ARTPOP Debate: Is ARTPOP Gaga's best album?

[Born Brave 2,072]

Production wise yes.. Lyrically it doesn't match TFM or BTW but the production is so much better on ARTPOP and to me that makes or breaks an album... so yes.. I think it's her best album although it doesn't have the massive success that many thought it would have.

[TonzaPOP123 142]

Music is an art form. So ARTPOP is an art product too. Do not care what other people say, you can say that ARTPOP is your favourite album if you want to. There's no facts about what good music is, it's all up to you. You decide what you like. End of the war. Bye :ARTPOP:

[Antidote 95]

It's her worst album for me. It's still a nice album tho, just not my personal style.

I love Gaga's dark pop songs and I miss them so much.

Also the lyrics on ARTPOP are disappointing, can't compare them at all to the BTW ones.

There are a lot of songs I used to skip all the time (Donatella, Fashion!, MANiCURE, Dope), and now I don't listen to it at all (for months now). I listen to TFM and BTW again.

The music has no longevity for me and the quality doesn't live up to the albums before

[Addy Ezzie 2]

It's a tie between ARTPOP and Born This Way, although both are very different and not really comparable. 

I love every single song on ARTPOP, they're all catchy and even though at first the album sounds a bit "light" and fun, it's much deeper than that and that's what makes it amazing. 

[TheFamousLM 635]

It's not my favorite but it's a great album tho. 

In order to be perfect there are two or three songs I would replace or delete: Swine, Jewels N Drugs and maybe Aura. 

The problem with its "low" commercial performance has to do with the singles and the promotion. Gaga should have released four or five singles already but she just released three. The first two singles were well chosen but G.U.Y. clearly didn't have too much potential (although I love the song).

[monsterdreams 1,529]

No, but I don't think it has any filler (like most of The Fame)

So I will put it third:

BTW

TFM

AP

TF

[Miel 15,009]

I'm far from ARTPOP's biggest fan, but in its defense, I don't think it doesn't have a theme. I think what Gaga was going for was more a general statement than an actual, papered out theme.
 
Here's some things that I wrote out about what I think ARTPOP is (because I'm too lazy to retype them all off the top of my head lol).
 

To me, I feel like Gaga created ARTPOP as an encompassing device, to be interpreted and reinterpreted by any individual, with every interpretation as right and as wrong as the other, including Gaga's (La mort de l'auteur, I guess).

She said somewhere in some artRave show that ARTPOP is that thing that hasn't been created yet, the thing that we've yet to amalgamate and interpret for ourselves, and that it literally "could mean anything". ARTPOP in the context of the album is used as a metaphorical device (of duality) to represent her life; ARTPOP in the context of the general world could literally mean anything.

Whoo, I'm so glad this is stickied! This is a great topic :)

I think ARTPOP, as a collective entity, is a transformative force that started as a mere idea. I like to think of ARTPOP (the song) as the starting point of the idea of ARTPOP as a whole. I see the song itself as ARTPOP the idea, the concept- the skeleton to the flesh that Gaga lived on in performance and with the rest of the album.

The placement of the song right in the middle of the album is important, emphasizing it as the center and core of the whole journet that is ARTPOP the album. In my opinion, Gaga uses the song and concept of ARTPOP concurrently as both a subject and a metaphor.

Superficially, I think the song is about her choice to be wholly free from the constraints of societal and media impositions, that all boundaries are merely conventions, intangible limits to her art and her intellectual work.

I'm on summer vacation now, awaiting college in a few months. In the meantime, I don't really have much to do. I'm job searching, working up the courage to learn how to drive, and... uh, writing essays. To be completely honest this is pure brain vomit. I'm not even saying it's right, either, just an idea I had in my head.

Hope you like it, if you read it at all

----


{this is just me supporting my own interpretation of the main theme, or one of the main themes, of Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP}

{where I look way too much into things, ramble a lot, and try to use quantum physics a--logies to try and explain something that was seen on the same night Miley Cyrus left Hannah Montana in the dust}

â€â€-

 

One of the things that’s been rattling inside my head the last few days has been the theme of Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP album. It’s been a bit of the talk both within the fandom and outside, particularly anger and confusion over the general nebulous theme(s) of ARTPOP (“if ARTPOP even has a theme at all lolâ€).

In comparison to Gaga’s previous albums, it definitely feels nebulous, at least superficially. See:

The Fame - both a glamorization and a subtle satire about the materialistic journey towards the gaining of fame, while also a canvas for Gaga’s own philosophical recontextualization and redefinition of ‘the fame’

The Fame Monster - probably the most ‘thematic’ album, detailing per song an individual fear (‘monster’) that generally ties back into the idea of ‘the fame’ - generally seen as the other side to The Fame’s coin

Born This Way - a bit more varying in its themes, but still generally based around the idea of acceptance, not just of others but also of self, including the fight that happens along the way

ARTPOP - anything? possibilities? ???

Let’s go back to Gaga’s initial hintings of ARTPOP, during Born This Way:
- “a hybrid can withstand these things / my heart can beat with bricks and strings / my ARTPOP could mean anythingâ€
- “ARTPOP is about possibilitiesâ€

These tweets, the first complete surfacing of ARTPOP, were released in the summer of 2012, while Gaga was touring the world for her Born This Way Ball tour. What I inferred from these tweets back then wasn’t all that much- just a possible discrepancy between ‘art’ and ‘pop’, and possible emphasis of bringing them together. It didn’t seem like much, and I didn’t expect all that much until later, considering that this was her first public acknowledging of ARTPOP as a new entity.

It wasn’t until around August when things started falling into place, both as theories back then and in hindsight now.

The first big clue was her dying her hair brunette. We’ve gotten only a few glimpses of her as a brunette post-2008, not counting the black highlight variations from 2011, so this would be the first time in a long time we would have a consistent dark haired Gaga. In any other given situation outside of the realm of Lady Gaga, it wouldn’t matter so much as her changing her hair to suit herself- but, going by general precedence in the realm of Lady Gaga, it definitely meant something.

Around the time she dyed her hair to a newly ‘Vuitton Brown’, she introduced plain blonde for the first time at the Born This Way Ball. In response to a pretty massive desire of her performing on stage as a brunette, she responded something about only being blonde on stage (a source would be nice for this, as I’m going generally by memory… LM.com post, maybe?). And that’s exactly what happened- no matter what variation of blonde she wore on stage, the brunette was kept solely in offstage and in candids.

This was the first possible indication of the theme of duality.

While we’re on the topic of Born This Way, some things I want to mention that I think definitely were a progenitor to ARTPOP’s theme of duality:
- that one thing Gaga said over and over during Born This Way, something about her “living between reality and fantasy at all timesâ€- didn’t she restate this recently, in a manner of “living between art and pop at all timesâ€?
- Marry the Night’s theme of the collision between reality as it is perceived superficially, and reality as it is perceived through the creation of fantasy via the power of retrospect
- the general intense and laborious nature of the Born This Way Ball- the narrative structure, the architectural design, and overall physicality of it as a collective entity definitely brought out the idea (presented in Applause) of the “backstage and behind the scenes being part of the artâ€

It definitely seemed that everything up until the VMA’s performance of Applause, not counting the second blackout*, was all a culmination in ARTPOP’s themes of duality.

For a while, Applause seemed even more nebulous and all over the place than what many see as ARTPOP now. The first promo images, while exciting and objectively very very beautiful, added nothing except confusion (though, that was probably an intentional form to gain excitement among the masses). I thought, as time went on things would begin to fall in place. In contrast, things got even wonkier.

First the black hair then the Pierrot makeup then the Venus hair? And what’s all this with the septum piercing? Bringing in the video itself, my interpretation of ARTPOP was all over the place.

Nothing felt like a duality anymore because there was just so much more than two general opposing forces. It wasn’t until the VMA’s performance where things seemed to come together a bit more clearly.

The performance itself definitely had a strong undertone of duality**, but in a way I personally didn’t think of up until then. When I thought of duality in the context of pre-ARTPOP Gaga, I thought of the hair, of art and pop, of fantasy and reality. The problem is, I didn’t think of them all collectively- the performance brought them all together generally through the opposing forces of what constitutes as art or as an artist, on stage and off.

I’m gonna use an a--logy probably isn’t the closest to narrative a--lysis but is what I understand in my head. Think of the general Schrodinger theory/quantum superposition principle. It was initially believed that an electron surrounded a nucleus in a fixed position, be it in a circle or some other kind of rotatory. Quantum superposition principles state instead that the electron is actually inhabiting all possible states at once, and is only in a static configuration when it is seen or observed at a given and linear point in time.***

Ever since her debut, Gaga’s been barraged with questions about the genuinity of her actions and her art. She’s mentioned that she’s the same person on the stage as she is off, that she considers her life as a continuous performance- and yet, people still question her. I think this performance is her answer to all that.

To Gaga, her art to her is similar to how an electron is perceived both in the context of the superpositional and of the originally perceived- art, to Gaga, is all encompassing and whole, while to others it is a mere moment, solely temporal.

Gaga has always redefined and recontextualized, for herself, what it means to be an artist. At the core, we all know she’s human- she gets hurt, she gets emotional, she reacts in forms that aren’t always what we consider rational or professional. And yet, sometimes she’s not human, going by what she considers herself- she’s an alien, she’s a woman, she’s a man, she’s a mermaid, she’s a goddamn cyborg walking across the country to find her love, she’s an omniscient computer entity bent on creating her own narrative dystopia, and sometimes she’s an octopus. The odd thing is, no matter if she creates another persona less than human, more than human, or not human at all, it’s all just an amalgamated and extended metaphor to emphasize that fact that she is human.

In the VMA’s performance, she doesn’t just recontextualize herself as an extended metaphor for what she perceives as self- she recontextualizes the situation and fourth-person perspective of the stage as an extended metaphor for what she perceives as the art. As what was created in the backstage of the Born This Way Ball, is recreated onstage for ARTPOP.

But even then, that’s merely the metaphor. The interesting thing about ARTPOP, as a collective item, is that it utilizes the general idea of the metaphor both as the metaphor and as the subject itself.
As is per the general narrative, Gaga herself is the one stating the meaning of ARTPOP through the album. And yet, at the same time, it’s almost as if she doesn’t claim the general concept of ARTPOP as her own, and is instead utilizing it as a metaphor to explain her own life story. It’s almost as if she’s using a concept she created on her own as a device to tell her own story.


Back to the superposition a--logy, I guess it can be applicable not just to Gaga, but to everybody in general. The concept of ARTPOP may be something Gaga created and interpreted herself, but not something she claims solely as her own anymore. It exists because she says it can, because we not just individually but also collectively choose to let it be created.

Interpretation created ARTPOP as much as ARTPOP now creates interpretation. It all boils down back to square one, that ARTPOP could mean anything.

â€â€

*The second blackout being Gaga’s period of healing after she broke her up. I personally don’t relate and contextualize this period up into interpretation of the canon of Gaga unless it has otherwise been explicitly related to a work done by Gaga (for example, the genesis of I Wanna Be With You/Dope, or the general recording process of ARTPOP). This was a personal time for her to deal with her struggles and get back on her feet, so I’ll leave it at that.

**All considering the intention of the performance she gave to us. I know there was a different performance planned, but since we don’t have complete knowledge of how that was to be, I’ll leave that out to avoid confusion. That said, I want to know more, because I feel like it’d add immensely to the discussion.

***If I’m inaccurate, please tell me so and I will fix. If it is beyond fixing, I’ll just leave it to the point instead.

----

tl;dr

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeu2tI-tqvs

[alexanderhp 0]

Personally I think it's her best - Every song offers something unique and different, and I don't get tired of listening to them... 

[Quark 7,098]

1. Because it's not a theme if she decided to go abstract, that's a theme but she hasn't, it's just random pop music thrown on an album.

2. Oh dear

3. Why are you picking out random tracks when I said the album is dated it's self. Aura is fresh (despite the horrific watering down it faced from the demo) but the album as a whole is dated.

4. That makes no sense but ok :ARTPOP:

5. I'm not trying to convince you, you made a thread asking if ARTPOP is Gaga's best album and for reasons, I answered with my reasons as to why for me it's not. The album is mediocre, in fact it's pretty bad. If I wasn't a gaga fan already, I would probably dislike it.

1. You not liking something does not mean that something doesn't have a theme.

2. I guess you have nothing else to say.

3. You also specifically picked Get Lucky. Plus do you seriously think songs like DWUW, ARTPOP, Dope, MJH, ect. Sound dated?

4. It made sense to me

5. Yes I understand. But since this is a debate, and I don't agree with you that the album is terrible, I am giving you my points as to why it isn't terrible.

[Optimus 298]

Nope.TFM is

[CookieHWilson 685]

I think it is, it's at least neck-and-neck with Born This Way. It might not be as sonically groundbreaking as BTW was, but I think the composition and the album itself are pure Gaga. BTW had a one-time only aesthetic of Springsteen, Houston, and Justice (amongst others) that worked beautifully for one album, but cannot be done again, lest she risk repeating herself.

 

But with ARTPOP, Gaga takes those myriad elements that make her such a unique presence in the pop scene (indelible hooks, eccentric genre mash-ups, s-xy and impressive vocals, meticulously layered production) and kicks it up a notch or three by showing admirable restraint in not making each track so self-consciously "hooky" and allowing the melodies, particularly in the verses, to breathe a bit and take time to form. She imbues the entire album with a sound that is both sci-fi futuristic and endearingly retro (another calling card of hers). The songs are airtight, deceptively simple, and they don't meander or overstay their welcome. The themes of ownership and artistic freedom might be one that she has touched on before, but not with this much clarity or honesty. This isn't about Gaga singing about a fame that she has yet to achieve, or the fears she's encountered on the way up. And it's not about Gaga singing to us about us. It's about Gaga singing to us about Gaga.

[HORRORHOLIC 105]

I still think The Fame Monster is her best album!!!

[Benji 20,113]

1. You not liking something does not mean that something doesn't have a theme.

2. I guess you have nothing else to say.

3. You also specifically picked Get Lucky. Plus do you seriously think songs like DWUW, ARTPOP, Dope, MJH, ect. Sound dated?

4. It made sense to me

5. Yes I understand. But since this is a debate, and I don't agree with you that the album is terrible, I am giving you my points as to why it isn't terrible.

 

Ok I'm done with this number thing.

 

You thinking there is a theme, doesn't mean there is one. I don't think there is on the album and that's my opinion, one that I've built up from listening to the album and actually listening to Gaga. I've made it very clear what I think and you've also made it clear what you think, I've stated multiple times that even though I've pointed out what it lacks in my opinion, I do also like the album for what it is.

 

Now can we move on from this because I'm sure you feel like me and feel like we've spent enough time discussing this now because it's just turning into "you said, I said, you said".. we're going around in circles because we're both adamant about different things!

 

Let's let it go

[bigmac 0]

There really isnt a bad song on it but I HATE the concept. WTF is an "ARTPOP". I wish the album had a different title and was marketed better but the songs are outstanding, in my view.

[alienmike 0]

no.