Lady Gaga reflects on her 2016 album, Joanne, and how it’s different from MAYHEM

[TheARTPOPball 271]

Idc what anyone says, joanne will always remain one of my favorites, and IMO felt more “Gaga” than Chromatica. It was a huge bold move to release an album like that, when she did, and how she did it. With gaga, always expect the unexpected, and i don't think there was a single fan that wasn't shocked and shooken when we got that album cover and had our first listen through the album. And that to me, IS the Gaga experience, and a big part of her artistic identity. Thats what makes her such a mass appealing, celebrated virtuoso

And those dropping the phrase “dead aunt” in a negative connotation really gives me an off putting disrespectful vibe. Generational trauma is very very real, and I've watched the same exact thing happen to my father over the years , that happened to her’s and how that affected my own upbringing. Its one thing to not relate but the lack of empathy and understanding…. 

 

Edited 19 hours ago by TheARTPOPball

[Starmie25 16,298]

  On 3/18/2025 at 10:10 AM, medicub said:

Joan Wayne

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[Starmie25 16,298]

  19 hours ago, TheARTPOPball said:

And those dropping the phrase “dead aunt” in a negative connotation really gives me an off putting disrespectful vibe. Generational trauma is very very real, and I've watched the same exact thing happen to my father over the years , that happened to her’s and how that affected my own upbringing. Its one thing to not relate but the lack of empathy and understanding…. 

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ALL OF THIS. 

The fact she's probably seen those types of remarks about her late aunt is appaling tbh.

[Ziggy 11,082]

  On 3/18/2025 at 5:33 AM, lastpopicon said:

I feel like she was talking how people perceived her before Joanne, because she says before: "it’s the most stripped-away that people feel that they’ve ever seen me", that's how I interpreted it at least, but from an artistic standpoint, yeah, it was an "abrupt" departure from her previous works. I feel like Joanne is her most personal album, maybe that's the more correct description.

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the most stripped away people *feel* they've seen her. that's different than how she sees it and the reality of the thing. I mean, lbr, she is a theater kid. She's eccentric. She's big. She grew up in one of the biggest cities on earth in one of its busiest places. Parts of Joanne are genuine, sure. But I think she's acknowledging that the very effort to strip away yourself to "be yourself" isn't necessarily authentic or real and the pursuit of that is dismissing parts of yourself that exist in tandem with these quieter parts. I do think she was sincere making it, but I also think she was doing what she was saying she was doing which was trying to throw everything away to "find herself" when "finding yourself" shouldn't require you to dismiss yourself.

The best moments of Joanne are the ones most genuine to the artistry we know her to possess, not the ones she donned to access a topic. Just Another Day being one such example and Sinner's Prayer and PI being others. That doesn't mean the album is bad, but I do think it's fair and fine to say it was, in fact, another hat for her, pun intended.

Edited 19 hours ago by Ziggy

[Ziggy 11,082]

  On 3/18/2025 at 10:21 AM, bim said:

It’s interesting to hear her reflect on Joanne and say she felt most distant from herself. One of the shows I went to she was talking (and teary) about how grateful she was for all she had and at times she wishes she never got famous. While it sounded authentic and is most definitely true to a degree, I feel the most genuine form of her actually does love all she has and this actually was her goal all along and she loves the spotlight and being on stage. Now that she’s finding how to balance this in a healthy way and be her own boss and create what she wants to and is surrounded by people she feels inspired and held by, it’s like she’s realizing this is always who she’s been meant to be. 
 

I could listen to her and all of us talk about her artistry endlessly. She’s such a fascinating human. To be alive to witness all of this is the greatest gift. 

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Well yeah ofc she wants it and im glad she is owning that. You cant be in the position she's in without wanting fame. You can't. It didn't just fall in her lap. She busted her ass for THAT. She wanted to be a STAR not just a musician.

[Spanish Eyes 2,270]

Every step in her artistic journey has been authentic because it's what she needed at the time. I love Joanne. Million Reasons is one of my favorite Gaga songs ever.

[Nycboy 1,027]

I think she’s finally at a place where she’s making music for music’s sake, following her creative impulses, and just being herself rather than making an album to prove something to the world about who she can be. 

Joanne was “You think I took my gimmicks too far with ARTPOP, so I’m going to show you that I can strip it all back and that I’m a great singer/songwriter at heart, without the showiness of Gaga. I am not all style over substance.”

Chromatica was “You think I can’t make dance music anymore? Well I’m back to prove that I can, although I want to show you that I don’t always need to let my freak flag fly like I used to. I’m still a bit nervous about how I alienated listeners during ARTPOP and so I’m holding myself back so I don’t alienate you again. I can be a typical pop star.”

Mayhem is like “I made peace with who I am, I am Lady f****ng Gaga, I am a legend, and I am free. I have my own distinct sound and artistry and references, and I’m proud to showcase them again after over a decade of editing myself down to be someone else or to prove something.”

TF, TFM, BTW, ARTPOP and Mayhem feel so genuinely Gaga. Joanne and Chromatica feel like Gaga slipping into a character, purposely hiding herself within the era. 

It’s insane to me that a lot of her decisions to this day can still be traced back to how the public received ARTPOP!

 

[Windowlicker 3,301]

  20 hours ago, eifulien said:

With the risk of coming across as very rude, I'm afraid that a significant part of our fandom doesn't have very good reading comprehension skills. We as people are complicated and full of contradiction, Gaga isn't an exception to this and she is also very informed in her artistic expression. So she always has multiple layers to her and her music, add the trauma that has been haunting her and it gets difficult but not impossible to see what she means when she looks back on her albums in retrospective.

In this quote she does not dismiss Joanne as bad or inauthentic. She actually reaffirms it as a necessary step on her journey to reclaim her confidence with MAYHEM. Please, stop projecting onto her. It's completely unnecessary to trash talk ANY of her albums. It started in 2019 when she tweeted jokingly that she didn't remember ARTPOP and so many people were like "yeah, we shouldn't either, it sucks", etc. Now Joanne and Chromatica are being targeted the same way. Let's just cut it. We have our preferences but none of her albums are actually bad, nor are they inauthentic. ARTPOP, Joanne and Chromatica come from a very painful experience for her and it's actually fascinating to witness how she worked with it and made sense of it. What we are living through right now is such a lovely full circle moment.

Lady Gaga as an artist that started as this fierce young genius artist and made The Fame, The Fame Monster & Born This Way had to lose herself with ARTPOP, start searching for a new path back to family and her roots with Joanne, come to terms with her imperfections, her trauma, mental health issues and the disadvantages of her own stardom on Chromatica, to end up gathering all of those broken pieces that she had burst into, mend them by truly loving and accepting herself, reclaim her role in her own artistic expression and become proud of herself with MAYHEM. It's amazing. Let's celebrate that instead of tearing it all apart. 

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Great post. 

To me, Joanne and MAYHEM are two sides of the same coin when it comes to revisiting the pre-Fame days, but her mindset and goals while making Joanne were completely different, and thus the results of the two albums are different too. MAYHEM sounds like the album she's been trying to make for the last decade. A way to recapture her first interactions with music and the influences that inspired her to become "Lady Gaga" (like she did on Joanne), while revisiting the dance floor sounds of her earlier albums (like on Chromatica).

Joanne is Stefani while Chromatica is Gaga, and I truly think that's why they suffered a bit. These two sides of her were never meant to be separated like this. And that's why MAYHEM excels. It is her whole vision. It's alive in a way those other two albums aren't. She is just as much Stefani as she is Gaga, and that's something that took a while for her to accept about herself because she resented what being Gaga had done to her life. That doesn't mean Joanne or Chromatica are bad at all, but she's far more confident in being her entire self now, and it shows in everything she's doing!

[Cameltoe Chariot 14,972]

  19 hours ago, TheARTPOPball said:

And those dropping the phrase “dead aunt” in a negative connotation really gives me an off putting disrespectful vibe. Generational trauma is very very real, and I've watched the same exact thing happen to my father over the years , that happened to her’s and how that affected my own upbringing. Its one thing to not relate but the lack of empathy and understanding…. 

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Oof. Say it louder for the people in the back.

Any true fan of Gaga should know how much her Aunt Joanne means to her, and how interwoven she's been in Gaga's life from the very beginning.

Joanne Stefani Germanotta was an aspiring writer who died at 19 years old from Lupus. Joanne was her father's best friend and he never fully recovered from her death. He even named his daughter (STEFANI Angelina JOANNE Germanotta) and his restaurant after her. Her whole life she felt a part of her was meant to fulfill Joanne's dream of being a successful artist.

Gaga included one of her Aunt's poems in the album booklet for The Fame.

"The Manifesto of Little Monsters" that was recited in The Monster Ball tours ends with "When you're lonely, I'll be lonely too, And this is the fame. Love and art. 12-18 1974 Lady Gaga" - the date referenced being the day Joanne Germanotta passed away.

I could go on and on, but it truly grosses me out how fans and haters refer to Joanne as "the dead aunt album", or accuse her of mining her family's trauma for her own art, and it makes me sick to think Gaga has probably seen a lot of that commentary too.

[LADYGAGA10MONSTER 1,804]

  On 3/18/2025 at 7:02 AM, nATAH said:

i still really want to hear the record that happened before bloodpop, which isn't a dig at BP btw

i like Joanne but finding out he was brought in by the label to "popify" it makes me really curious about the before

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I honestly think mayhem is the closest we ever get to the OG LG5 because think about it a lot of the songs on the album kind of fit the vibes that were being portrayed before she started working with Mark Ronson because I know a lot when she was doing the American horror, story press, run, and interviewers with ask her about music she would say that she was exploring the art of darkness so that can tie back into mayhem with some songs like perfect celebrity, disease, abracadabra, and so on but then I think there were some rumors that it was also supposed to be fun inspired which if you look at zombieboy and Killah you get those funk vibes from those songs as well as some disco now I’m not saying that God I didn’t add more on to what mayhem is, but I would say the root of it was her wanting to go back and read what she wanted to do for OG LG5 

[pratz 1,347]

  On 3/18/2025 at 7:38 AM, hELXIG said:

The more time goes on the more it becomes clear that her whole career she was creating characters to find her strength (but they were all her still) and ARTPOP was like the absolute peak of her creative escape. She did say at the time (paraphrasing here) that she doesn't want to be one artist, she wants to be every artist. And then after ARTPOP she kinda crashed out and realised she was actually doing herself harm, so she went so far the other direction trying to get back to her roots as a Stefani, a simple, family oriented, musician, that she kind of lost her 'artist' self and felt she was 'erasing' parts of her. But then obviously that didn't serve her either. This must lead us to her breakdown before Chromatica when she didn't know who she was or what her purpose was or why she should even stick around, which is where we get Replay, 911, Alice, basically the whole album

And it seems like now she's finally in a place where she's learnt exactly who she is, all the different versions of her that live inside her, and she's happy, confident and comfortable. No wonder so many people are saying this is the healthiest we've seen her in years!

I am SO happy for her and I really hope this time it's for real  

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I love your explanation and yes, it does make a lot of sense!

[Anderson123 37,062]

Joanne is a great album that needed to happen at that time in her life, especially after ARTPOP. I appreciate it now for what it is but I very much prefer A Star Is Born soundtrack AND Harlequin. I think I love these two side projects more than Joanne because it feels more like she wanted to make it something but didn't quite get there or was afraid to. It does have some really great songs like John Wayne, Perfect Illusion, Sinner's Prayer and beautiful ballads Million Reasons and Angel Down but looking back at it, it's not an album I would miss listening to in months.

[nATAH 45,561]

  16 hours ago, LADYGAGA10MONSTER said:

I honestly think mayhem is the closest we ever get to the OG LG5 because think about it a lot of the songs on the album kind of fit the vibes that were being portrayed before she started working with Mark Ronson because I know a lot when she was doing the American horror, story press, run, and interviewers with ask her about music she would say that she was exploring the art of darkness so that can tie back into mayhem with some songs like perfect celebrity, disease, abracadabra, and so on but then I think there were some rumors that it was also supposed to be fun inspired which if you look at zombieboy and Killah you get those funk vibes from those songs as well as some disco now I’m not saying that God I didn’t add more on to what mayhem is, but I would say the root of it was her wanting to go back and read what she wanted to do for OG LG5 

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I'm talking more about the Joanne before bloodpop, she or mark or somebody talked about how Joanne used to be super folk or piano or whatever until the label introduced bloodpop

[LADYGAGA10MONSTER 1,804]

  15 hours ago, nATAH said:

I'm talking more about the Joanne before bloodpop, she or mark or somebody talked about how Joanne used to be super folk or piano or whatever until the label introduced bloodpop

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Oh sorry my bad 

[nATAH 45,561]

  15 hours ago, LADYGAGA10MONSTER said:

Oh sorry my bad 

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no worries!