Photo: WENN.com
Lady Gaga: Two great albums, which spawned some of this decade's most exciting pop. Some mad outfits which will stay with us forever (hello, meat dress). She was fun, exciting, innovative and full of ideas, and stuck out amongst the sea of mediocre pop puppets.
Then she broke her hip, and disappeared for a while. We all missed her (you're lying to yourself if you didn't). A comeback was announced. All hell broke loose. 'Applause' was released! And - yeah. Truth be told, it was somewhat of anticlimax for some.
With further previews of ARTPOP provoking a general response of 'meh' from fans, has Gaga lost it? Has her crown slipped? Do we care what she wears anymore? After last night's, er, interesting X Factor performance, we look at both sides of the argument as two people with very differing opinions air their views...
FOR - LADY GAGA IS THE NEW DAVID BOWIE
Lady Gaga releases third studio album ARTPOP on 11 November. There are those who are saying that at just 27-year's old, the star is already over. There is a school of thought that says she has become a parody of herself and is insulting her fans by releasing substandard music and focussing solely on her increasingly eccentric image. So is this album to be the final desperate act of an attention seeking simpleton or is there more going on than people think?
Well those people are simply wrong. With 'Applause', Lady Gaga released another fantastic single that only cements her position as the artist making the best pop music in the World today. A lot was made of it losing the chart battle to Katy Perry, but Gaga is an artist who truly transcends these sorts of trivial rivalries. With 'Applause', upcoming single 'Venus' and other snippets leaked online, it sounds like ARTPOP is set to be her best album to date. But what makes her so special?
Gaga stands out from the rest because she truly understands the world of pop music and its relationship with art. Like Roy Lichtenstein in the sixties, she is pillared from all sides for trying to take simple pop culture and turn it into something more than the sum of its parts. Like Lichtenstein, history will judge her a lot more favourably than some of her current critics. People say that she is is all style and no substance. I would argue that she is all style AND substance.
There seems to be a certain misogyny at work here. When Davie Bowie did pretty much exactly what Gaga is doing, creating perfect pop characters to channel his music, he was heralded as a genius. When women try to do the same they are branded either as mad or in some way trying to compensate for a lack of musical talent. Why should women stand earnestly behind microphones for whole songs to be taken seriously? It just doesn't make sense.
With ARTPOP, Gaga has taken her journey so far to its logical conclusion. The lyrics are self-referential without being self-pitying and the music is both excellent and varied. If you strip everything else that Lady Gaga is away you are left with a superb multi-instrumentalist who can write classic pop songs almost for fun. That's not something critics of ARTPOP will mention too often I imagine, but it's something to bear in mind when judging the album.
AGAINST - SHE HAS LOST ALL MEANING
The thing is, 'Applause' wasn't a fantastic single. It wasn't fit to shine the shoes of 'Poker Face', or even breathe the same air as 'Bad Romance'. Lady Gaga's fans are afraid to admit this, because even they can't quite believe how far the standards of her music have fallen.
Other previews of ARTPOP have also proved incredibly disappointing. 'Venus' is just really, really awful, and 'Do What U Want' is just...bleh. Oh well, the guest appearances on ARTPOP are sure to be amazing, right? Wrong. A washed up R&B singer who (allegedly) pisses on (allegedly) underaged women and a rapper barely anyone has ever heard of (Too $hort. Yeah, us neither) barely even count as guest appearances. Doesn't this speak volumes about the quality of ARTPOP - that no artists of bigger stature wanted to attach themselves to the project?
One can argue that for all her deep references to art, there's really not actually substance behind it. Yes, she references divisive American sculptor Jeff Koons in 'Applause' but the lyric doesn't actually MEAN anything, it's just there for the hell of it. It's as if she's been in the studio running her finger down a list of acclaimed 21st century artists that she's printed off Wikipedia, and selects one at random.
The attention-grabbing outfits are dull as well now. She literally ventured out last week with what looked like a giant slice of toast on her head, and I didn't even blink an eyelid. I admire how it seems that she doesn't seem to give a shit what she looks like or what anyone thinks, but the reality is she wants people to give a shit, so she can act like she doesn't give a shit.
She's also resorted to cringey publicity-seeking tactics, like 'making up' with former enemy Sharon Osbourne (did anyone even know they were enemies?) in an embarrassing display on the stage of our very own X Factor, which is as far as you can sink without actually being an X Factor contestant.
I'm not sure it's misogyny that's the problem here. Yes, David Bowie created characters and was heralded as a genius, but...his music was entirely superior to anything Gaga has ever released, and hash brown-head isn't exactly Ziggy Stardust. She doesn't deserve the accolade of genius after making two good albums. Must try harder.
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