LADY GAGA

CIRCUS MAXIMUS

Lady Gaga revels in the overcharged excess that is Artpop

by Matt Ashare |  
Published November 20, 2013

The long, colorful, and mostly amusing lead up to the long, colorful, and mostly amusing celebration of the eagerly anticipated release of “Artpop” is, at last, beginning to appear as if it may indeed be winding down. The monolithically conceived and intensively promoted third album by the one and only Lady Gaga, “Artpop” reportedly had its genesis in a string of inspirations that hit Gaga only shortly after the release of her previous blockbuster, 2011’s multiplatinum “Born This Way.” As the title suggests, what she had in mind was a project of Warholian scope that would push well beyond the bounds of genre or even of music, encompassing everything from fashion and visual art, to music, technology, and, of course, social networking.

         If that sounds just a wee bit familiar, well, let’s just say that she’s not the first superstar to embrace naked blond ambition, and she’s not likely to be the last. And, if it also sounds kinda like an app, well, that’s because it is: feel free to download it and have your “aura” read. FYI: “Aura” also happens to be the title of the opening track on the album, which is pretty convenient for all involved.

         But, “Artpop” — or “ARTPOP,” because all-caps is bigger — is far more than just a slick aura-reading platform that allows Gaga’s burgeoning online community of fans (a/k/a, her “little monsters”) to chat, swap photos, and buy/listen to the album. It’s really just so much more, or so it would seem.

         Gaga geared up for her immersion into the brave new world of meta-marketing fame as product as commentary on fame as product, and so on, by convening her Haus of Gaga brain trust and seeking out several key partnerships in the larger world of art and pop. In 2011, she hooked up with controversial photographer Terry Richardson, which begat a transgressive book of photography simply titled “Lady Gaga x Terry Richardson.” He’s now supposed to be putting the final touches on film documenting the creation of “Artpop.”

In the last two years, Gaga has also struck up a friendship with controversial performance artist Marinia Abramović (I sense a pattern of controversy developing here). And, as the “Artpop” machine was kicking into gear in early 2013, she brought avant-garde stage director/choreographer Robert Wilson on board as an advisor, and, in a truly inspired bit of postmodernist mischief, recruited the eminently silly, neo-huckster sculptor Jeff Koons to create the larger-than-life size likeness of Gaga that adorns the cover of “Artpop.”

         If Wilson and Abramović have mostly been working behind the scenes to help the Lady hone her sense of Brechtian theatricality, then Koons, as he is wont to do, has happily thrust himself into the limelight in the multi-ring circus of the absurd surrounding “Artpop.” You might even say that he’s been elevated to something akin to partner status in the Haus of Gaga. One of his blue glass gazing balls — his latest line of works, based on and fabricated to resemble an apparently once quite trendy suburban garden ornaments — sits nestled between the thighs of the nude sculpture on “Artpop”’s cover, as it did at Gaga’s grand “ArtRave” party, a gala blowout at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on November 10^th that featured a characteristically bizarrely costumed Gaga performing amidst dancers, sculptures, and even a few musicians under looming banners that read “GAGA” and “KOONS” (in all caps, natch).

The Koons orbs were also on display at the two temporary “Artpop” boutiques — one in NYC, the other in LA — that opened last week. The stores, financed by makers of the video game “Just Dance 2014” (featuring two Gaga tunes), Interscope Records, and Dr. Dre essentially split the difference between art gallery and merch booth, with Dre’s headphones and plenty of Gaga gear on sale alongside displays of various “Artpop”-related works.

         In the wake of all the considerable fanfare, it’s almost uncomfortably easy to overlook the inconvenient fact that there’s actually an album called “Artpop” somewhere at the bottom of the marketing onslaught. The hour-long collection of 15 new Lady Gaga musical compositions even contains a few tracks we’re likely to be living with for the better part of the next two years. Indeed, the disc’s first single, the taut, tart, discofied party anthem “Applause” (released in early August), has already found its way onto “Now 48: That’s What I Call Music!,” a top-of-the-pops compilation that also includes Katy Perry’s “Roar,” Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop,” and Taylor Swift’s “Everything Has Changed.” A second single, the more soulful and sexual explicit neo-soul rave-up “Do What You Want” (as in, “You can’t have my heart/And you can’t use my mind/But do what you want with my body. . .”), made a somewhat smaller splash when it dropped in late October. But it does feature a winning guest vocal by R. Kelly, as well as a rather candid shot of Gaga’s prominent posterior. 

Clearly, much time and energy, not to mention a small stable of songwriters and producers (the Israeli electronica duo Infected Mushroom, a Russian-born progressive house DJ known as Zedd, and Mr. Will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas fame, are part of the impressively diverse cast of enablers), went into creating the album. And, yet, on some level it’s been relegated, at least temporarily, to a supporting role. Next to “Artpop” the event, “Artpop” the album seems like little more than a soundtrack to a much larger drama: the relaunch of Lady Gaga, international pop star extraordinaire, coupled with a massive reboot of Gaga enterprises. The spectacle is the commodity, which exists and is consumed independently of the object, in this case a lowly audio recording.

To put it another way, might have had just as much conceptual-art fun this time around if she’d taken her cues from John Cage’s infamous ultra-minimalist piece “4:33,” and released a blank CD. But, Gaga has many muses. As she’s quick to point out on the disc’s title track, a coolly percolating, sleekly stylized, synth-pop manifesto, “I tried to sell myself, but I am really laughing/Because I love the music, not the bling.” Of course, the central conceit of “Artpop” is summed up, to the degree that that’s possible, in the lines, “A hybrid can withstand these things/My heart can beat with bricks and strings/My artpop could mean anything.”

So, there you have it: read as much or as little as you like into the representations Gaga inhabits on “Artpop.” And there are plenty to choose from. The disc opens with a little spaghetti western acoustic guitar, with Gaga, in her best mock-gothic Vampirella voice, intoning, in apparent homage to the pulped fiction of Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” epics, “I killed my former and left her in the trunk on highway 10/Put the knife under the hood/If you find it send it straight to Hollywood. . . Hahahahaha. . .” The dark temptress of “Aura” quickly gives way to the electro-funk of “Venus,” an ultra-campy interstellar Barbarella romp replete with a planetary countdown that has Gaga playfully, if somewhat ham-handedly, rhyming “Uranus” with the catty aside, “Don’t you know my ass is famous.”

There are other obvious, and frankly futile, attempts to shock on “Artpop,” — from the gender reversal naughtiness of “G.U.Y.,” to the girlfriend-to-girlfriend flirtations of “Sexxx Dreams,” to the sweaty sex talk of the glam-rocking “Manicure,” which that plays on the not-so-clever revelation that, when she drops the “i.” it sounds like Gaga wants to be “man cured.” And there are a couple of needless diversions, like the gansta-lite of “Jewels N’ Drugs,” an uninspired collaboration with rappers T.I., Too $hort, and Twista, which seems to be Gaga’s way of saying that she can indeed roll like that.

But, “Artpop” is never lest than interesting, even when Gaga’s sorta trying to have her cake and eat it to, like with “Donatella,” a product-placement celebration of Versace’s reigning chief designer that also takes a swipe or two at couture culture. It’s just much better, and much easier to swallow, when she’s channeling “Let’s Dance”-era Bowie on the dancefloor with “Fashion,” an undulating ode to dressing up that has the easy complexity of Madonna’s “Vogue.” Or, when she’s going rogue diva like Cher in “Gypsy,” a straightforwardly anthemic dance rocker that eventually spots salvation somewhere in the general vicinity of Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” Or, when she get all earnest in the wounded piano ballad “Dope,” because the Lady can roll like that too.

“Artpop,” paradoxically amounts to an exhaustive, and exhausting concept album that refuses to cohere, a hybrid funhouse of mirrors, grooves, laughs, and horrors that really could mean anything, or nothing at all. The good news is that Gaga’s fascination with high-art constructs hasn’t diminished her instinctive passion for pop, only complicated it. “Pop culture was in art, now art’s in pop culture in me,” is how she boils it all down in “Applause.” Whatever. As she belts out more believably in the chorus of the very same song, “I live for the applause, applause, applause. . . Live for the way that you scream and cheer for me. . . I live for the applause, applause, applause. . .”