TW; mentions of rape, bulimia, and paedophilia.
Pop is, by definition, meant to be easy. That is going to be a divisive statement to some, but I stand by it. Pop music can titillate, it can confuse, it might even be antagonistic to a specific audience, but it has to be populist at the core. We’re talking about art for the masses, and the masses only enjoy that they don’t have to really work for.
At the most basic level, this is a genre of music built on hooks and accessibility, and there is nothing less accessible than performance art to the standard consumer. Look to the most famous performance artist in pop culture history: Yoko Ono. Even if you remove the cultural narrative that she broke up the biggest band in the world (she didn’t), there’s a significant amount of backlash towards her art on concept alone. The idea that she’s making art that you might not understand. When people complained about the increasing pretension of John Lennon, it was always her fault, even if not. Her work before him was derided, and after his death, it was routinely dismissed.
I personally came up in an internet that was rediscovering Ono. Not necessarily as an artist, but a ridiculous figure of pop culture mockery. Her vocal stylings in particular were the source of much ironic amusement, going viral for not being pleasant. That nobody thought to question if these were more than the vanity recordings of a rich, old woman is a testament to the internet’s lack of curiosity.
All this is to say that the pop audience, and audiences in a general sense, are not trained to enjoy performance art. The truth is that they’re rarely able to enjoy art that isn’t spoon-fed to them in its entirety. Thus, things got messy when a pop artist, spoken of in the same hushed tones as Beyonce and Madonna, attempted to marry the two concepts.
Enter Artpop (2013), the album that essentially killed Lady Gaga’s pop career. Or at least, derailed a very fast moving train.
With the first single release 12 August, a controversial album should start with a bang. ‘Applause’ is not a single that signals any such lofty goals at the face of it. In fact, it’s a fairly tepid piece of dated pop ephemera that felt out of step even at the time – not just with radio, but with Lady Gaga herself. It’s an anthemic ode to being clapped at, but also a bitter and unfocused response to critics. Mostly for those who may have taken issue at her over-reliance on references. They apparently had referred to her as a geek. It must have shaken her to her core.
This response is a childish declaration that she, unlike her critics, likes to read and has fans. It’s quite frankly a pathetic attempt at a clapback that fails to land, if for no other reason than her references are obvious. You don’t need to read an academic journal to know about Madonna’s 1989 hit single ‘Express Yourself’, or to recognise the obvious similarities between it and the Gaga’s 2011 hit, ‘Born This Way’.
“This is like writing a song about the kid who called you a ‘butt breath’ in second grade.” – Todd in the Shadows, POP SONG REVIEW: "Applause" by Lady Gaga, 2013
‘Applause’ is, in many ways, an attempt to speak to the audience and critics directly in her music. It was a first for the pop star, hit not the last, although maybe the only attempt to do so via a major release. There’s a reason for that. The lead single for an artist who was breaking records with her last album should not stall out at number four.
The commercial performance of ‘Applause’ was not necessarily a failure, but it wasn’t the smash clearly expected. Considering the money and promotion that had gone behind the star for the past three releases, barely scrapping the top five of Billboard was likely disappointing. Particularly when you realise that her main cultural competitor, Katy Perry, saw her own lead comfortably in the top slot. The song was everywhere, but not necessarily impacting consumers.
But what else was going to happen when this was what she offered?
“R Kelly and I have, sometimes, very untrue things written about us, so in a way this was a bond between us…It was a really natural collaboration.” – Lady Gaga, 2013
The defining moment for the publicity tour Lady Gaga undertook in 2013 is the moment she defended R. Kelly in Japan. Dressed in what can only be described as alien couture, her slow speech betrays either attempt to either present a mystical front or is a deliberate strategy to hide slurring. Likely both.
Gaga wasn’t well this year.
In a 2019 statement, following the release of ‘Surviving R. Kelly’, the singer attempted to apologise her decision to worth with and defend the convicted paedophile. Describing her thinking and actions as “twisted”, and the act as an attempt to be “defiant and provocative”. Her 2017 documentary ‘Gaga: Five Foot Two’ contextualises a lot of this by placing it in line with her chronic pain and self-medication following an injury on tour the year previously. But ultimately, you’re left with a track and two televised performances that are often ignored by fans, but integral to the story of this album.
Like it or not, ‘Do What You Want’ is the single that both saved and doomed this album into its cultural blackhole. It is, unfortunately, the best song on the album. Following the abortive second single in ‘Venus’, this was a well-produced piece of pop that attempted to play with provocation via content in a more playful way. If ‘Applause’ is clumsy and almost uninteresting, this track is fascinating in how it tackles objectification via the media. But again, it did so with a man who was a known sex offender.
It does that by framing it in the grossest way possible, further exacerbated by an unreleased by leaked music video filmed by famed photographer Terry Richardson – who has been facing allegations of sexual misconduct since 2001. Despite his inescapable presence in early 2010s pop culture, in context of Gaga’s entire thing with the song, that too could not go unnoticed. What leaked from the unreleased music video was one long, uncomfortable moment. One infamous moment had Kelly informing Gaga “when you wake up, you’re going to be pregnant”. A person described it to Page Six as “an ad for rape”. Even the most diplomatic of cultural critics seemed relieved when the video was scrapped, considering how well-reviewed the single was. But with the song refusing to cross into the top ten – even with the Xtina remix – all that was left was to drop the album.
In the wake of the singles, audiences might be forgiven for rejecting this tainted product, but the initial first week sales were excellent. Not quite to the level of ‘Born This Way’ in 2011, but very strong at 258,000 copies. But a second week drop to 46,000 exposed the real pain point. By 2013, Lady Gaga was an established brand that was being upheld by her “little monsters” in that first week. There was, unfortunately, no staying power, and no clear third single to smooth things over. This kind of had to be for the arts, not the charts, as stans like to say.
To put things into perspective, the album dropped in early November, and the next and last official single release wasn’t until the end of March the next year.
Looking at the record as a complete body of work, this kind of delay seems odd. Not because there’s a clear next single – there simply is not – but because so much of the album feels oddly built to be thrown at radio. For all the posturing and pretension, ‘Artpop’ is an electronic pop album released right after the peak, and at least half of the tracks could have found a home amongst the radio singles from fellow pop albums ‘Bangerz’ and ‘Prism’. The album simply isn’t that sonically distinct to be this aggressively hard to promote. It was meant to be the soft opening of an era that would be followed by something more experimental. A project tentatively titled ‘Artpop: Part Two’.
It really does put so much of the theatrics into perspective when you contrast the music on here with the visuals at play. The Jeff Koons cover, as evocative as it is garish, suggests music that takes the next step from what she had already been doing. Something more than pop had previously been. Paired with her increasingly verbose interviews, suggested transcendence.
The music did not.
‘Artpop’ is essentially a playlist of songs that Gaga felt were the more commercial offerings in her recording process. To listen to it is to feel that no care was taken in sequencing and no real interest in narrative. Whether that’s true or not is irrelevant, it’s just doesn’t work as an end-to-end product. You just have to treat it as a series of unrelated choices, despite clear opportunities for storytelling. Released in the same quarter as Beyonce’s self-titled, game changing record, you get the sense that what’s at stake here is less the music, and more the brand.
What hurts is that there are running themes that don’t feel adequately explored. Gaga regularly returns to the loneliness and isolation of fame and her chronic pain in a way that feels almost connective. You could make the argument that the last two tracks (excluding ‘Applause’) are a real attempt to crash the listener to reality after a lot of dance pop that is supposed to read as sonically euphoric and manic. EDM as a genre has its place in creating an soundscape for generic ecstasy, and there are tracks on this album that take advantage of that, or work against it in interesting ways. There’s an idea of a project at the heart of this, begging to be taken seriously. But so much of that unclear intention cracks under the pressure of just how…empty this album feels.
Take this back to the title track, which is an inelegant attempt at verbalising the core tenants of the album. In actuality, it’s oddly plodding, emotionally distant, and most critically, thematically unrelated to the songs that connect emotionally. But then again, ‘Artpop’ feels right at home amongst other confusing additions, like the duo of ‘Donatella’ and ‘Fashion!’, which act as a buffer between the almost vulnerable and kind of brilliant ‘Swine’, the best the album has to offer. Then you have the strangeness ‘Aura’, which is the most direct Gaga gets on fame and the industry, including a baffling tie in to ‘Machete Kills’ (2013). And you can’t forget the overproduced mess that is ‘Mary Jane Holland’. Nothing is actually that objectionable in its own right, but this is not a playlist, it’s an album.
In the chaos of this release, we do need to acknowledge the randomly high charting promotional single ‘Dope’. The track charted in the top ten for one week, before collapsing to 71 and dropping out entirely after that. An unfortunate trend setter in this way, Gaga was early to the phenomenon of big streaming debuts boosting the apparent chart success mostly unpopular songs. Doubly strange, seeing that it isn’t even the good ballad on the album. It wasn’t even counted amongst the official singles for some reason. If it was, the chart run might have been juiced up enough to obscure how unpopular this album was.
Like so many mediocre pop albums, this would probably make a decent EP. The trouble is that EP still would pale in comparison to what she’s clearly going for with the project. Or rather, what you hope was the intention, given how erratic the tracklist is.
But what is music without performance?
The promo performances for during this album cycle all have a sense of desperation and unhinged enthusiasm. Take the Thanksgiving special “Lady Gaga and the Muppets Holiday Spectacular”, where we get a series of loosely connected performances with celebrity cameos and also Muppets. It’s a mess, but accessible to the masses in a way that the ‘ArtRave’ earlier that year had not been.
You cannot overemphasise how deranged it felt at the time to see the woman who 2 years previously had maintained the perfect balance of pop and stunt to start babbling about a “flying dress” and promoting the first concert in space. While performances for the album in the previous three months had been somewhat theatrical but comprehensible, this felt like madness.
The ‘TechHaus Volantis’ can be described as a drone with a platform the user stands on amidst a very stiff “dress”. That is to say it’s the type of idea that is exciting in theory but underwhelming in practice. It has not hence become part of the Gaga brand for obvious reasons.
"[Volantis] roared to life and lurched forward a few feet, hovering. Then it did the same thing, backwards. Then it stopped. That was it." – Amy Phillips, Pitchfork Media, 2013
But what really took centre stage was the performances at the two-day event hosted by Gaga at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York, wherein she performed nine tracks from ‘Artpop’. ‘ArtRave’ as it was called (later to title the album’s official tour) was the definitive moment where the scope of the album was made real. In these performances, we would see Gaga meld the art and pop worlds together in a way that mimicked the artists she had become obsessed with. In it, she married the most commercial of her album’s track list with bizarre visuals and incoherent lectures.
It was a success. If anything was a proof of concept that the melding of art and pop was possible, it was ‘ArtRave’. The heavenly mix of hype and atmosphere made everything sound good, even the most disjointed of the tracks. Not even the vaguely terrifying image of Gaga stumbling around the stage in an ensemble that read both as gimp mask and Michelin Man put a damper on things. She had done it.
My artpop could mean anything.
Performances continued throughout the rest of the year, and into 2014. That leads us to the next logical step. Despite no third single, the album continued to be promoted across the globe, and in March of 2014, Gaga headlined SXSW, where she invited performance artist Millie Brown on stage with her. This is where the rubber band snaps again.
Swine is about rape, and in the context of the album, sticks out as a highlight and the darkest the album gets. A performance at the iTunes Festival in 2013, named SwineFest by Gaga herself, is probably the best of the promo run outside of ‘ArtRave’, in part because of how much passion she puts into it. Sexual assault is a consistent theme in her discography, and part of why people found the inclusion of Kelly so jarring. But the song itself resonated with her audience, and so, she continued to perform it.
“Do me a favour and don’t post this show.” – Lady Gaga, SXSW, 2014
Millie Brown is a vomit artist. Whether you take that seriously or not is your choice, but her art involves her using her body from within to create art. And Gaga’s decision to have Brown vomit onto her while performing a song about rape is meant to be as disgusting as the act itself. The stains were present through the rest of her time on stage. For some, this was a powerful statement, better handled than ‘Do What You Want’ had been. But other found it, for lack of a better word, gross. That may have been the point, but you have to remember that Lady Gaga is a creature of pop, a persona crafted so perfectly that people could attach themselves too.
Thus enters Demi Lovato, who at the time was the established third or fourth wheel of young pop starlets, who was publicly recovering from their own issues with bulimia. As I’ve spoken about before, 2014 was a standard-bearer year for online discourse as it was taking shape. Lovato’s history with eating disorders meant that this was a voice to listen to, and that voice decried this as an act “glamorizing eating disorders”.
Brown defended their art style as not inherently a statement about eating disorders, but the public in general had something to latch onto. They ran that discourse into the ground, ignore context for content. Gaga had found the line at which her art ambitions could go to and had crossed it. It wasn’t that the performance was a failure. People just had a reason now to opt out.
So obviously, it was time for a new single.
I haven’t spoken about ‘G.U.Y.’ yet, and that’s because it doesn’t immediately strike me as a pivotal song within ‘Artpop’ when listening to the album. It has a strong hook and fun concept, but there’s nothing here that isn’t done just as well elsewhere on the album. But the very loud minority of people who still cared about the album months after it had fled the charts were loudly fans of it, and so we got…an extended extravaganza.
The video for this song was yet another instance of Gaga throwing imagery against the wall in hopes of making something stick. A grand music film that failed to meet the heights set by her pop peers, whether they be Beyonce’s more expansive visual album, or Lana Del Rey’s more dynamic ‘Tropico’. The “art” of ‘Artpop’ had failed to compete, and now we got its poppiest moment. It even featured fairly random nods to Bravo and the reality show universe of the ‘Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ which…as someone with very little exposure to them, mostly felt just plain odd. Even with that, this type of mega video felt like an event. But the end result was a single that didn’t really go anywhere. It was a whimper of an ending of ‘Artpop’ as a cultural touchstone, that saw Gaga’s pop career falter at the stage that she should have been ascending.
She went on tour, then started courting the elderly while she licked her proverbial wounds. Her current trajectory is more Cher than Madonna, and everyone seems happier for it. In many ways, falling out of pop favour has only aided her in expanding the legacy. But maybe if she hadn’t stumbled so severely, we would have been saved from ‘House of Gucci’ (2021).
There is a habit some have online to defend ‘Artpop’ as a misjudged masterpiece, but I think that misses the core of what actually went wrong with the album. Having some good songs and interesting performances does not make an album worthwhile, and between the strange and abysmal sequencing, and the tragedy that exists in the singles, what you salvage is probably not enough to make it worthwhile.
Gaga and those close to her, when discussing the album and the possibility of ‘Artpop: Part Two’, always make sure to emphasise how painful this period is for her to relive. And in many ways I’m sure it is. From the perspective of a fan, it was such an awkward and unhappy moment to live through and consume. Or, in many cases, to not consume. It’s a collection of highs and lows that don’t make a complete picture, and her personal issues with chronic pain and addiction likely made things even worse.
But it’s likely painful because of how many poor decisions she made in the creative process.
‘Artpop’ is what happens when ambition hits the wall. Lady Gaga is a defining pop artist of the 2010s, but this is the album that showed that she couldn’t be the defining artist. The following decade of her career is proof positive that she has plenty of greatness in her, but maybe she lacks a personal understanding of her limitations. The lasting legacy of the album is probably best left in the minds of stans, who will always see it for what they wanted, not what they got.
But I will always applaud her for trying.