As we discussed last week, Lady Gaga covers the December issue of Rolling Stone, in a feature well-timed on the heels of Grammy nominations and an overall very big year for Gaga. When the nominations were announced, Gaga set several records (album pun!): she was the most-nominated female artist with seven nods for Mayhem — and Harlequin, too! — second only to Kendrick Lamar who earned nine; this broke Gaga’s personal best of six nominations in one year, which she last had in 2010 for The Fame Monster, and brings her up to 45 career nominations total. Brava, Gaga! Critics and fans alike have heralded Mayhem as a return to form for our Lady. It’s pretty much been in constant rotation in my house (just when I think I’m ready to give it a rest for a bit, she goes and drops a new track!). Obviously, the Rolling Stone article goes in depth on the making of Mayhem; what it symbolizes for her personally and how she couldn’t really have recorded it before now. A few highlights:
Mayhem-the-character came from the ‘Disease’ music video: “We started exploring with the choreography this idea of me battling myself,” she says. “That song is so deliberately about somebody that wants to harm you — and it being you.” Gaga has played with horror-movie imagery before, but the “Disease” video is a coded tour of her darkest thoughts, a remarkably uncompromising way to begin an all-important album cycle. She starts the video singing as her own corpse, mowed down by a car with Mayhem at the wheel, and it gets more nightmarish from there.
Exorcising her demons onstage: Starting with her Coachella performance in April, essentially the first draft of the show, she placed that internal battle at the center of her performance. … She laughs when I point out that, lightened up or not, she chose to put a concept she found psychologically destabilizing at the center of a world tour, forcing herself to revisit it night after night. “You just, um, pretty much nailed me and psychoanalyzed me all at once,” she says. “That’s very something that I would do — is have, like, a traumatic experience and then orbit everything around it.” But as she sees it, “discomfort in all areas of life can make you better. You just have to allow yourself to work through it.”
The melody that you choose, can rescue you: As “Vanish Into You” developed, …Gaga finally steered back into the center of her artistic lane, after years of productive detours that she traces directly to the Artpop aftermath. “I put so much into Artpop,” Gaga says. “It really was my EDM opus. And also I was in a very chaotic place. It feels hard sometimes to stand firmly in the ground when it’s sinking, you know?” The album, and her choices around it, refused to give people what they expected. “People don’t like it if I say, ‘I won’t dress the way you want me to dress. I won’t have the hair you want me to have, and I’m going to not make pop music the way that you want me to make it. ‘Cause you want everything to sound like “Bad Romance,” and I’m never doing that again.”’
I find it funny that she specifically mentions “Bad Romance” there on that last note (music pun!) about defying expectations, because I actually think “Abracadabra” sounds the most like “Bad Romance” of any song she’s done since. Musically, and with their complementary nonsensical choruses: “Ra-ra, ah-ah-ah/ Roma-, roma-ma/ Gaga, ooh, la-la/ Want your bad romance,” vs. “Abracadabra, amor-ooh-na-na/ Abracadabra, morta-ooh-ga-ga/ Abracadabra, abra-ooh-na-na/ In her tongue she said, ‘Death or love tonight.’” It’d be fun to hear a mash-up of them! What else… Turns out “Vanish Into You” was the first song Gaga wrote for Mayhem, which tickled me because it’s without question the track I’ve listened to the most. Something about the feeling behind the song just instantly grabbed me, more so than the lyrics which are pretty simple (and sans gibberish, see above lyrics). Oh, and if you’re like me and have always wanted #JusticeForArtpop, the album comes up A LOT in this interview. It seems the lackluster reception to it was a pivotal, roads diverged in a wood moment in her life.
Photos credit: Best Image/Backgrid, Rolling Stone and via Instagram
I’m an Artpop truther. I had that album on repeat and it IS one of my favorites. I loved it then, too. I think part of the bad reception was that it’s not radio friendly and she released Do What U Want with an R. Kelly feature. I love the song, but it’s a difficult listen knowing he’s a sex predator. I haven’t listened to mayhem. I didn’t love the Joanne era and kind of checked out.
There’s so many good songs on Mayhem. Love it.