To promote her new album, Lady Gaga has taken a comedy lie detector test, named her favourite British snacks and eaten increasingly spicy chicken wings on camera. It isn’t 2009 anymore; the rules for selling yourself are radically different than those that applied in an era in which you could throw together a shiny, semi-naked cover for Rolling Stone and then call it a day. Everyone, from Ariana Grande to Donald Duck, partakes in the hot-wings-and-short-form-video rodeo now. But there’s still something a bit jarring about Gaga doing it – eyebrows bleached, dressed like a wedding cake, dabbing the chicken sweats from her brow. Here is an artist who has spent years in the musical abyss, detaching herself from contemporary culture in the process, suddenly strapped into its most conventional churn.
Gaga, at one point in time the hungriest and most sonically thrilling performer of her generation, has benefited enormously from the landscape of critical poptimism that emerged in her wake. In an era in which even pop’s most staid acts – your Tate McRaes or Benson Boones – tend to inspire breathless critical appraisals, few have talked loudly about Gaga’s decade of diminishing returns. The milquetoast power ballads. The old-timer cosplay of her collaborations with Tony Bennett and Mick Jagger. The nonsense storytelling of Chromatica, her Covid-era album inspired by a fictional planet of “kindness punks” and repetitive dance music. The resulting impact of these uncomfortable, converging factors suggests that she got lost as an artist – eager to move past the electrifying freakiness of her early pop, but too nervous to push boundaries anywhere else.
