| |
Celeb News: ARTPOP Official Reviews: 61/100
Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 13,781
|
Quote:
Originally posted by Retro
No.
|
You tell her sis!
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 1/28/2012
Posts: 11,237
|
The billboard review 
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 6/17/2011
Posts: 16,910
|
New York Times
Quote:
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.”
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 sexually 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 banal 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.”
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 scream”; “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 “Aura”: “tech dance sex art pop.” For gender-blurring sexuality, there’s “G.U.Y.” (which stands for “girl under you”), “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 “Donatella”— 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: sexy, 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.
|
No score but it reads mostly positive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/ar...?hpw&rref=arts
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 13,781
|
Since they didn't give a score are they not submitting to metacritic?
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 4/8/2012
Posts: 1,621
|
NY Times never gives a real score, right?
They also had a review for Born This Way without score.
Anyway, looks they like the album.
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 3/13/2011
Posts: 19,555
|
that review seemed pretty negative to me  If it was on Metacritic I'd guess the score would be in the low 60's.
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 6/17/2011
Posts: 16,910
|
Quote:
Originally posted by ALA
that review seemed pretty negative to me If it was on Metacritic I'd guess the score would be in the low 60's. |
It's a pretty tame review for NYT standards.
This is a lashing: Eminem Grows Older, but Not Up
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 6/17/2011
Posts: 16,910
|
Quote:
Originally posted by jim19911126
NY Times never gives a real score, right?
They also had a review for Born This Way without score.
Anyway, looks they like the album.
|
They don't give number scores, but reading it again I don't think this is an "official" review. It reads like the piece they did on Born This Way, where it was written more as an editorial piece for their A&E section than a review. That review didn't count for Metacritic so I can't see this counting.
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 10/29/2010
Posts: 29,249
|
Quote:
Originally posted by geemarty
Since they didn't give a score are they not submitting to metacritic?
|
NY Times do not give scores, MetaCritic will read it and assess what score it deserves.
But I don't think this is their review of it, there would have been "MUSIC REVIEW" at the top of the article.
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 15,734
|
The album is so good so.. 74 will be the final acore 
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 3/22/2012
Posts: 9,573
|
I want the Rolling Stone one..
|
|
|
|
Banned
Member Since: 12/3/2011
Posts: 19,217
|
One more review until ARTPOP gets a score. I'd love for that score to be Rolling Stone since they stan for Gaga and i know they would give her a good review. I hope the score starts off strong.
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/18/2013
Posts: 13,165
|
Wait so the score is based off of 4 reviews?
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/25/2012
Posts: 5,671
|
If this doesn't get a 75+ score...
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 12/27/2011
Posts: 20,704
|
Quote:
Originally posted by SHICD
Wait so the score is based off of 4 reviews?
|
No, the first four reviews give it it's first initial score. It'll then either fluctuate up or down and eventually stabilize as more reviews come in.
A Metacritic score can be made up of a different amount of reviews depending on the album. Born This way had 33 official reviews, The Fame Monster had about 15, etc.
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/18/2013
Posts: 13,165
|
Quote:
Originally posted by Rivington Reject
No, the first four reviews give it it's first initial score. It'll then either fluctuate up or down and eventually stabilize as more reviews come in.
A Metacritic score can be made up of a different amount of reviews depending on the album. Born This way had 33 official reviews, The Fame Monster had about 15, etc.
|
Thanks sis.
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 3/7/2011
Posts: 8,251
|
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 10/3/2010
Posts: 50,276
|
TORONTO SUN:
Lady Gaga’s ‘Artpop’ more style than substance
Well, she's half right.
There is indeed plenty of pop to be found on Lady Gaga's third full-length Artpop (out Tuesday but streaming online now).
But art? Aside from the Jeff Koons cover and the Warhol title reference, not so much.
Well, perhaps if you're talking about the art of provocation. That's always been Gaga's main discipline - using meat dresses and giant eggs and other antics to get attention. And as a way to manipulate fans and the media, it has served her admirably (until she got upstaged by Miley Cyrus 2.0, anyway).
Thing is, as a means of songwriting, outrageousness has a limited shelf life. And seldom translates from the real world to the recording studio.
This has always been a problem with Gaga's albums - Artpop included. Like her others, this disc feels self-indulgent and unfocused, more concerned with style than substance. It flits between genres - the EDM wubba-wubba of Aura, the space-sex disco of Venus, the handclap R&B of Manicure, the
hip-hop menace of Jewels n' Drugs, the industrial grind of Swine, the Broadway balladry of Dope, the dance-rock of Mary Jane Holland, the new wave of Applause, even a dash of Born This Way's heartland rock in Gypsy.
But as usual, most of these club anthems seem simultaneously underwritten and overproduced, with verses and choruses and changes and elements hamfistedly mashed together in a way that seems less like creative vision and more like arrogant lack of discipline.
But when you get right down to it, the art Gaga has truly never mastered is that of writing lyrics. And the sex-obsessed, drug-heavy Artpop has some of her lamest clunkers yet. But rather than blather on, let's let her speak for herself. Here are some of the album's most, um, artful couplets:
http://www.torontosun.com/2013/11/06...than-substance
3/5 Stars
Doesn't count. 
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 10/3/2010
Posts: 50,276
|
Oh and Pretty Much Amazing (counts for metacritic) seems to be liking the album a bit based on their comment about the ARTPOP stream:
Quote:
Lady Gaga’s hyper-stimulating, exhausting, exhilarating, confusing and ultimately immensely enjoyable third LP, ARTPOP is streaming now on iTunes a week ahead of Interscope’s November 11 release date.
It’s a fairly coherent and consistent listen with only one truly cringe-worthy moment – the strip club rap jam “Jewels N’ Drugs” with T.I., Too $hort and Twista, so skip that if you can. The LP’s highest highs include three sets of three; the opening one, two, three knockout of “Aura,” “Venus” and “G.U.Y.” (“Venus” is a serious contender for dance track of the year), album centerpieces “Do What U Want” (featuring R. Kelly), “Artpop” and “Swine”, and finally the astonishing final three-song stretch of “Dope,” “Gypsy” and first single “Applause.” We’re not calling the album’s other six tracks filler, but we’re not not saying that either.
Here is ARTPOP showstopper “Dope”.
|
http://prettymuchamazing.com/music/a...dy-gaga-artpop
I hope they give it a B in their official review. 
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 4/25/2012
Posts: 2,185
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
