People never think of Gaga as cute. She’s been otherworldly strange, or full-on to the point of threat, or, later on, rocking her pitch-perfect untouchable widescreen diva pose. She’s always moved fast and kept her distance. But actual Gaga is cute. Especially now, parallel acting career long established, loved up long-term (to a successful tech bro, no less) and not far off her fortieth year. I suspect that the series of — extremely cute — live-to-camera promo pieces she just taped with Bowen Yang for her Saturday Night Live hosting gig this weekend are some of the truest-to-life reveals of Lady Gaga we’ve seen. So: a lighter touch than the casuals realise, particularly for a performer so drenched in the artistry of the overblown.
Mayhem is Lady Gaga’s sixth proper solo record and her first since Chromatica half a decade ago. But if you add in the pair of swing pop collaborations with Tony Bennett (the first a lot better than the second) and four movie-related releases with her name attached (of similar steeply varying quality) this turns out to be her twelfth release since she first broke through, fully formed, back in 2008.
Much of Mayhem sounds — deliberately and self-consciously — far closer to the edgy early material that catapulted her to genre-redefining global icon status, than to anything she’s done lately. No question, from its first moments, Mayhem is both a satisfying return to form and also an unabashed revisiting of stylistic and thematic roots, even linguistic tropes and tics.
The single ‘Abracadabra’ heralded this early doors, brazenly revisiting that, “Ooo la la, ooo gaga” type of cool-sounding (dancing on the edge of ridicule) word salad that she mastered back on her debut. The song lurches from big chorus melodies to breakdowns that glitch the whole track in chewily modern fashion. Momentarily, at first, I didn’t much care for ‘Abracadabra’ when it appeared as a single. Perhaps this usefully lowered my expectations. I wasn’t listening properly and reacted along the lines of, “Uh, it’s Gaga-by-numbers”. But here, high up the record, placed immediately after slower opening track ‘Disease’, it’s banging. Ha, even the word “disease” is a neat, time travelling nod to her younger self.
‘Perfect Celebrity’ lays out themes, tackling the multi-layered challenges of being a mythologised quasi-fictional public figure, versus being the real person behind that figure. This torturous deal with the devil has been explored in so much detail lately by a newer generation of (especially young women) songwriters, Gaga isn’t singing anything remotely new – Yet to be fair, she already mined the topic to death herself on Born This Way in 2011.
The collaboration with Gesaffelstein, ‘Killah’ is a very solid Sign O The Times-era Prince jam, both musically and lyrically. Actually, the verse melodies feel partly cribbed from that specific song, though that’s not a criticism — it’s an absolute belter. In the outro, when the tempo doubles, it is Berlin techno basement great. This leads into the album’s super-fun disco mid-section, with ‘Zombieboy’ serving fluid bass guitar, chanted choruses and too brief synth solos channelling Chic via prime Dua Lipa, before ‘LoveDrug’, a swooping mid-paced handbag club anthem.
Next, a downtempo swerve also works beautifully: ‘How Bad Do U Want Me’ leans hard in a Taylor Swift acerbic storytelling ballad direction, filtered through a sonic palette of early 80s synth pop in the vein of Yazoo. The writing here is very Taylor indeed. Identical inflections. Vocally, it even sounds like Swift may be sneakily present on backing vocals. I can’t find her named as a songwriter, though funnily enough Gaga’s fiancée Michael Polansky has a credit, which has been a Swift anonymisation trick in the past. Hmm, will we maybe get a ‘Girl So Confusing’ style remix reveal in coming months?
We’re already down the back straight and the quality has rarely dipped, though the end is a little weaker.
A tribute to her man and to lasting love, the poetic-but-stodgy minor chord power ballad ‘Blade Of Grass’ could have concluded Mayhem, in a similar emotional way to how Charli XCX could’ve concluded (the first version of) Brat with ‘I Think About It All The Time’. Both are reflections of domesticity and long-term commitment, versus the rush of the ongoing adventure. Gaga recently told the BBC that Polansky proposed to her with a ring of hand-woven blades of grass, so she’s had them set into resin to be worn as jewellery, though (of course) she also sports a head-turning million dollar diamond alongside it. Musically, ‘Blade Of Grass’ sounds curiously pompous and dark for what ought to be a singular moment exploring romantic commitment.
It’s a bit of a misfire. In Charli’s case there was a precise artistic reason to turn her back on the schmultz and close out her record with the dark hedonism of ‘365’. Here, in Gaga’s case, the Mayhem ending feels like a commercial decision without artistry, which therefore falls flat compared to the whole. Last year, amidst some career turmoil (I’m thinking of the box office disaster of Joker: Folie à Deux, which she starred in and soundtracked with not one but two ill-fated companion albums) Gaga still managed an enormous global number one smash hit (a multi-billion streaming behemoth) collaborating with Bruno Mars on ‘Die With A Smile’. This artificial mid-paced ballad sort of soars, but never engages actual emotion. It’s this song that finishes the album. In future, I’ll stop listening two tracks earlier.
To abuse a cheesy football metaphor: on Mayhem, I’d say Lady Gaga has lost a yard of pace, but rebuilt her game to manage it effectively. None of this stuff is quite so impactful as the visceral breakout of ‘Poker Face’, ‘Bad Romance’ or watching Gaga and Beyoncé smash up the ‘Telephone’ video. But it could never be, when Gaga herself moved those goalposts, not to mention constructed her breakthrough out of young discomfort and alienation. That’s the long gone element that can’t be reclaimed by a wealthy, storied superstar. So of course, at times it all gets too mainstream rock, but that’s inevitable. To counter that, she’s in better voice than ever.
This is a horrible comparison and unfair: but Mayhem reminds me of the early 2000s when U2 suddenly remembered they were allowed to sound like U2. In their case it was awful. In Gaga’s case, this music is mostly fucking boss. Mayhem will – I think, I hope – do really well, because of the consistent quality of the bops – a pile of bona fide hits and memorable moments.
We needed Lady Gaga this good, honestly, in the post-Brat era. The space was right there. The buttoned up, even haughty formalism; the tidy cosplay of ‘classy diva’ Gaga is a look she can always successfully pull off. She’ll surely go back there whenever she fancies, right through her middle age. However it did leave a gap of absent grit and chaos. Let’s not forget this is an artist who named her fans “monsters”, who inspired something of the moral majority handwringing of a late 80s Madonna, even a Marilyn Manson, before we all got comfortable with her. Back in her formative blast zone era, nobody made a mess like Lady Gaga – not Britney, not Kesha, not anyone.
So now, gazing back through time at all that destroyed garden furniture and spattered sparkle and those escaped wild beasts, from the liberated horror-show viewing platform of the mid 20s, more than any other artist, Lady Gaga feels like true connective tissue between Madonna’s 90s and Brat’s 20s.
Personally, I’ll always love filthy, queer, in your face (and yes, cute) outsider Gaga more than equine ballgown Hollywood Queen Gaga. Now, what used to feel transgressive may feel closer to camp, yet this new old Lady Gaga also has a lighter, calmer touch that we’ve missed — and it does her a solid. On form, Gaga can be as fiercely punk couture queer as Chappell, as innovative a club diva as Charli and as archly manipulative of the male gaze as Sabrina, all in one strut. On Mayhem, she almost, almost achieves it.
