside the ovoid vessel\u2014which she later claimed to have slept in for three straight days prior to her Grammys performance, as a \u201ccreative, embryonic incubation\u201d\u2014was not even her most outr\u00e9 awards-show caper. (The year before, she\u2019d attended the MTV Video Music Awards in an outfit made entirely of raw meat, a pungent provocation that managed to draw the ire of vegans and carnivores in equal measure.) The strange act I am referring to is a stint that Gaga did, for a little less than a year, writing a magazine column describing the inner workings of her creative process. The idea to do this was hers\u2014she\u2019d allegedly approached Stephen Gan, the editor-in-chief of the avant-garde fashion magazine V<\/em>, with the pitch. Gan told the Times<\/em> that Gaga required very little editing.<\/p>\n

The six articles that Gaga wrote for V<\/em>\u2014she called them \u201cGaga memoranda\u201d\u2014are bizarre, fascinating, and often very funny pop curiosities that read like a cross between Diana Vreeland-esque stream-of-consciousness musings and an art-school thesis. With exaggerated hauteur, Gaga explains that she does not, ultimately, have to explain herself to anyone. She is her own greatest creation, sprung from her own forehead the moment she decided to stop being Stefani Joanne Germanotta, a precocious, piano-playing Catholic schoolgirl from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and started performing gigs around the Lower East Side wearing her stage name and not much else. \u201cLady Gaga\u201d was a work of artifice, she conceded, but she\u2019d come by the act honestly. \u201cArt is a lie,\u201d she wrote. \u201cAnd every day I kill to make it true.\u201d Her penchant for costumes and her \u201cnatural inclination to be grand\u201d made her seem like a \u201cmaster of escapism,\u201d she added, but \u201cMaybe I am not escaping. Maybe I am just being. Being myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is something delightful about Gaga\u2019s arch, grandiloquent tone in these columns. She was flirting with a scholarly affect that was rarely present in her early singles, which were built for mass dissemination. Gaga\u2019s first album, \u201cThe Fame\u201d (2008), is full of loud, hooky choruses and often garish goofiness, including cheesy, fun lyrics that are easy to learn and impossible to forget. In the electro-pop banger \u201cJust Dance,\u201d she sings about losing her phone and \u201cgetting hosed\u201d in the club before exhorting listeners to \u201cJust dance, gonna be okay, da-da-doo-doot.\u201d In her second single, \u201cPoker Face,\u201d she made a meal out of plosive consonants, repeating the phrase \u201cP-p-p-poker face\u201d over a thumping beat with winning propulsion. In \u201cLoveGame\u201d and in \u201cPaparazzi,\u201d respectively, she sang about taking \u201ca ride on a disco stick\u201d and being \u201cgarage glamorous\u201d\u2014phrases that were silly enough to be smartly infectious. By the time she released \u201cBad Romance,\u201d in 2009, Gaga had proved that she could make a hit, through sheer bravado, out of little more than nonsense syllables. The supremely beltable refrain, \u201cRoma, roma-ma \/ Gaga, ooh-la-la,\u201d briefly freed us all from the pressures of logic. Gaga treated the irrepressible medium of dance pop as a jet pack to send herself, like a curious astronaut, to the outer edges of fame. Since her teen years, she\u2019d been a student of celebrity, modelling herself, from the outset, after pop stars (David Bowie<\/a>, Prince, Madonna<\/a>) who had managed to remain in aesthetic flux. She read Warhol biographies, and throughout her \u201cFame\u201d tour showed a video of herself playing a character called \u201cCandy Warhol.\u201d That she pulled all of her influences directly (and unsubtly) into her work was not, in her mind, a form of pastiche but, rather, a method of invention\u2014or, as she put it in V<\/em>, in characteristically grandiose terms, \u201cThe past undergoes mitosis, becoming the originality of the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gaga is thirty-eight now\u2014a grande dame in pop years. She is no longer the enfant terrible of the recording industry but one of its most enduring institutions. And yet I found myself thinking again of her youthful columns as I listened to her new record, \u201cMayhem.\u201d Both sonically and thematically, the record, her sixth solo effort (or seventh, depending on whether you count her \u201cFame\u201d rerelease, 2009\u2019s \u201cThe Fame Monster,\u201d as its own entity), marks a return to what her fans call her \u201cimperial era\u201d\u2014those inexhaustible early years when she was obsessed with becoming globally famous, and obsessed with dissecting what becoming globally famous meant<\/em>. \u201cMayhem\u201d is Gaga\u2019s first major album in five years, and her first instantly lovable, bombastic pop offering in more than a decade. (Her last LP, 2020\u2019s \u201cChromatica,\u201d was, to be fair, a dance record, but one that adopted its overarching sound from the less accessible and more melancholy tradition of industrial house music.) \u201cMayhem,\u201d despite its entropic title, is at heart Gaga\u2019s happiest record, in that it feels, at long last, more like a celebration of her myriad talents than like another contested way station on her long march through the Zeitgeist. She\u2019s been a stadium filler and a Super Bowl halftime act<\/a> but also a film actor, a TV-soap star, a fan-dancing representative at the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics, and an ambassador between pop music\u2019s old guard (as seen in her warm collaborations with Tony Bennett and Liza Minnelli<\/a>) and its new stars. In her musical output, she\u2019s lily-padded from genre to genre, from the techno-ish \u201cArtpop\u201d (2013) to the stripped-down, country-twanged \u201cJoanne\u201d (2016) to the almost nihilistic crunch of \u201cChromatica.\u201d \u201cMayhem,\u201d in its buoyant, carefree way, feels like a respite from the relentless hard work<\/em>\u2014though in its unforced ease it also reaffirms that Gaga is one of the hardest-working people in the business.<\/p>\n

\u201cMayhem\u201d is, it must be said, a project full of self-citation. It is new Gaga music that channels old Gaga music, pulling from a bag of tricks that she has arguably helped to define: nonsensical chanting (in the chorus of \u201cAbracadabra,\u201d \u201camor-ooh-na-na\u201d is a wink at \u201cBad Romance\u201d); syncopated, buffeting choruses (as in the \u201cPoker Face\u201d callback \u201cGarden of Eden,\u201d in which she sings, \u201cI\u2019ll t-t-t-take you to the Garden of Eden\u201d); and songs that critique the insidiousness of fame, among them \u201cPerfect Celebrity,\u201d a grungy, insouciant kiss-off that Gaga has described as the \u201cmost angry\u201d song in her catalogue. (\u201cChoke on the fame and hope it gets you high \/ Sit in the front row, watch the princess die.\u201d) Somehow, Gaga\u2019s rummaging through her own past for inspiration\u2014alongside her main producers, Cirkut and Andrew Watt\u2014has yielded the freshest collection of songs she has released in years. Perhaps her past has undergone enough mitosis to morph into future originality. Or perhaps, as we careen toward another possible recession and whatever further chaos the current Administration will inflict, we are ready for big, juicy, showy hooks again, the kind that overwhelm the brain with dopamine and the hips with a need to move. I cannot listen to \u201cKillah,\u201d the exuberantly funky, bass-slapping track that Gaga made with the French d.j. and producer Gesaffelstein<\/a>, without smiling and bopping my head. Or perhaps, as Gaga has said over and over again on her indefatigable press tour for the album\u2014which has seen her gnaw chili wings<\/a> on \u201cHot Ones,\u201d hold a private Spotify press conference in Greenpoint for her devoted Little Monsters fan base, and do double duty as the host and the musical guest on \u201cS.N.L.\u201d\u2014she is finally making pop music from a place of devotion rather than domination. After all, Gaga is in love, engaged to a philanthropist named Michael Polansky, whom she croons about in the album\u2019s penultimate song, the ballad \u201cBlade of Grass.\u201d (He is credited as a co-writer on several of the album\u2019s songs, and Gaga has said that it was he who advised her to go back to making pop music.) For the first time, Gaga, whose many years of queenly isolation led her fans to dub her Mother Monster\u2014the patron misfit of the misfits\u2014is publicly discussing a yearning to start a family, retreat from the grind, loosen her vise grip on persona. In V<\/em>, she\u2019d written, \u201cI am a show with no intermission.\u201d Now she is talking about how the chasm between her public commitments and her private life led her to experience \u201cpsychosis,\u201d such that she was no longer able to distinguish what was real. I\u2019ve found it quite moving to hear her talk about how she knew that Polansky was the right partner because he simply \u201cwanted to be my friend.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is all to say that the current Gaga is, ostensibly, a different\u2014and far more relaxed\u2014artist than the one I encountered when I met her for a New York Times<\/em> Magazine<\/em> profile<\/a> back in 2018, when she was promoting the film \u201cA Star Is Born<\/a>\u201d and in full-on Oscar-campaigning mode. At the time, she was playing the role of the ing\u00e9nue movie starlet; when I met her at her Laurel Canyon offices (which, in studious Gagaian fashion, were situated inside the bohemian former home of the experimental-rock pioneer Frank Zappa), she wore a Marilyn Monroe-ish wiggle dress, cherry-red lipstick, skyscraper heels, and a sculpted platinum coif. In one room, she had hung a still of her crying face from the last scene of \u201cA Star Is Born,\u201d blown up so large that it barely fit on the wall. She was hyper-attuned to the mannerisms of a capital-\u201cA\u201d actress while never quite seeming as embodied off the screen as she did on it. (I still consider her turn<\/a> in \u201cA Star Is Born\u201d to be one of the great d\u00e9but film performances of our era.) I could sense, from our conversations, how much effort she was putting into her prestige transformation\u2014and also how little fun she seemed to be having.<\/p>\n

I worried, at first, when I heard that Gaga was calling her record \u201cMayhem,\u201d that it might not be all that much fun, either. To be honest, I thought that the title might be another marketing push for \u201cJoker: Folie \u00e0 Deux<\/a>,\u201d Gaga\u2019s third film and her biggest critical flop to date, in which she plays the anarchic DC Comics antiheroine Lee Quinzel (a.k.a. Harley Quinn), a character whose animating passion is to wreak mayhem wherever she goes. That film was a distressing misstep for Gaga, not because it was a campy mess (she was the best part of the campy mess \u201cHouse of Gucci<\/a>,\u201d after all) but because it was so dismissive of her natural charisma. Gaga\u2019s co-star, Joaquin Phoenix, allegedly encouraged her to sing poorly<\/em> for much of the film, robbing her performance of one of its potential pleasures. Gaga barely gets to sing or dance or even chew scenery in the film; her smile looked convincingly painted-on throughout. Fortunately, Gaga\u2019s musical entanglement with the \u201cJoker\u201d sequel ended with \u201cHarlequin,\u201d her polished but snoozy tie-in cover album of jazz standards. \u201cMayhem\u201d is not a reference to an external chaotic force wrought by a pigtailed imp but, instead, to an internal tension that Gaga claims to wrestle with daily\u2014between the past and the present, candy-coated pop and more esoteric experimentation, the person and the disguise. To Gaga\u2019s credit\u2014and to the credit of that twenty-five-year-old girl writing strident columns about how art is a lie\u2014she has never tried to assert that she is more herself now than she was before. In a recent interview with the Times<\/em>, she said, \u201cI was authentic before. That was authentically me. I just was authentically splitting off into different personalities all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last weekend, delivering an opening monologue as the host of \u201cS.N.L.,\u201d Gaga, riffing on her age, joked that \u201cmost pop stars are over forty: Chappell Roan is fifty-eight, and Charli XCX, she\u2019s seventy-five. Tate McRae\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. is my biological grandmother.\u201d This was meant as commentary on the music industry\u2019s cult of youth, but it also made me think about Gaga\u2019s larger relationship to her pop-star successors. Members of a generation that\u2019s been addled by the internet\u2019s intrusions since birth, many of them seem much less bullish about chasing mass appeal. Roan<\/a> has been vocal about her struggles with fandom, cancelling shows for self-protection and using awards speeches to call out the industry\u2019s lack of care for its talent. Charli XCX sneers at fame\u2019s conflicting demands all over \u201cBRAT<\/em><\/a>,\u201d with much more open anxiety than Gaga has yet been willing to reveal. (On \u201cPerfect Celebrity,\u201d Gaga sings, of resurgent pressures in the age of Ozempic, \u201cI look so hungry, but I look so good\u201d; Charli XCX, says, more searchingly, on \u201cRewind,\u201d \u201cNowadays, I only eat at the good restaurants \/ but, honestly, I\u2019m always thinking \u2019bout my weight.\u201d) Gaga herself seems to be inching toward a philosophy of self-preservation, perhaps encouraged by her younger counterparts, who may indeed be her elders in this regard. But where Gaga still feels dominant\u2014and nearly untouchable\u2014is onstage, where she gives everything<\/em>, every time, sans fear, sans wobbling. On \u201cS.N.L.,\u201d she staged a dynamic version of \u201cKillah,\u201d spinning on the studio floor like a break-dancer and stomping through various hallways before exploding onto the main stage to perform in a red spangled leotard. Both her pelvic gyrations and her outfit nodded to Liza Minnelli, another performer who always gives of herself utterly. Gaga ended the song with a primal scream, her eyes wide and unblinking. \u201cMayhem\u201d may have emerged from a softer, wiser Gaga, but she is still hitting hard where it counts.\u00a0\"\u2666\"<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 O artigo anterior foi obtido e traduzido do site internacional da celebrity.land \u2019 Source Link <\/em><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the spring of 2011, Lady Gaga, then twenty-five years old and on the cusp of releasing her second full-length studio album, \u201cBorn This Way,\u201d did something unexpected\u2014at least for a pop star of snowballing fame. I\u2019m not talking about the way she\u2019d shown up at the Grammy Awards that year, nestled inside a giant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1235911,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1235910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-musica"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1235910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235910\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1235911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1235910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1235910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1235910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}