Vanishing Into MAYHEM

Mother Monster’s seventh album is here. It’s dark, it’s danceable as hell, it’s a return to form – for better and for worse.

Did you hear the news? Recession pop is back, baby! Sure, there’s evil men running the world, and everyone’s skint, but at least there’s the club! Over the last couple of years we’ve seen album cycles hearkening back to this bygone era of music: Chappell Roan’s DIY drag; Charli xcx’s sleazy party girl; Shygirl’s DJ cosplay. We’re all scared about the state of the world, so – as we did in 2008 – we’re turning to music to help us forget.

A foundational song of the recession pop era, ‘Just Dance’ by a then-emerging Lady Gaga is one of the all-time great pop songs – the iconic intro! The hooky chorus! The pre-bridge breakdown! – whose lyrical complexity begins and ends at the title. The song’s key appeal, then, aside from the club-ready production, was Gaga’s performance. With theatre-kid melodramatics (as befitting her Tisch upbringing), Gaga sang about a night out with giddy ecstasy and made us feel like we were right there with her getting shit-faced and losing our keys under neon lights.

Just as recession pop’s made a comeback, so has the bass-led Europop of Gaga’s earliest and most beloved work; indeed, many reviews of her new album MAYHEM bill it a return to form for an artist more recently known for her acting turn in the disastrous Joker sequel and not one but two (!) jazz albums in the last five years. While MAYHEM is undoubtedly a return to the dance-first approach that Gaga made her name off, it lacks the bite or innovation of those earlier projects. It’s a return to form, sure, in that it’s still fun and the beats still go hard. But at points, it just feels like facsimile.

To craft her latest venture into pop, Gaga and co. go headfirst into banger territory. In particular, the four-track run that opens MAYHEM is a masterclass in making pop hits. Lead single ‘Disease’ is fuelled by relentless bass passages, its feet on the gas and its hands in the air. ‘Abracadabra’ is similarly brutalist with its bass, and resembles classic Gaga most closely with its nonsense chorus and choreo-oriented video. ‘Garden of Eden’ reaffirms that Gaga is at her best when she’s making religion sexual again, and ‘Perfect Celebrity’ claws out of its chilly intro to deliver an arena-rock dispatch from Gaga’s penthouse.

At face value, these are great songs: catchy, danceable, well-performed. But, aside from a few production flourishes, they also sound like they could’ve been on The Fame Monster, Gaga’s 2009 magnum opus. That’s the catch with trying to replicate past success; like a sequel to a beloved film, it’s impossible to recapture the magic or the shock value.

Sometimes Gaga inadvertently reminds you of bigger, better songs – ‘Don’t Call Tonight’ just makes you wish you were listening to the other song about declining someone’s calls – and at other points just goes for out-and-out imitation, as she does on the chorus of ‘Abracadabra’, which recalls a certain intro. (She even throws in a ‘Gaga’ among the nonsense words, for old times’ sake.) References to hitting the lights, meeting her on the floor and putting your paws up abound. Recycling is good for the environment, sure, and sometimes reheated nachos taste great. But there’s a point where they’ve been microwaved so intensely that they just become stale, and Gaga comes dangerously close several times on this record.

For an artist as chameleonic as Gaga – and for an album that is literally titled MAYHEM – these songs, relentlessly fun as they are, feel unambitious and unchaotic. Born This Way was defiantly queer; ARTPOP was experimental (and, dare I say, ahead of its time). Even Joanne, widely considered her weakest record, was at least trying something different. MAYHEM is the first Lady Gaga album to feel like ‘just another Lady Gaga album’.

To clarify, ‘just another Lady Gaga album’ is a very good thing. I speak on behalf of the gays when I say I could listen to Gaga read out her shopping list over a RedOne beat and still eat it up. And as a music critic (albeit an aspiring one), I will assert that what these songs lack in originality, depth and innovation they make up for in sheer amounts of fun. Despite what she would have you believe, Stefani Germanotta is first and foremost a pop artist, and MAYHEM is largely a reaffirmation – a flex, even – of how excellent a constructor of pop melodies she is.

Aside from the stellar four-track run previously mentioned, there are several pop smashes waiting in the wings. ‘Zombieboy’ is a glittering roller-disco romp and ode to model Rick Genest, and is probably the strongest album track here, its funk guitar passages burying themselves in the mix like hands in a lover’s back pocket. ‘Killah’, meanwhile, dazzles with Gaga’s Prince-like melody gliding atop a Nine Inch Nails-esque beat – and it’s produced by Gesaffelstein! I’m sat! I’ll even forgive ‘LoveDrug’ for being cornier than a cob with its lyrics, simply because of the tasteful AutoTune deployed beneath the electro-pop synth passages.

It’s a shame that Gaga’s lyrics are especially weak here – the chorus on ‘How Bad Do U Want Me’ is egregiously 2014 Tumblr – because previously she always had something to say. On The Fame it was, well, fame. On Born This Way, it was queer liberation. Chromatica – stick with me here – might be her most lyrically dense album to date, a tapestry of anxieties and mental health battles wrapped in a dance-pop bow. What’s MAYHEM about, you ask? Well, ‘Disease’ is about sex. ‘Garden of Eden’ is about being at the club. And that’s… it, really. The album sort of flits between those two.

That isn’t to say that albums about sex and partying can’t be lyrically intriguing: see Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE (NOTE: CAN PEOPLE STOP TITLING THEIR ALBUMS ALL IN CAPITALS). But where Beyoncé’s record about sex and partying was a glittering disco epic paying homage to the Black roots of dance music (not to mention the Black and Latino ballroom subcultures) as well as her late Uncle Johnny, the lyrics of MAYHEM feel like an afterthought, just another musical component serving the grander electro-pop picture.

That’s all well and good when the music slaps (gun to my head, I could not tell you what ‘Abracadabra’ is actually about, but God forbid I won’t lose my shit when that comes on at the gay club), but when the production slows down and becomes less interesting towards the end of MAYHEM the lyrical flaws become more obvious. ‘The Beast’ in particular drags sonically, and its lyrics mix the central werewolf metaphor to the extent that you worry she’s singing about bestiality. It all ends up getting a bit confused.

If the album has a theme beyond sex and clubbing, it’s the idea that love will save the day – as evidenced by the placing of its lovey-dovey ballads at the end of the tracklist – which would be a lovely sentiment if we hadn’t heard it a thousand times before. It’s all well and good that Gaga is happy in her relationship (the story behind ‘Blade of Grass’ is truly the stuff of romcoms) but as Justin Bieber showed us in 2020, romantic bliss doesn’t thrill so much as it bores.

It's why ‘Perfect Celebrity’ – the one song on the record where Gaga ventures out lyrically – is the most interesting to analyse. Her comments she made on The Fame are updated with a new, hard-won perspective, and even if she doesn’t make any strikingly new observations it’s a thrill just to hear the words coming from her mouth. Her candour here, like it was on Chromatica, is refreshingly welcome, and it’s a candour that the remainder of the record sorely lacks.

But in a world where authenticity is in (see: Taylor, Gracie, even Charli), is that something we even want from Gaga? I’d argue in the affirmative, but I’ll admit that I don’t rush to spin a new Gaga record to hear what latest gossip or personal drama she has for us. I’m here to dance, and MAYHEM makes sure that you’ll dance, alright. It’s like a homecoming for Gaga; from her very first song, she was instructing us to ‘just dance’. Indeed, MAYHEM, if it’s not all that thematically engaging or sonically experimental, has me fooled – like the very best of recession pop – into thinking that it’ll be okay. (Da-da-doo-doot-n.)

7/10