Monday Melodies: Lady Gaga – “Artpop” (2013)

When talking about Lady Gaga in 2019, you would think that she turned a corner. Following 2017’s stripped-down pop album “Joanne,” she went even further into the world of being taken seriously with an Oscar-winning turn in A Star is Born (2019). She had escaped the taboo of being the performer who satirized celebrity culture by wearing meat dresses to awards shows and doing everything to remain provocative. If you needed to understand how serious she was about everything, you simply just needed to watch her music videos. Any of them will really do. You’d think that we were getting a new era of Lady Gaga, one that was more polished and mainstream…

But, you don’t live in 2020. If anything can be suggested about her career, it’s that she never rests too long on one phase. She’s back into her surrealism with “Chromatica,” making music videos that can be described as neon-colored aliens dancing in the desert. Yes, Lady Gaga is going back to her roots, reminding us that even if we were able to appreciate her massive talents, she was still this weirdo who thrived in the house music world. 

Most of us just forgot because this Lady Gaga hasn’t been seen in almost seven years. It has been like a cicada, hiding out and waiting to unleash its true form on an unsuspecting public. While I will talk about “Chromatica” later in the week, I want to spend this column looking back at the album that served as the nadir of her image, something so broad and out there that it became the easy punching bag for anyone who thought that Lady Gaga was getting by on being provocative. “Artpop” was designed to be a shallow album, but those who weren’t on board had plenty of reason to guffaw at this exchange.

On one hand, I acknowledge how it played like a trainwreck in 2013. To read the description of the concept album is to find something that is secretly self-flagellating underneath the least serious mission statement imaginable. “Artpop” was a celebration of the “reverse-Warholian” trend where everything had this immaturity to it which meant we were basically listening to an album about human desires. As the titles alone would suggest, this was not one of a deeply political means, but one with deliberate surface value: “Sexxx Dreams,” “Jewels n’ Drugs,” “MANiCURE,” “Fashion!” and “Applause.” It was a tale of excess and one that fits with the image she had already contracted.

Her debut album “The Fame” was also about celebrity culture in a way that established Lady Gaga more as a satirist than a genuine pop star. With “Born This Way,” she never dropped the façade but found ways to get more personal within this structure. After all, it was an album that featured her head poorly photoshopped on a motorcycle. Those who were tired of her need to be out there likely were ready for the massive eye roll that was “Artpop” on mainstream society.

Which isn’t to say that it lacked this brilliant provocation. During her Born This Way Ball Tour, Lady Gaga was already at work on the album, conceptualizing and recording songs immediately after shows. When she was recovering from surgery, she took a deeper focus on in and quickly discovered what she wanted in an album she described as having a “lack of maturity and responsibility.” It clearly was a prolific period, as there were at least six times as many songs that didn’t make the final cut. Still, she pulled from artists like T.I., Too $hort, Twista, and R. Kelly, who all recorded their tracks separately due to limited availability. 

I guarantee that any artist worth their merit has an album like “Artpop,” which is one that is so ambitious that you can feel their personal desires breaking through. It doesn’t even matter that they make sense, but that we’re getting a genuine view of an artist who has been stuck on an upward trajectory. You have to go bigger every time out, and Lady Gaga decided to make the most of it, managing to find a cross-section between Greek and Roman mythology, paintings by artists like Pierrot and Sandro Botticelli and had a music style that featured everything from synth-pop to industrial, dubstep, techno, and R&B. If that wasn’t enough, her two-day album release party (dubbed ArtRave) would feature the TechHaus Volantis or an electric-powered hover vehicle that was sold as “the first flying dress.” It would also be released on an app, making it only the third in history. Oh yeah, and she promoted the album on a Thanksgiving Day special with The Muppets.

The flying dress

If this wasn’t the biggest gambit in Lady Gaga’s career, then whatever could it be? If you watch the music video for lead single “Applause,” you’ll immediately see what peak Lady Gaga looked like. Within minutes she takes on various art forms, clashing together in a collage of eye-catching imagery ranging from a clam bikini to disembodied heads. On one hand, it was the perfect way to describe the experience of consuming “Artpop,” though it was always going to be too avant-garde to ever be accepted by the masses. This was a pop star known for being self-involved reaching her most self-involved. Add in that the Madonna comparisons only doubled down on this album, and you get someone desperately looking for their own identity.

Here’s the honest truth: I find “Artpop” to be a massively interesting album. Maybe it’s even more compelling to research than consume. Still, in light of “Chromatica” being a house music album that’s more driven by personal emotion, it’s interesting to see this artificial lens that Lady Gaga is giving us in hindsight. While not a direct sequel, it fills in where “The Fame” left off, making the excess into this decadent comedy that is intentionally blunt. If you’re laughing and asking yourself “what is she doing?” then you’re connecting with the album in its preferred way. 

While it seems foolhardy to see pop music lack personal meaning, this has the benefit of being released during Obama’s second administration, in a time before things would get, ahem, very heated again. Narcissism and fun were more acceptable then.

This is the timeline where Lady Gaga was a key collaborator of Robert Rodriguez and Ryan Murphy: people more associated with schlock than high art. In fact, the opening song “Aura” was featured in Machete Kills (2013), where she starred as La Chameleón. Rodriguez would direct the lyric video for the song, and thus her outsider status was firmly established. If you ask anyone in 2013 if Gaga would ever be nominated for an Oscar, you’d probably laugh. How could you take her seriously when the whole point of her career at that point was that nothing really mattered?

The mission statement was very clear in “Aura.” Following a pre-verse about how she murdered someone and traveled along Highway 10 to start a career in Hollywood, CA, she would sing:

Do you wanna see me naked, lover?

Do you wanna peek underneath the cover?

Do you wanna see the girl who lives behind the aura, behind the aura?

The proposition is enticing, given that nobody still knows who the real Lady Gaga is. We’ve come closer to an idea, but following “Joanne” with “Chromatica” is a WILD left turn. Anyone who listens to this will think that we’re getting a deeper look at who Lady Gaga is, and the way that it sprinkles mariachi flavoring over her distorted voice at points makes it all the more mysterious like we’re entering a world we’ve never seen before.

Eh? If the album has any semblance of focus, it’s in breaking down its subject matter into sections. In fact, if taken as a concept album, the next song “Venus” suggests that we’re blasting off in rocket number nine to the most symbolically feminine planet in the galaxy, but with a fun disco beat. Then there’s “G.U.Y.” (or: girl under you), which continues to lay on the sensuality without a single subtle hint of irony. Lady Gaga is so earnest that it makes you realize that she’s trying to do what Madonna did with “Erotica,” which is break down our sexual desires to their basic core, finding humanity inside those decisions. 

Then there’s “Sexxx Dreams.” 

Boy, is there ever “Sexxx Dreams.”

“Sexxx Dreams” isn’t only titled that way for effect. It’s the moment that spawned “too much information” answers in interviews. The song is about dreaming of these intimate affairs with people. She doesn’t act on them but decides to tell the person about it. You can hear her pleading with desire as she declares “we’re both convicted criminals of thought.” Other times she rhymes “nasty” with “trashy,” and you can figure it out from there.

Still, because of this song’s subject matter, she has been known to discuss what she dreams about in these contexts. The most striking detail is that there are statues involved.

The issue is that because this album has such an underlying camp, it’s hard to appreciate when things got more serious. Of course “Jewels n’ Drugs” is supposed to be a lark, especially when it features a trap beat and three rappers hogging air time. “MANiCURE” is a fun punk-twinged number meant to be about the artifice of cosmetics. Even the choice to dedicate songs to Donatella Versace (“Donatella”) or the idea of looking good (“Fashion!”) all have this sense of self-parody that by this point has firmly established things as a joke.

Which is why it’s especially weird to go from “Do What U Want” to “Swine,” The former song features R. Kelly singing about how they’re each willing to give in to their lustful desires (“do what you want to my body”). It eventually had a version where Christina Aguilera replaced R. Kelly, but it still wasn’t enough to keep the song from being erased from history, especially following the Surviving R. Kelly documentary series that revealed his abusive nature. Though it didn’t help that the also now deleted music video was directed by collaborator Terry Richardson, whose sexual harassment allegations were just as bad.

Before she got her first Oscar nomination with “Till It Happens to You,” she spoke about her personal history with sexual harassment in “Swine.” It’s not a bad song, but given the context of this album, to make a song that uses the pig metaphor to a literal extent is a bit off. Where everything else is this joke about excess, we get this emotional moment whose deepest, most emotional revelation is:

I know, I know, I know, I know you want me

You're just a pig inside a human body

Squealer, squealer, squeal out, you're so disgusting

The intent is good, but considering how this album feels so full of ideas that a lot of it can be lost, to have it so close to a song like “Do What U Want” is a bit unfortunate. Sure it helps to explore the entire dynamic of a woman’s agency and sexuality, but given that we’re about to enter a quick run of songs about fashion designers, and it feels like the strangest interlude that you could possibly go for.

If there’s an issue with how this album is designed, it’s that we’re looking at Lady Gaga the artist clashing with more personal ideas that she wasn’t yet comfortable exploring as herself. Where something like “G.U.Y.” makes sense in this heightened farcical vision, songs like “Swine” and “Dope” are a bit confusing tonally. This isn’t to say that we should ignore Lady Gaga’s history of sexual harassment and drug addiction, but when she hits those high notes in “Dope,” what had been used previously as this winking satire now rings hollow like we’re not really singing about something serious. 

When she cries “I need you more than dope!” it feels like a joke when consumed in the nature of the story. On one hand, it could be read as a reprieve, a self-awareness that these consumer habits have gotten the best of her. In that way, it’s a perfect emotional beat. However, we’re entering the song “Gypsy” where she goes on about how great it is to be free and on the road. Then it all ends with “Applause,” whose whole point was that she “lives for the applause.”

You can understand why she wanted to drop the act for a while after “Artpop.” This was so obsessed with the concept that it was finding cracks into something more personal. Sometimes it was just these weird sex dreams, but others it was wanting to discuss real issues that impacted women. But how could Lady Gaga ever hope to be taken seriously on those matters when her album is about lacking maturity and responsibility? It’s the conundrum that keeps the album from ever being boring, even at its most unfortunate parts.

Truthfully, I think that having this album around for seven years keeps it from appearing flimsy to me. Yes, I am aware of how goofy it feels and that the elaborate focus on luxury is nonsensical. It’s an album about how reliance on materialism reveals something shallow about humanity. “Artpop” was supposed to combine everything into one grand vision. What it ultimately said was that while the sound could get bigger and the ideas more abstract, Lady Gaga needed a moment to find herself.

I’m thankful she found it. I personally think that as a general pop album, “Artpop” has too much going on not to appreciate. Even if there are moments that are frankly baffling (“Jewels N’ Drugs”), there are others that work as these vapid pop numbers. I personally think that “MANiCURE” is about as perfect of a realized song about cosmetics as she could ever produce. It has its ups and downs, but it reflects that she always had an ear for pop that keeps even the joke from growing stale. If anyone wasn’t laughing by the end, it was herself. 

Is it her best? I wouldn’t even think that it’s an obscure favorite unless you are into impressionistic paintings. That isn’t to say that I don’t love how ribald and self-effacing it is, maybe making one of the most unique pop album experiences of the decade. The songs that work here are wonderful, the others have their moments. It’s one of the best examples of an artist’s bubble growing so big that it’s about to burst. The choice to go out with “Applause” in that scenario feels like the perfect way to acknowledge it. Considering that she has expressed interest in revisiting the "Artpop" aesthetic in the future, one can't help but feel that this is a smaller piece of a bigger picture. What that is will be interested if, and when, it's finally revealed.