Unfortunately, the production can’t keep up and feels chintzy rather than anthemic. “Gypsy” in particular seems destined to be a huge hit for her the pop hooks here stick their landing. The album recovers a bit toward the end with “Mary Jane Holland,” “Dope,” and “Gypsy,” but it fails to match its earlier streak. It sounds like an outtake from The Fame, and it shouldn’t have happened at this stage in her career. Produced by will.i.am, it’s repetitive, grating, and, worst of all, boring. This leads right into “Fashion!”-one of the worst things Gaga has ever put her name to. The ridiculous, diva-ish lyrics might make it at home in a gay club, but the appeal quickly wears off. Unfortunately, after this rather dynamic and interesting run, the album hits a brick wall with “Donatella.” It’s not that the song is bad, necessarily, just bland. Gaga has hinted that this particular song’s germination is rooted in some particularly dark occurrences in her life, but it’s a wonderful reminder that her sense of humor hasn’t been lost. As the track culminates, it even features vocals that seem to imitate Porky Pig. This track sees DJ WhiteShadow going for guttural, buzzy, ripsaw synths, some of which suggest pig squeals and grunts. It leads into “Swine,” another huge EDM stomper.
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With spectral and hypnotic production, it’s part manifesto, part love song. “Artpop,” the album’s centerpiece and namesake, is a highlight. I have trouble getting past the contextual baggage here. Kelly is a guest feature on the track and it seems a bit like possible “stunt-casting” on Gaga’s part, further complicating the sexual and power dynamics. However, some of those readings leave me deeply uncomfortable. Gaga claims to have written it in response to her critics, and while some of the lyrics bear this reading out, it’s also hard not to interpret a dark and troubling sexual scenario from the chorus: “you can’t stop my voice / ‘cause you don’t own my life / but do what you want with my body.” Like a lot of Gaga’s work, it’s a song that reveals several layers and invites multiple readings. The lyrics are yet another interesting examination of power and submission. It’s produced with great restraint and ends up sounding smooth and liquid cool. “Do What U Want,” on its surface, is a total winner. The resulting cocktail is cheesy but addictive, a song begging to be belted out with the windows down. “MANiCURE,” combines very 80’s guitar riffs with hand claps and cheerleader-ish shouts. “Jewels n’ Drugs” is Gaga tackling a full-on rap song and it mostly works, even if it feels like a digression for the pop star. Things stay strong for the next few tracks. It’s an intricately produced song, and with “G.U.Y,” it represents the album’s peak. Next up is “Sexxx Dreams,” a mid-tempo jam with verses that sound genuinely menacing, a perfect reflection of the mix of excitement and guilt suggested by the song’s themes of fantasized infidelity. It works, but really only through that camp lens. This sits alongside “Highway Unicorn” as Gaga’s campiest song to date, but “Unicorn’s” pairing of arena-rock with her queer sensibility made for a more dynamic and unexpected combo than this song, which is a spacy, synthpop, disco banger through and through. “Aura” gives way to “Venus,” which is big, messy (it’s Gaga’s first attempt at a primarily self-produced track), and incredibly kitschy. But that’s been neutered here, and it’s a mystery why. One of Gaga’s greatest qualities is how she takes the sheen of pop music-that focus-group tested, A&R concocted, assembly-line like “perfection”-and injects it with something surprisingly visceral and raw. The problem is that the song itself is only middling, and is a disastrous reworking of the leaked demo, which was about ten times more aggressive.
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It’s really an incredibly intelligent song-a metaphorical examination of identity, of intimacy and “nakedness” as signifiers of honesty and “realness.” Pair that with the cultural appropriation (the song makes mention of burqas and hinges on a play on the words aura/awrah), and you have a work destined to be polarizing. The song those lyrics belong to is “Aura,” which features abrasive EDM that propels its verses (a sample from Infected Mushroom) and oddly inflected vocals from Gaga. It’s ARTPOP’s version of hatching out of an egg at the Grammys. But for Gaga, it simply signals an iteration in a constant cycle of reinvention. Were this anybody else, such opening lyrics might ring with a bit of finality-the artist definitively moving to a new phase. “I killed my former and left her in the trunk on Highway 10” begins Lady Gaga’s new album, ARTPOP.