Lady Gaga has a disease (meh music)

Eye roll back, but not in ecstasy.

The words “Lady Gaga Lead Single” used to mean something in this country.

I want to take you back to 2011. Lady Gaga has spent the past three years establishing herself as the most aesthetically daring pop musician radio can handle. She’s done the meat dress, blown up a man in his bed, and died on stage. There is nobody as provocative, nor as fascinating. We’re all on edge as a new era of maximalist pop is beginning.

Then she released ‘Applause’, and thus began the beginning of the end.

It’s hard to actually remember, but not only is that song not particularly good (argue with the wall) but it was a disappointing end to half a decade of dominance. Every other hit she has had since has come with caveats, and in 2024, that’s lead to the worst performing lead single she’s ever had.

It's also a song she has released before. Back in 2017, in the midst of the Super Bowl promo cycle and prior to ‘A Star Is Born’, Gaga dropped an entirely different bad song about curing pain with love. It was called ‘The Cure’. Nobody liked it. Even those who did, did not.

In 2017, it wouldn’t have been fair to label Gaga as an artist who was barely treading water. ‘Artpop’ (2013) had been a disaster, and ‘Joanne’ (2016) had proved underwhelming (her worst album to date), but she’d also established herself as a pop artist with range. Her performance at the Super Bowl had rocketed a single piano ballad to the top ten. One throwaway track wasn’t a trend.

But in the current decade, she’s spent a significant amount of time attempting to re-establish herself as a populist pop star. Sometimes it works – usually with collaborations. Stupid Love was a technical top ten hit. Her quirks have come back around from exhausting to endearing.

So why is ‘Disease’ so underwhelming?

‘Disease’ is what happens when you slap the aesthetics of Gaga at her most interesting on a banal pop song. Much like how ‘Stupid Love’ did the same a few years prior. But I want to emphasise the awkwardness of this whole disaster of a rollout. Lady Gaga in her “monster” mode has become unbelievable and awkward.

Musically, it’s a throwback that’s come a few years too early. ‘Born This Way’ (2011) era Gaga is clearly the mold she’s going for. The sludgy, overcrowded production and shouty vocals is a poor imitation of the energy she had 13 years prior. The dark leather and torture visuals clashing against suburbia feels dated. Pop culture hasn’t circled back to this yet. We’re in early-2000s mode – the bubbly calm before the dance music storm.

It doesn’t sound distinctively bad. But it doesn’t sound distinctively good. What it does sound like, is derivative.

This is all of her worst instincts rolled into one. It’s boring behind the mask. I’m not going to say she doesn’t do love songs well, because she has plenty of great ones, but this is a remake of her worst one. It’s basically an admission of defeat. Previous years, she’d have made this distinctive from other records. Now it’s self-referential and self-indulgent. The worst part is, I’m not convinced that she’s convinced by it. It feels like she’s wearing a Gaga costume, and not simply being herself.

To be fair to Gaga, maybe she assumed the world wanted this from her. Stans online have spent the better part of a decade hounding her to “return” to dance pop, and she probably felt safer surrounded by the ephemera of ‘Born This Way’ than the relative normalcy of ‘The Fame’ (2008). But the result is a song that feels like an obligation. It’s telling that her throwback ballad with Bruno Mars is sitting very pretty in the top ten.

Maybe the world just doesn’t need this song. It didn’t need it in 2017, it doesn’t need it now.