1) Aura; 2) Venus; 3) G.U.Y.; 4) Sexxx Dreams; 5) Jewels 'n' Drugs (feat. T.I., Too Short & Twista); 6) Manicure; 7) Do What U Want (feat. R. Kelly); 8) ARTPOP; 9) Swine; 10) Donatella; 11) Fashion!; 12) Mary Jane Holland; 13) Dope; 14) Gypsy; 15) Applause
Excessive, chaotic, high-energy. Gaga battles against an impending popularity comedown by frantically going all over the place, turning her internal battles into off-kilter pop monsters. It's messy, but she knows it.
Key tracks: "Venus", "G.U.Y.", "ARTPOP"
Lady Gaga loved fame. Her first two albums were dedicated to it and to the tragi-romantic notion of how too much fame can affect a person. Appropriately, she gained her own fame through it and ironically, when her imperial phase had hit its peak and she needed to keep on top of her own fame, she felt the effects too. But rather than crumble under pressure or push herself away from it, Gaga plunged herself right into it. Some artists end up recording 'fame hangover' albums where their music takes a sudden turn following exposure to something they couldn't deal with, but ARTPOP is instead the heavy binge right before that comedown; the musical equivalent of someone diving right into their addiction with full disregard to its danger. If Gaga was addicted to her own perception of her status in the pop culture world, this was her reckless junkie phase.
While Gaga was always explosive on stage, it's worth watching some of her live performances from around this tour. They're the show of a woman outright possessed on stage, pushing herself to her limits and often reducing her vocal range to a guttural scream over a series of songs that each come out more outrageous than the last, the breakdowns becoming more intense as the tour continued on. Gaga has later come clean on just how much of a bad mental state she was in at the time: she was feeling vulnerable as she was retrospectively dealing with her abused past and second-guessing her own moves all the time, which fed into a snowball of desperate measures to prove her stature. This is the era where her infamous clothing got even crazier, where she talked a great deal about a companion app to the album that'd revolutionise how music is experienced (it ended up just being some photo filters and a lot of Peter Molyneux-esque forgotten features), she was planning to be actually launched into space for a performance... Little of it actually came true in any realistic fashion, but you could tell Gaga was constantly pushing herself to be something gigantic, in a way that felt far-fetched even to her own standards. But amongst all that music needed to be made, and her mania filtered into the album and so, ARTPOP became the one real-life monument to this particularly tumultuous period.
ARTPOP is still a pop album - it's just every pop album you could think of. The character Gaga had created for herself was starting to crack and the fragments started pulling away from each other. Here's the emotional balladeer; here's the crazy art chick; here's the perfectionist dance pop superstar; here's the hip-hop hook girl. She had no filter and no idea was considered too much. The swerving opener "Aura" was originally called "Burqa", tip-toeing around the controversy right on the doorstep of all the covert islamophobia rising in media; "Swine" was a call-out against the gossip blogger Perez Hilton who Gaga felt backstabbed by after a period of fake friendship, and which on stage took form of a scream therapy session that got more maddening the further she toured (by SXSW she was literally puking out neon paint). The message of "Do What U Want" was that anyone could take advantage of Gaga's body but no one could ever own her mind, as an abstract response to how media and paparazzi were treating her - and she invited already-infamous R. Kelly to sing a completely point-missing verse that just made it that much seedier. Somewhere among this she became obsessed over the concept of taking pop art and flicking the theme upside down, by way of an incoherent vision of bringing art into pop music; there wasn't really any kind of logical red line in her rambles, but it's the reason for all the Koons balls in the artwork, promotional material and referenced in the lead single "Applause". "Applause" itself is an adrenaline-fueled art statement of a song that's more a manifesto of Gaga's concept for the record than an obvious chart-topper, barely catching its breath for its anthem of a chorus. This was right as pop had started turning towards the Lorde-led eat-the-rich chill vibes, and here Gaga was literally singing about people praising her in a way that many perceived as egocentric - and she sounded like she's absolutely terrified if it would ever end.
It doesn't take a long-winded analysis to realise just how all over the place ARTPOP is, but that's where its power stems from. Born This Way holds its place as one of the key pop albums of its decade because of how completely fearless it is in its execution and vision, with Gaga taking inspiration from so many different things and meshing them into something that shouldn't work but does. ARTPOP is the same but just way more unhinged, however it's got that same adventurous spirit and most importantly, Gaga is still operating on that same songwriting high that she wrote Born This Way on. When she's at her best, Gaga brings together the kind of hooks pop dreams are made of with mad ideas no one else could think of. Take "Venus", which is an absolutely ridiculous song: the stop-start rhythm with its punctuating title drops which range in tone from ecstatic to utterly bored, the ludicrous lyrics that move from "let's blast off into a new dimension - IN YOUR BEDROOM (... Venus!)" to the middle-eight where she lists off the solar system one-by-one like the planets are her groupies and where she counters her own brattishly stressed "ur-ANUS" with a histrionically shrieked "don't you know my ass is famous?!", and the sheer 70s b-movie glam space opera histrionics at all. And yet, not only it's an instantly powerful hook after another but it has two obvious choruses and both could be the shining moment of a hit song in its own right. It's stupid, but it's completely irresistable and a really wonky version of pop heaven.
ARTPOP makes an art out of throwing something unexpected and baffling into the mix and creating something of a landmark through it. It's in the gloriously ugly bass fills that steal the chorus of "Sexxx Dreams" (and its instantly iconic, endlessly quotable spoken word bridge), the sudden mosh pit ending to the otherwise impeccably slick and suave "G.U.Y" that turns an artist tag shoutout into a album highlight, or the fact that "Fashion!" features both David Guetta and Will.i.am in co-production duties and yet Gaga has such a tight control over them that the song is a glacially smooth, wondrously decadent French disco jam rather than the horror you'd expect from such a duo. The album's production drills this down, full of weird quirks of its own from raunchy distortions and split-second breakdowns to playing around with volume to a disorienting degree. It's every bit as hi-fi and hyper-produced as you'd expect from the new album of a global pop superstar, but where the odd element you'd expect to be there have been replaced by malfunctioning synthesizers and traditionally unattractive sampler choices. It does actually serve the songs too: the chaos is a creative force, a cavalcade of synthesizers and programmed elements all clashing into noisy layers that Gaga channels into a frantic, manic energy for her pop powerhouse songs. The production of ARTPOP is a wondrous thing in all its excessive obnoxiousness, because it matches the excess of the songs. It's big, maximalist pop but closer to auteur in its execution.
The best way to prove that the jumbled nature works for the album's advantage is that the song which lacks of all of it is also the worst on the record, i.e. the piano ballad "Dope". While there are other songs with questionable antics, they pull through by compensating elsewhere: e.g. you can just about ignore R. Kelly's presence on "Do What U Want" because everything else about the song is a gloriously huge pop mammoth breaking down china shop walls, and while "Jewels 'n' Drugs" is perhaps a slightly misjudged attempt to slip into mainstream rap by way of creating what sounds like an AI designed the most stereotypical rap song you could think of, every single person who appears in it is so full of charisma that they salvage the song with their presence. But "Dope" is a bad, clichéd metaphor ("your love's a bigger drug than the actual drugs, okay") and it's a dull, fake-earnest song that goes for histrionics over emotion. Gaga has done piano ballads elsewhere and they are all far better, and if she wanted to soothen the album's wall-scaling energy down with it, she demonstrates it perfectly well elsewhere on record that she doesn't need to remove everything for that. The already mentioned "Fashion!" is a frictionlessly gliding groove that's simply stylish as all heck without going towards anything outrageous, and the title track is an actual masterpiece - a hypnotic half-siren song, half-dance anthem full of ethereal atmosphere, over which Gaga lays one of her best arrangements and melodies and which culminates in a genuinely triumphant middle-eight where she lays down everything she meant with the "artpop" concept and drives it across so clearly with her performance that even the listener gets it. Some days I legitimately consider it as Gaga's outright best song.
Whether ARTPOP works as an album is another thing. It's one wild ride of a tune after another, but at 15 songs is absolutely way too much of it. It's practically exhausting towards its final segments, and whether it's because of that or the songs themselves, the latter third just doesn't carry the same excitement anymore. "Dope" is what it is, "Mary Jane Holland" is a lesser version of the mid-tempo jams of Born This Way and even though "Gypsy" is as classic and "normal" of a pop song as you can find here and Gaga sounds genuinely earnest in her love for her fans in it, it lacks the pizzazz and sounds too plain for its surrounding elements. It's enough to halt the high you were riding and if it weren't for "Applause" at the end, the final part of the album would be a completely disappointing slide to a quiet fizzle. On its own "Applause" still isn't so much of a standout; when it was first released, it came across as a disappointing first taste of the new era following the footsteps of Born This Way. But as a closer to the album, it makes so much more sense because it's less of a stand-alone song and closer to a summation of all the album's themes from concepts to production, all the way to closing both the song and the album as a whole by spelling out the album's name for no particular reason. It's the grand finale, the appropriate bow for applause. It just about saves the album from completely falling off the rails as it ends, even if I'd much rather just have a shorter but stronger record.
To some extent, the end of the album also marked a curtain call for Gaga. ARTPOP was a commercial success (though arguably because of the strength of her previous albums) but in terms of public consciousness and general consensus now, it flopped - its singles run was full of cancellations, last-minute replacement choices and aborted videos and its campaign was a messy string of Gaga jumping from one idea to the next, and they shot the album's chances of ever regaining a real foothold or a hit. Following this, her own private demons made her resent some of the choices she had taken and the public largely wrote her off as a desperate attention seeker following some of the aftermath from the first two points. Gaga herself would move away from the pop world as much as possible following ARTPOP, by sinking time into side projects and acting and eventually emerging with a whole new sound for the eventual follow-up record. You listen to the album and watch some of the era-specific videos and you sort of understand why, because it is such an inherently disorganised selection of songs and concepts and with every televised performance, Gaga is dangerously close to tripping the fine balance between serving iconic moments and trying too hard, the line which she used to be able to dance around carefully. But listening to the album, it also feels like it never got a chance to truly show its worth because there's so many things here that are so compelling and exciting, and so very thoroughly Gaga - they just got buried in the process. ARTPOP, flawed as it is, is one of my favourite things Gaga has released, even if it took me a long time to get any kind of clear footing with it. Within its sleeves is proof of Gaga's talent, but it also comes with a big asterisk at the end of the sentence. It's the pop version of a tortured artist splashing colours on a canvas and eventually throwing the entire canvas on the floor, manically explaining that the whole room the canvas is in is part of the art piece after all. During ARTPOP's best moments, Gaga manages to be viciously convincing about those ideas being perfectly on-point.
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