Art and pop intersected long before Lady Gaga. So did pop and calculated eccentricity.
Gaga’s third album leans hard on her favorite provocateurs (Madonna, David Bowie) and pop masters (Donna Summer, Jim Steinman, Freddie Mercury). The 15 tracks also surprise with a few fun, new inspirations: Jim Morrison’s Lizard King on “Aura” and a dash of Joan Jett on “Manicure.”
Her reliance on past influences doesn’t drag down “Artpop.” This late in the game, pop stars can’t avoid homages to early icons. Her reliance on sounds we’ve heard from her and hundreds of other artists this decade, however, gets tedious.
The album retreads both the crazy, sexy, cool dance jams and ballads of “The Fame” and “Born this Way” (with diminishing returns) and played-out Top 40 trends. I don’t mind artists doing the same thing over and over — the Ramones, AC/DC and Grateful Dead made fine careers doing just that. But Gaga has hung her career on being an innovator, and “Artpop” is behind the curve. She’s only now getting around to bad hip-hop crossover attempts.
When not plagiarizing her own records, she’s using last year’s (and the year before that) EDM beats (see: “G.U.Y.,” “Swine,” “Mary Jane Holland”). We heard these same dubstep drops from LMFAO, then Rihanna, then Justin Bieber. Gaga should never chase Bieber’s sound.
But there’s not enough art or pop in “Artpop” to make it the milestone Gaga
I am sure these reviews are not pissing Madonna off like Gaga wanted.
She's italian right? I saw somebody having a meltdown like 2 weeks ago because she was releasing the same day that Gaga and thought she would block ARTPOP.
Although her song "Víveme" >>>>
She definitely will block ARTPOP yes despite the singles flopping.
What hype? 2 promo singles, 3 performances? And you call this promo? At least she is not fiming herself with a male prostitute for attention
Didn't she announce it a year ago already?
2 official singles + 2 promo singles
Performances at the VMAs, iTunes festival, X-Factor, GMA, Youtube awards...
Only 300k
And are you really coming for Justin with that prostitute story when Gaga was showing her saggy **** in the Marina Abramović video and her ***** in a club while performing
The fact that some people dragged 4's opening sales (310k in summer month) where radio basically pretended Beyonce doesn't exist.
And now you have Katy and Gaga, with their gazillion promo singles, months of hyping, pre-orders, +100 million of airplay and numerous TV commercials spinning their songs all day long, failing or opening in that same area in October/November.
ARTPOP is not a brilliant album. It has no hits – at least none at the level we’re used to expecting from Gaga. It’s an extremely cluttered record, and clutter is bad. Clutter is the opposite of clarity in music. It may mean that options kept proliferating when she couldn’t come up with a good idea. There is very little ‘cut through’ here, until you come to ‘Dope’, which is a fantastic track, super stripped down (how the album actually should have been if she was keeping with her rambling aesthetic) and expertly reduced by Rick Rubin. ‘Applause’ actually stands out as a decent track at the end, and considering that’s a pretty poor song, that says a lot about the company it’s keeping. There are flashes of Peaches and a lot of Kylie, especially on ‘G.U.Y.’ and ‘Sexxx Dreams’ (the latter of which has grown on me) with both songs musically referencing ‘In My Arms’ and ‘Get Outta My Way’. It’s these Calvin Harris-isms that Gaga is missing if that’s what she really wants to do. Get bloody Harris into the studio then. Other people are doing what she’s trying to achieve with these tracks far better. ‘Do What U Want’ is catchy but throwaway, and the less said about the atrocious ‘Jewels and Drugs’ the better.
Gaga has run out of ideas. That’s what it felt like in the run up to the record, anyway. I would have seen the ARTPOP title as almost a Gaga parody. After creating herself as a walking dancing piece of art, the natural thing would be to strip it all back, which she has done; nude make-up and nude nudeness. Unfortunately, the interesting thing about Gaga was actually the bells and whistles as ridiculous as they all were. As my friend Anthony said on Twitter “she’s lost the run of herself.” That might sound like Anthony is your granny, but there is a ring of truth to it: that she used up so many ideas and identities and alter egos so rapidly that there wasn’t much left to explore. Maybe she needs a reset button, or at least a lot of time out. Mind you, the Jeff Koons coverart is fantastic. A classic album cover.
Gaga has recycled a lot of ideas from other sources – as everyone does – but nothing is as cynical as the imagery she was producing in the run up to the album’s release which was purposefully anti-thematic, and therefore, you’d have to think, doesn’t mean anything at all, just a bunch of pretty pictures. That’s grand, but stop attaching greater meanings to stuff then.
Everyone can now see behind the "Burqa" of Gaga's creativity. Its all smoke and mirrors.
What about taking this empty cup and filling it up
With a little bit more of innocence
I haven't had enough, it's probably because when you're young
It's okay to be easily ignored
I like to believe it was all about love for a child
and thought she would block ARTPOP.
And you have the nerve to even go after PRISM...
