On "MAYHEM," Lady Gaga is Monstro StefaniGaga
album review of Lady Gaga's "MAYHEM" and a retrospective of her career
There’s no one in pop music quite as good in shapeshifting as Lady Gaga. Simply put, reinvention is her lifeblood. She first broke into the scene as an avant-garde pop provocateur, then she was a jazz chanteuse with Tony Bennett, and then she became an unlikely Hollywood darling. Each Gaga transformation brought forth a new aesthetic, a new sound, and a new philosophy to her artistry.
“She did that Tony Bennett record and won a Grammy. And then she pivots and goes and wins a Golden Globe for American Horror Story: Hotel. And then she pivots and does Joanne. And then she pivots and wins an Oscar for A Star is Born. That’s so cool, that ability to be so capable in so many different worlds. There’s so much dexterity to her career.”
- Taylor Swift on Lady Gaga, 2019
It’s this dexterity that made her one of the most compelling pop stars of our time, but also one of the most elusive. Longtime fans who fell in love with The Fame era Gaga of club anthems and excessive theatrics have long clamored for “old Gaga” to return. But Gaga has never been one to stay in one place for too long, and she has always been more than just a pop star.
She confessed she was singing jazz before her pop days, and she also claimed that she wanted to be an actor more than a singer. These statements seem difficult to reconcile for many Little Monsters, for her dance-pop persona has always felt like her truest self, and that Gaga is always destined to be a major pop star in every timeline.
So here comes MAYHEM, an album that feels like Gaga's most confident attempt to reintegrate her fractured identities. With years of flirtations with jazz, country, and rock music, high-profile successes and flops in cinema, and even an upcoming supporting role in the second season of Wednesday alongside Jenna Ortega, Gaga is approaching her career from a much different vantage point now.
Much like the themes of dual selves in the recent Oscar-winning film The Substance, MAYHEM is marked by a constant negotiation between two selves—“Gaga,” her artistic persona, and “Stefani,” the person behind all the spectacle and grandeur. Is there a way to respect the balance and let both shine, or would that only serve to neuter either, or even both, selves? What happens when fans can’t stop demanding the return of “old Gaga,” and how does Stefani fulfill that demand without sacrificing her artistic integrity?
In my opinion, Gaga has achieved a remarkable synthesis of Gaga and Stefani on MAYHEM, creating a cohesive body of work that is both a nod to her early pop days and an affirmation of her growth as an artist.
Gaga
It’s impossible to grasp the seismic phenomenon that was Lady Gaga circa 2009 unless you experienced it firsthand. With The Fame and its darker counterpart The Fame Monster, she changed celebrity culture and cemented herself as a mainstay in pop music. Iconic Gaga moments of that era were aplenty—bleeding on stage, wearing a coat full of Kermit the Frog dolls, and receiving awards whilst draped in raw meat.
This was the Gaga her fans first fell in love with—unapologetic, entertaining, and fiercely dedicated to her artistic vision. Sure, she was a bona fide hit-making machine (cue “Poker Face,” “Bad Romance,” “Just Dance,” “Paparazzi,” “Telephone”… you get the drill), but she was also simultaneously creating a whole universe beyond the music. She cultivated an army behind her: her beloved Little Monsters who were drawn to her fearlessness and empowerment. With a shared sense of rebellion between her and her fans, Gaga became the pioneer of the modern pop fandom. She weaponized the internet to forge a new type of undying paw-raising loyalty that would later be traced in K-pop fans, Directioners, and more.
Her 2011 album Born This Way further solidified her status as an icon of the misfits, with empowering anthems like “Hair,” “Marry the Night,” and the title track as love letters to underrepresented identities, particularly the LGBTQ community.
As Gaga ascended to global superstardom, the weight of fame inevitably began to take its toll on her. The first sign appeared in early 2013, when a broken hip forced her to cancel over 20 shows of her Born This Way Ball Tour. Then, her album ARTPOP was released later that year, but not without controversy. The media pitted her against Katy Perry, and Perry’s PRISM being the commercial juggernaut that it was meant Gaga was the “loser” of that rivalry. The public, once enamored with her theatrics, began to grow weary, labeling her as “too much.” And so began the journey of Gaga forging new paths for herself.
Stefani
In 2014, Gaga dropped a joint jazz album with Tony Bennett, presenting a starkly different version than her pop persona. Following this rebrand, she landed a gig to perform a The Sound of Music medley at the 2015 Oscars, and later released her 2016 album Joanne, an eclectic mix of country, rock, and Americana-leaning tracks. Beyond music, Gaga also found another dimension of artistic expression in acting, starring in the TV show American Horror Story: Hotel and the film A Star in Born.
I see these works as passion projects not for Lady Gaga, but for Stefani Germanotta. They served as outlets for creative expression for the person she was pre-fame (pun intended). Amidst chaos, she retreated inward and connected with the music she had loved as the New York City girl with big dreams. Embracing acting also allowed her to explore storytelling as another form of self-expression.
Despite these Stefani endeavors, the echoes of Gaga never fully faded. Her fans still craved pop star Gaga, and in 2020, she released Chromatica, a supposed return to her dance-pop brilliance. But Chromatica arrived at an awkward timing, dropping in the midst of a pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests in the United States. Personally, I found the album to be rather half-baked too, and ultimately a superficial attempt at a pop comeback.
Monstro StefaniGaga
- Lady Gaga on MAYHEM
With MAYHEM, Gaga has unleashed a whole new beast upon her fans, creating a musical experience that feels both familiar and new at once. It’s not a project that’s reverse-engineered to evoke Gaga of her glory days and bank on nostalgia to appease fans, but something that feels true to the spirit of both Gaga and Stefani.
Though comparisons to Madonna have followed her throughout Gaga’s career—once much to the former’s annoyance—MAYHEM makes it clear that Gaga’s influences stretch beyond female pop predecessors. The album revels in gritty pop soundscapes influenced by the likes of David Bowie, Prince, Nine Inch Nails, and Chic.
Tracks like “Perfect Celebrity” ride on the same synth-pop brilliance emblematic of pop Gaga but with a darker undercurrent. Lyrically, it’s an interrogation of the very fame she once chased so passionately. “Find my clone, she’s asleep on the ceiling,” she sings, referring to the Stefani-Gaga tension inside of her. “[When] I’m in a room with anyone, there’s me, Stefani, and Lady Gaga sleeping on the ceiling and I have to figure out which body to be in,” she explains in her interview with Zane Lowe.
“You love to hate me, I’m the perfect celebrity,” she snarls in the song’s grunge-inspired chorus. She’s calling out the public’s fickle relationship with celebrities and the cycle of idolization and backlash, yet it also feels personal. It’s Stefani singing to Gaga, confronting the artistic persona she has created that has both empowered and consumed her over the years.
On “Don’t Call Tonight,” she describes a similarly toxic relationship. “You pull me close and knock me down, then I beg to come back around,” she sings, painting a push-pull dynamic that fits this Stefani vs. Gaga narrative once again.
But MAYHEM isn’t about submitting to these psychological battles in her mind, it’s also about reconciliation and learning to exist in the fractures rather than trying to futilely mend them. Nostalgia-tinged power ballads like “Vanish into You” and “Blade of Grass” harken back to pre-debut Stefani, the determined New York girl singing on her piano every night with all her heart and might. “Vanish into You,” in particular, is a career highlight. She sings about an undying bond between two entities: some say it’s in memory of the late Tony Bennett, some think it’s for her fiancé Michael Polansky, but it might as well be about her fans, or maybe… Stefani and Gaga.
Then there’s “Abracadabra,” perhaps the most outstanding example on the album of Gaga “reheating her nachos” successfully, a term the internet has coined for reviving old musical ideas. “I would say that my nachos are mine, and I invented them,” Gaga declares when asked of the meme.
Gaga describes MAYHEM as a project born from fear, specifically the fear of returning to the pop music that defined her earlier career. She likened the process to “reassembling a shattered mirror,” where “even if you can’t put the pieces back exactly as they were, you can still create something beautiful and whole in a new way.” And therein lies the heart of MAYHEM—it isn’t a nostalgia excavation of Gaga nor is it Stefani trying to rid herself of her past, but a defiant and lawless clash of both Gaga and Stefani, even if they are at odds.
Truly, there is no trusted formula for merging these two selves into one. And yet, after nearly two decades of performing as Lady Gaga, this might be the moment where Stefani has never felt more confident to be her. She is happier now and ready to starting a family with her fiancé, and in this stability, she has learned to embrace the darkness that has followed her.
“Your demons are with you in the beginning and they are with you in the end, and I don’t mean it in a bleak way. Maybe we can make friends sooner with this reality instead of running all the time,” she explains of this “radical acceptance” she found while making MAYHEM. And that’s exactly why MAYHEM works so well. It doesn’t resist contradictions but thrives on the tension between them, reveling in the chaos where looking back and looking ahead collide.
And in that mayhem, a beast emerges. Monstro StefaniGaga is her name :)
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