NY Times reviews ARTPOP

[Redstreak 6,653]

Lady Gaga the relentless is back in full force on “ARTPOP†(Streamline/Interscope), her third full-length studio album of new songs. It took hip surgery, for injuries that she had aggravated onstage, to knock her off her tour and sideline her from media exposure for a few months earlier this year. But in summer the next push began with a single, “Applause,†that simultaneously reaffirmed her need for the love of her audience and announced her new pivot to align herself with the (visual) art world, singing, “Pop culture was in art, now art’s in pop culture, in me.â€

 

My misgivings started then. Wasn’t she an artist already?

 

Lady Gaga, born Stefani Germanotta, has certainly worked like one, mingling the generalized and the personal, the accessible and the inexplicable, the attention-getting and the head-scratching, the market-savvy and the strange. As strong as her commercial imperatives were, they only emboldened her nutty streak. When she emerged, Lady Gaga didn’t separate pop culture and art. Like the best pop stars, she made the mass media her gallery space.

 

Her multimillion-selling singles, like “Bad Romance†and “Paparazzi,†joined catchy choruses to verses that probed obsessions and contradictions, showing where desire, ambition, self-realization and self-destruction could converge. Atop her music, in video clips and public appearances, she piled on a nonstop, nearly superhuman fashion show and a public image that expanded to embrace misfit, outcast, unappreciated and s-xually nonconformist “little monsters,†as she named her fans.

 

But “ARTPOP†positions her in a more rarefied zone: with the kind of performance and gallery artists more likely to be seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music than at an arena concert.

 

Of course musicians are artists, creating impractical works out of intuition, compulsion and craft. And of course there are affinities among all the arts. Musicians and visual artists exploring in tandem found the synergies of Stravinsky and Diaghilev, the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol, Black Flag and Ray Pettibon; art colleges have incubated maverick musicians like John Lennon, David Bowie, M.I.A. and the members of Roxy Music, Talking Heads and Sonic Youth. But those were contemporaries working with street-level contemporaries, at least at the beginning. Pop’s newer fine-art infatuation has more to do with stars meeting stars and luxury brands doing co-promotions.

 

The cover of “ARTPOP†is a sculpture of a blond Lady Gaga cupping her breasts and holding a big shiny blue sphere between her legs. It’s by the pop artist Jeff Koons, who is renowned for his blown-up renditions of ephemeral and ba--l objects like the steel “Balloon Dog (Orange)†that Christie’s expects to sell on Tuesday  a day after the planned release of “ARTPOP† for $35 million to $55 million. It’s a portrait of a pop star by an art star  but it’s stiff and detached.

 

Lady Gaga has also announced collaborations with avant-garde elders like the theater artist Robert Wilson and the performance artist Marina Abramovic, who has lately also turned up alongside Jay-Z. On her Facebook page, Lady Gaga wrote that “ARTPOP†would be released with an app that she described as “a musical and visual engineering system that combines music, art, fashion and technology with a new interactive worldwide community  ‘the auras.’ †She went on, “Altering the human experience with social media, we bring art culture into pop in a reverse Warholian expedition.â€

 

Whatever.

 

The music on “ARTPOP†isn’t as convoluted. “My ARTPOP could mean anything,†Lady Gaga sings in the title song, and most of the time, it means putting the four-on-the-floor thrust of mainstream club music behind the kind of big pop hooks that made her a superstar.

 

Lady Gaga conquered the world with “The Fame,†her 2008 album of rocked-up dance tunes, and its EP sequel, “The Fame Monster,†in 2009. Then her 2011 “Born This Way†made its predecessors sound temperate. In songs that juggled Christian imagery and pagan rocker, Lady Gaga piled on vocal bluster and musical excesses remembered from decades past. Sales of “Born This Way†didn’t match those of her debut album  in part because its songs didn’t dovetail as well with radio formats  but they still added up to millions worldwide.

 

Now with “ARTPOP,†Lady Gaga turns oddly defensive, reacting to her endless media brouhaha instead of leading it. She advertised “Applause†with a pre-emptive, heavy-handedly ironic video clip called “Lady Gaga Is Over.†In the title song of “ARTPOP,†she dismisses the notion of a commercial downturn, singing, “I tried to sell myself but I am really laughing/Because I just love the music not the bling.†She reiterates the sentiment in “Jewels & Drugs,†a misfired attempt at hip-hop, insisting, “Don’t want your money, want your love.†And the lyrics of her current single, “Do What U Want,†with its chorus “Do what you want with my body,†are directed not to a lover but to media coverage printing things “that makes me want to screamâ€; “my body†is her image, separate from her mind or heart. R. Kelly joins her to sympathize about the “crazy schedule, fast life†of a fellow star before he offers his come-on.

 

The album teases with promises of candor. Its opener, “Aura,†pauses its thumping beat as Lady Gaga croons, “Do you want to see the girl who lives behind the aura?†(The lyrics also, unwisely, play with the metaphor of a burqa.) Elsewhere, songs touch repeatedly on thoughts of addiction: to intoxicants, to attention, to lust, to love. “Dope†is an Elton John-style piano ballad that works up to wrenching, belting melodrama as she sings about trying to give up bad habits because “I need you more than dope.†She and her co-producer, Rick Rubin, apparently didn’t apply pitch correction to the vocal, lending some intimacy to the stadium-sized emotions; “you†might be a lover, or her audience.

 

But for most of the album, the music is a fortress  more elaborate than “Born This Way†and decidedly less retro, pumping so insistently it sometimes forgets to breathe. Lady Gaga’s main songwriting collaborator is DJ White Shadow (Paul Blair), whose productions often top booming drum tracks with rock guitars. She also enlisted Zedd (Anton Zaslavski), a German electronic dance music producer who had his own million-selling single with “Clarity†in 2012; in his tracks, thumping beats and buzzing, abrasive bass lines drive the verses to gleaming, club-anthem choruses.

 

There are still some sparks of eccentricity. “Venus,†a mutating, episodic dance-floor track produced by Lady Gaga herself, starts with a quotation from Sun Ra (who shares songwriting credit) before the singer presents herself as the goddess of love in the “seashell bikini†painted by Botticelli.

 

But for much of the album, “ARTPOP†also seems to be working off a checklist that Lady Gaga chants in “Auraâ€: “tech dance s-x art pop.†For gender-blurring s-xuality, there’s “G.U.Y.†(which stands for “girl under youâ€), “MANiCURE†and “Sexxx Dreams,†which fantasizes  to echoes of 1980s Janet Jackson  about getting “nasty†and “trashy†with someone whose boyfriend is out of town. For pop, there’s a booming, cheerless, cheerleader-chant song, “Mary Jane Holland,†that’s nearly a single entendre about marijuana.

 

Not on the checklist, but definitely on the agenda for trademark reinforcement, are songs about clothes. Lady Gaga’s shallowest thoughts to date about style are in “Donatellaâ€â€†an oddly backhanded tribute to her friend Donatella Versace, delivered in a nasal comic sneer  and “Fashion!,†produced by Will.i.am and David Guetta to mimic David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance†while Lady Gaga sings, “Looking good and feeling fine,†sounding like a jingle.

 

What’s missing from too much of “ARTPOP†is Lady Gaga’s old conviction that pop, in its 21st-century configuration as music plus video plus social media plus celebrity, could tell every story she wanted to tell, all at once, trashy and transcendent. Her stage spectaculars have already built arty superstructures on her songs: s-xy, disruptive, funny, unsettling ones. Validation from the fine-arts world  a much more elitist, insular place than pop’s mass market  shouldn’t matter anywhere nearly as much as stirring the passions of the little monsters

 

A pretty fair review coming from the NY Times.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/arts/music/blurring-art-artifice-and-pop-culture.html?hpw&rref=arts&_r=0

[Runway 27,876]

Did they give a number

Nice review :)

[Robotboy 1,700]

i just want the score im not gonna read all that

[Luc 4,775]

What's the rating? miley:

[Sexxx 5,623]

Did they give a number

Nice review :)

 

 

no score yet

[Redstreak 6,653]

There was no score, they either are going to publish another "official" review that actually gives a score or Metacritic is going to take this piece themselves and give it a score based on the overall feel of the review as they have done before in the past.

[Truth 90]

Nice :)

[Sexxx 5,623]

What’s missing from too much of “ARTPOP†is Lady Gaga’s old conviction that pop, in its 21st-century configuration as music plus video plus social media plus celebrity, could tell every story she wanted to tell, all at once, trashy and transcendent. Her stage spectaculars have already built arty superstructures on her songs: s-xy, disruptive, funny, unsettling ones. Validation from the fine-arts world  a much more elitist, insular place than pop’s mass market  shouldn’t matter anywhere nearly as much as stirring the passions of the little monsters

[MJH07 0]

I loved this review. The author seemed to know what he was talking about.

[EastonEllis 1]

Ouch.

 

I agree with lots of things though.

But the writer seems to miss a few smart moves and meanings in the lyrics.

[HOTRODSGAGA 81]

[badboymonsterx 540]

[AgusPop 4,141]

score!!!??

 

btw pretty fair review 

[Atomic 0]

Sounds pretty three star-ish (out of five) to me. It's the most objective review I've seen yet.

[Dean Winchester 197]

its positive for the most part right?