Artpip no art10/24/2022 ![]() ![]() The album teases with promises of candor. Kelly joins her to sympathize about the “crazy schedule, fast life” of a fellow star before he offers his come-on. 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. Now with “Artpop,” Lady Gaga turns oddly defensive, reacting to her endless media brouhaha instead of leading it. 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. In songs that juggled Christian imagery and pagan rocker, Lady Gaga piled on vocal bluster and musical excesses remembered from decades past. Then her 2011 “Born This Way” made its predecessors sound temperate. 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. 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.” 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. It’s a portrait of a pop star by an art star - but it’s stiff and detached. 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. 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. 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.īut “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. 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. Like the best pop stars, she made the mass media her gallery space. When she emerged, Lady Gaga didn’t separate pop culture and art. ![]() As strong as her commercial imperatives were, they only emboldened her nutty streak. 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. ![]() ![]() 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.” 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. #Artpip no art full#Lady Gaga the relentless is back in full force on “Artpop” (Streamline/Interscope), her third full-length studio album of new songs. ![]()
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