Gaga returning to her roots

[TheARTPOPball 1,338]

I might be the odd one out in this but I don’t really feel like mayhem is a return to form in any way besides the abracadabra video.And even that still just kind of feels like a part of the bad romance>judas>*insert abracadabra* passing of the torch. Mayhem feels more like an evolution, or a tribute, like she gathered her favorite moments from her previous records and combined them. 
 

I still took her seriously as a pop star during Joanne, chromatica, and ARTPOP. I accepted her as a pop chameleon that can become anything she wants and will whenever she feels like it. And the remnants of the “old Gaga” still showed herself in different ways throughout the eras. Without any recency bias, I don’t think I would put mayhem in the same category as born this way and the fame monster. I found it kind of odd in a way that she promoted mayhem as “ this is MY sound” when she had spent the entire 2013-2024 years talking about her evolving and changing and kind of living the “ I am the master of many sounds” type persona. I view every album of Gaga’s as an individual piece of work that reflects her always changing perspectives and wherever she is at in life. 
 

I also really just don’t understand the obsession with comparing her every single album she puts out to the fame monster and born this way. I know we love that sound and that’s what most of us know her as, but if she were to continue down that path over and over it would become so overdone and I think she has said what she needed to say in that space and that there is a reason she decided to leave that sound behind for nearly 10 years. They are all complete albums. 

[imogen2133 368]

6 hours ago, Lextyr97 said:

Mayhem is Gaga going back to Gaga. Chromatica could’ve been a Dua album. Joanne is wildly inauthentic upon revisiting it and the era. I was expressing elsewhere how frustrating it was watching her in the dive bar talking about the album while we know what we know now. “My dad was so moved when he heard this record. Like he recovered something he was missing” (not at all a direct quote, just the gist), girl you’re a liar. Your dad didn’t give af. Gaga was in a dark place for so longggggg I’m so glad she’s out of it

Well I  wouldn't say Gaga's dad didn't care about the album and it didn't affect him emotionally we saw that clip in 5ft2 where he walks out of the room, but it is true that it didn't heal him in the way Gaga wanted and she was unsuccessful there. That comment is a bit dismissive though

[Future Lovers 7,371]

14 hours ago, imogen2133 said:

Why do you think that? I'm not saying I disagree persay just curious what is it about ARTPOP, Joanne and Chromatica that feel like detours from who Gaga is/was or less like Gaga overall?

ARTPOP felt like her trying to do what people who didn't listen to her thought a Lady Gaga album sounded like. Rather than the bizarre, strange, confronting sounds and visuals coming naturally, all of ARTPOP's strangeness felt intentional and planned. Nothing about it felt off the cuff or particularly authentic. For the first time, it felt like her actively trying to be weird and get people's attention from it rather than her just expressing herself or following a curiosity. 

In that same vein, Joanne was pure calculation. She and others can say whatever they want to about why it sounds the way it does and why the aesthetic she adopted during that era looked they way they looked, but it doesn't change that the core of it was an intentional image softening. ARTPOP went too far and turned people off from what had previously drew them in, so she moved to the opposite extreme and presented herself in a very easily digestible and accessible way. She was reaching out not to fans, but to casual listeners who had been off-put by ARTPOP. And to that end, it did work. But it again felt calculated. She was trying very hard to change the perception of herself, and as such presented herself in a way that felt very subdued and out of character. 

Chromatica was the inverse of ARTPOP. Whereas ARTPOP was her trying to make what people who didn't listen to her thought she sounded like, Chromatica was her trying to make the album that she thought her fans wanted to hear, whether that's what she wanted to make or not. It was an album that was built not around her desires, but fan service. The album is full of a lot of box ticking, and while she ticked some of those boxes well, at no point did it come across like she was really all that invested in it. 

I don't think these three projects were wastes at all. I think they each produced some good songs that I'm happy to have. But they all three represent Gaga being extremely conscious of herself and how she is perceived. What cemented her as an icon is the way in which she came by the spectacle so honestly. The Fame, The Fame Monster, and Born This Way felt very uninhibited and true to who Gaga showed us she was. None of it felt calculated or meticulous. MAYHEM was her return to that. 

[Future Lovers 7,371]

3 hours ago, imogen2133 said:

Well I  wouldn't say Gaga's dad didn't care about the album and it didn't affect him emotionally we saw that clip in 5ft2 where he walks out of the room, but it is true that it didn't heal him in the way Gaga wanted and she was unsuccessful there. That comment is a bit dismissive though

I wouldn't take anything in Five Foot Two as gospel. It is a promotional piece for her album and presents a very carefully constructed narrative to support how the album was presented. It's not more a truly factual discussion or exploration of how and why the album was made than any other carefully curated piece of promotional material in an album cycle.

The documentary shows us what she and her team wanted us to see, which was not necessarily the truth. That is pretty much the case for all of these celebrity documentaries, especially ones made with the intention of promoting a new release. 

Edited 5 hours ago by Future Lovers

[imogen2133 368]

15 minutes ago, Future Lovers said:

I wouldn't take anything in Five Foot Two as gospel. It is a promotional piece for her album and presents a very carefully constructed narrative to support how the album was presented. It's not more a truly factual discussion or exploration of how and why the album was made than any other carefully curated piece of promotional material in an album cycle.

The documentary shows us what she and her team wanted us to see, which was not necessarily the truth. That is pretty much the case for all of these celebrity documentaries, especially ones made with the intention of promoting a new release. 

This is true and I guess we can't say for sure either way if it affected her dad deeply or not but we do know that it wasn't successful in healing him like Gaga wanted since she said as much during the Chromatica era. I would say 5ft2 does contain some truth to who Gaga was at that time and what intentions were with making Joanne but at the same time it was likely very calculated and edited in a specific way like you said.

[RainOnGaga 771]

it depends on how you define "Gagaism"

[gagzus 20,618]

1 hour ago, Future Lovers said:

ARTPOP felt like her trying to do what people who didn't listen to her thought a Lady Gaga album sounded like. Rather than the bizarre, strange, confronting sounds and visuals coming naturally, all of ARTPOP's strangeness felt intentional and planned. Nothing about it felt off the cuff or particularly authentic. For the first time, it felt like her actively trying to be weird and get people's attention from it rather than her just expressing herself or following a curiosity. 

In that same vein, Joanne was pure calculation. She and others can say whatever they want to about why it sounds the way it does and why the aesthetic she adopted during that era looked they way they looked, but it doesn't change that the core of it was an intentional image softening. ARTPOP went too far and turned people off from what had previously drew them in, so she moved to the opposite extreme and presented herself in a very easily digestible and accessible way. She was reaching out not to fans, but to casual listeners who had been off-put by ARTPOP. And to that end, it did work. But it again felt calculated. She was trying very hard to change the perception of herself, and as such presented herself in a way that felt very subdued and out of character. 

Chromatica was the inverse of ARTPOP. Whereas ARTPOP was her trying to make what people who didn't listen to her thought she sounded like, Chromatica was her trying to make the album that she thought her fans wanted to hear, whether that's what she wanted to make or not. It was an album that was built not around her desires, but fan service. The album is full of a lot of box ticking, and while she ticked some of those boxes well, at no point did it come across like she was really all that invested in it. 

I don't think these three projects were wastes at all. I think they each produced some good songs that I'm happy to have. But they all three represent Gaga being extremely conscious of herself and how she is perceived. What cemented her as an icon is the way in which she came by the spectacle so honestly. The Fame, The Fame Monster, and Born This Way felt very uninhibited and true to who Gaga showed us she was. None of it felt calculated or meticulous. MAYHEM was her return to that. 

While I agree with a lot of this I think we often forget the nuances behind WHY all this stuff happened. Label and team interferences.

ARTPOP was such a disaster of an era and a mish mash of an album (although I enjoy it and think it brought a lot of great experimentation out of her) because Troy Carter was pushing for her to remain highly successful. Because her money was HIS money at the time. That’s why it sounds like it does, in the aftermath of the era on LM.com she outrightly told us (and in some interviews like the SXSW one) that it became about “just looking pretty and making dance music” for her label (presumably Troy). 

This can be seen in the way her appearance changed in 2012 — she focused on looking prettier and sexier, I even remember at the time that people around me who didn’t like her started commenting on how attractive she’d became. She also became visually similar to Lana Del Rey who was the “it” girl of the time online.
 

Also the shift you mentioned glean be seen in the extremely chaotic way in which the theme of the album changed, because she allowed us into her creative process (and has never done since) in real time, she announced songs that never got released and talked about themes that never got used in the end like “Disney princess in a rave” or “decay of the blonde superstar”.

She promised high hopes and expectations “this is the album of the millennium” or “this is my best album ever”. Which by the time the album actually arrived fans were already tired of it because it was all she would talk about online, at concert M&Gs and more. And even when the album came the single choices were tampered with, stuff was cancelled (apps, videos, concerts etc). And at this point because new artists were getting a shine that were — for lack of a better term — in her nachos, like Nicki Minaj who at the time was putting out dance music with catchy hooks whilst pulling weird looks (literally a copy of her formula).

Joanne and C2C were soft because Bobby’s job as her new manager formerly head of her marketing, was to rebuild her image after she became so overexposed and because she was open about her drug use, her process and everything was changing online with social media culture and what not they had to rebrand her to relatable.

Which I think she’s had a very hard time sustaining hence why now she doesn’t really interact with fans or the public at large at all — she no longer really uses social media unless she had a product to sell, she hasn’t been in LM.com in almost a decade properly, she doesn’t do M&Gs anymore, she doesn’t pick fans out of crowds — she’s now gone the Beyoncé route of a legacy act who seems untouchable again but in a more grounded way than she did when she was in her mid 20s.

Chromatica is a different story, she admitted she was heavily unwell mentally and wanted to make the album basically ballads and more stripped, but Bloodpop (presumably under label guidance) had to keep pulling her back to making dance music for it to be marketed as her “comeback album”. That’s also why I think the Boyz Noize stuff was scrapped, not because of the sound but because Gaga herself probably went “I do not want to make this” to him and her label at one point. Then luckily she had all of the pandemic to “come back” to herself and deal with stuff in private. 

Mayhem whilst musically is influenced by the “secret sauce” of her old albums, it’s a product of her finally finding where her image sits in pop culture, that’s why she said “this is my sound” she didn’t mean it in a literal sense she meant she understands what people think a Lady Gaga song is supposed to sound like from both the public and fans and what she knows she’s capable of.

Edited 3 hours ago by gagzus

[Ziggy 13,619]

16 hours ago, imogen2133 said:

Also for everyone here who has said Mayhem you have said so because it contains sounds from Gaga's previous albums which makes sense and also because it contains music from her influences (Prince, Michael Jackson, David Bowie etc) but I assume another reason people would say Mayhem is because people see lots of "Gagaisms" present that were also in her earlier work. So my question to people who have said Mayhem is what "Gagaisms" on Mayhem make it feel more like her previous work like TF, TFM and BTW and more like a Gaga album overall compared to ARTPOP, Joanne and Chromatica?

Mayhem is like the force awakens in that it’s a great place to ground ourselves but let’s be very real when we say it’s not some huge step artistically. It’s the necessary grounding to do the evolution of her art (hopefully). So in it being a return to form it’s bc it shifts Gaga and recalibrates her to her tastes and sounds and aesthetics. The Grammy performance being a perfect example of that where it’s hard, aggressive, unique, and has something very clear to say in its performance art—something she hasn’t done in well over a decade of performance imo.

[Ziggy 13,619]

2 hours ago, Future Lovers said:

ARTPOP felt like her trying to do what people who didn't listen to her thought a Lady Gaga album sounded like. Rather than the bizarre, strange, confronting sounds and visuals coming naturally, all of ARTPOP's strangeness felt intentional and planned. Nothing about it felt off the cuff or particularly authentic. For the first time, it felt like her actively trying to be weird and get people's attention from it rather than her just expressing herself or following a curiosity. 

In that same vein, Joanne was pure calculation. She and others can say whatever they want to about why it sounds the way it does and why the aesthetic she adopted during that era looked they way they looked, but it doesn't change that the core of it was an intentional image softening. ARTPOP went too far and turned people off from what had previously drew them in, so she moved to the opposite extreme and presented herself in a very easily digestible and accessible way. She was reaching out not to fans, but to casual listeners who had been off-put by ARTPOP. And to that end, it did work. But it again felt calculated. She was trying very hard to change the perception of herself, and as such presented herself in a way that felt very subdued and out of character. 

Chromatica was the inverse of ARTPOP. Whereas ARTPOP was her trying to make what people who didn't listen to her thought she sounded like, Chromatica was her trying to make the album that she thought her fans wanted to hear, whether that's what she wanted to make or not. It was an album that was built not around her desires, but fan service. The album is full of a lot of box ticking, and while she ticked some of those boxes well, at no point did it come across like she was really all that invested in it. 

I don't think these three projects were wastes at all. I think they each produced some good songs that I'm happy to have. But they all three represent Gaga being extremely conscious of herself and how she is perceived. What cemented her as an icon is the way in which she came by the spectacle so honestly. The Fame, The Fame Monster, and Born This Way felt very uninhibited and true to who Gaga showed us she was. None of it felt calculated or meticulous. MAYHEM was her return to that. 

I have a slightly different read which is that ARTPOP was* crazy. We can hear it in the demos. But I think the label got scared and she tinkered to the goal of appeal like you said. Just a slight difference imo

on Joanne, I think the music was genuinely spontaneous coming out of working on ASIB and becoming inspired, but then the look and marketing was veeeeery calculated. I genuinely think she had been working on something different originally but the inspiration hit and she wanted a shot at the Super Bowl and ran with that. She wanted ASIB and the Super Bowl and being in that frame of mind I think Joanne naturally came out of it. 

[imogen2133 368]

28 minutes ago, RainOnGaga said:

it depends on how you define "Gagaism"

Well I guess the things present on her earlier albums like repeated phrasing or elongated words (p-p-p-poker face, Auraaaa, auraaa, auraaa, judas judass, judah,judah-ah etc), her campy lyrics, layered metaphors, theatrical vocals, unconventional song structures, long bridges, lots of vocal layering, mixing other genres into pop and double meanings/entendres. These are the things that defined her earlier work and what made her music hers and unique to her. I assume there are others people can think of but these are the main ones people usually sight. 

[Helxig 44,909]

I guess each one wasn't her returning to her 'roots' it was her revisiting herself 15 years prior. Maybe that's part of the cycle of life in general and it's just reflected in her art. We are who we are, we grow and change, the most recent 'past version' of ourselves feels shameful, but over time we learn to reflect on and love that former self, or even miss parts of who we were so long ago, and then we re-embrace those parts of ourselves that we rejected. Miley seems to do the same thing now that I think about it

[imogen2133 368]

30 minutes ago, Ziggy said:

I have a slightly different read which is that ARTPOP was* crazy. We can hear it in the demos. But I think the label got scared and she tinkered to the goal of appeal like you said. Just a slight difference imo

on Joanne, I think the music was genuinely spontaneous coming out of working on ASIB and becoming inspired, but then the look and marketing was veeeeery calculated. I genuinely think she had been working on something different originally but the inspiration hit and she wanted a shot at the Super Bowl and ran with that. She wanted ASIB and the Super Bowl and being in that frame of mind I think Joanne naturally came out of it. 

Well it is interesting that you say that because even though Gaga/her label changed things from the demos to appeal more and tone it down slightly critics at the time still trashed ARTPOP for being too chaotic and out there/crazy and experimental. I personally don't see huge differences between the demos and final versions for most of the songs. Swine, MANiCURE, Venus, Do What U Want and Gypsy are quite similar to the demos but the only ones that were largely changed were Aura(well mostly just the verse vocals and name of the song of Burqa to Aura), ARTPOP(if you count the iTunes festival version as the demo but Gaga did say she didn't want the song to change much or "explode" like the others and she wanted to keep it simple) and Fashion!. 

[Helxig 44,909]

P.S. I also feel like it's more complicated even that what I said before. I think that to the world it looks like 'Gaga going back to her roots', but I get the impression that from her own perspective it's not that at all..

 

After ARTPOP she felt she had lost herself to her persona, so she stripped it all back during Joanne to rediscover the human being behind Lady Gaga, which was something cathartic she needed to do for herself

 

Then during Chromatica she was ready to fully embrace Lady Gaga again, but she was still struggling with some demons at the time, and really needed to dance through the pain (with the help of some friends)

 

And for Mayhem.. I truly believe that Mayhem is her fanservice era, giving the fans everything they want, as she closes this big chapter of her life and moves forward to other things, and steps away from the public eye for a while. I think she's ready to move on from all of her career stuff and focus on building a family. She's hinted at it many times and she even said something along the lines of feeling ready to close the book on Lady Gaga, but reassuring us she will always be an artist (fully paraphrasing but the metaphor is there). I see Mayhem as her love letter to her fans, a funeral for her past self, finally letting go of allll the demons (Mistress of Mayhem) for once and for all

[skellingtongaga 144]

19 hours ago, MountainMonster said:

MAYHEM is a return to form. ARTPOP, Joanne, and Chromatica were the (mostly unfortunate) detours. 

yeah I agree. I think Mayhem is the closest that Gaga has ever been to her early days, although way more mature. 

[skellingtongaga 144]

18 hours ago, REALITY said:

MAYHEM feels the most authentic. It's an amalgamation of a ton of different sounds that feel genuinely her. It includes many inspirations that were present in her early work: Bowie, Prince, MJ, funk, disco, electro, dance, synth, glam rock, etc.

I don't doubt Joanne was supposed to be a "return" to the music she listened to before becoming Gaga, but it felt more like a tribute to her dad and family than anything internal. 

I've said this before, but Chromatica always felt like someone cosplaying as Gaga. A lot was going on at the time, between the pandemic, her mental state, and the public pressure to return to something more closely aligned to TFM/BTW after Joanne & ASIB. I don't hate Chromatica, but the album felt safe and diluted compared to what she's done in the past (and especially compared to MAYHEM). It's like she wanted to return to the earlier days, but just wasn't ready yet. MAYHEM accomplishes that in spades.

I actually feel like Chromatica is the farthest from "herself".