Album: Lady Gaga - Mayhem

Just the other day I overheard one of my kids watching a YouTuber called Nathan Zed and was instantly gripped. It was called “How Trying Became Cool Again,” and focused on pop cultural moments like Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl show, Doechii’s Tonight Show performance, Chappell Roan’s giant pink pony at the Grammys and Tyler, The Creator’s… well, just about everything.

His thesis is that in an era defined by laziness, whether in dating apps or AI generated art, people going the extra mile to express themselves matter more than ever, and this is why suddenly “theatre kids” are back on top in pop. 

The godmother of this vibe in the modern age is, of course, Lady Gaga, who has never created anything she didn’t immediately add a few extra layers of jazz hands on top of. She throws a spanner in the works, though, in that the more “theatre kid” she gets the more annoying she is: way too many of her records have been spoiled by Meatloaf-style musical theatre ballads, shooby-dooby swing jazz, and bizarre Bowie-via-Guy-Ritchie-era-Madonna “English” accents. She is someone who does one thing well – big, bolshy, camp dance pop with a goth / stadium rock edge – and much as one hates to tell an artist to stay in her lane, she’s a whole lot more enjoyable when she does. 

Thankfully that’s what she does here. She lifts ideas willy-nilly, from Yazoo, from Daft Punk, from Pat Benatar, from Michael Jackson, from Gwen Stefani and, hilariously, from herself (the gibberish-filled “Abracadabra” is more or less “Bad Romance” part two). The production crunches, fizzes and bangs in all the right places, the songs all aim for maximum impact in under four minutes, and Gaga is on fine form, belting it out for sonic impact not theatricality or overly-sincere emotion. For all that sonic impact, it avoids the over-compression and enforced rushes of EDM, and the ballad “Blade of Grass” when it comes stays enough with the air-grabbing soft rock vibe to fit. All in all it’s a ton of fun: respect to Gaga for sticking to what she’s good at… though of course, that doesn’t mean she’s being lazy, it clearly takes a lot of work to maintain an aesthetic this coherent across an almost hour-long album. Sometimes it's crass in its referentiality, but much more often the kaleidoscope of pop culture works just great, with her force of personality holding it all together. Even her dance pop is theatre kid to the bone, and it’s good to have it back.

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Listen to "Abracadabra":