FEATURE:
The Digital Mixtape
The Lady Gaga Collection
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THE reason for…
PHOTO CREDIT: Domen & van de Velde
highlighting Lady Gaga is because her latest album, Mayhem, is out and receiving positive reviews. I wanted to use this Digital Mixtape to compile a selection of Lady Gaga’s songs. The best-known tracks and some deeper cuts. I am going to get to that mixtape soon. Before that, I wanted to include a review for Mayhem. This is what NME said
“When Lady Gaga first announced ‘Mayhem’ in January, she said it “started as me facing my fear of returning to the pop music my earliest fans loved”. She hasn’t literally tried to recreate the sound of 2008 – there’s no reunion with her ‘Just Dance’ producer RedOne – but Gaga has tapped into her old sense of excess. On her first proper pop album since 2020’s house-infused ‘Chromatica’, she dials absolutely everything up to eleven.
Gaga telegraphed her return to core values on recent single ‘Abracadabra’, a sinewy synth-pop banger that culminates in a truly ludicrous vocal hook: “Abracadabra, amor-oo-na-na!” Thankfully, it’s no red herring on an album that stomps out of the speakers with unselfconscious confidence. We get Gaga delivering a stuttering, ‘Poker Face’-style vocal hook on ‘Garden of Eden’, Prince-ish slinkiness mixed with punk on ‘Killah’ and the dark melodrama of ‘Bad’-era Michael Jackson on ‘The Beast’.
Longtime Little Monsters will find plenty of references to Gaga’s pop past as well. Take ‘Perfect Celebrity’, where she comes across as a battle-hardened version of the starlet she played on her 2008 debut ‘The Fame’. “You love to hate mе, I’m the perfect celebrity,” she sings, before an onslaught of lashing guitars remind you that Gaga’s stage name is a nod to a Queen song.
Co-producing with Andrew Watt (Rolling Stones, Post Malone) and Cirkut (Charli XCX, Rosé), Gaga infuses her bombastic dance-pop sound with stadium rock theatrics throughout. ‘Don’t Call Tonight’, an evocative and anthemic snapshot of a toxic relationship, is begging to be belted out in front of 70,000 lit-up smartphones. Then there’s disco-rap banger ‘Zombieboy’, where Gaga sometimes sounds a bit like a musical theatre kid channelling Blondie’s Debbie Harry – but just about gets away with it.
There’s a nonchalant confidence in the way Gaga sticks to her maximalist vision without pandering to contemporary pop trends. Most ‘Mayhem’ tracks run close to or over four minutes, making them mini-epics in the TikTok era. Only ‘How Bad Do U Want Me’, which has shades of ‘1989’-era Taylor Swift and Yazoo’s synth-pop classic ‘Only You’, doesn’t sound totally and thrillingly Gaga. ‘Die With A Smile’, her relatively restrained soft rock duet with Bruno Mars, is sequenced at the end like a palate cleanser after a feast of bold flavours.
Ultimately, ‘Mayhem’ feels like a great Gaga album because it’s just so much fun. At times, it’s a bit like reconnecting with an old friend who makes sense even when they seem to be chatting nonsense. When she sings “river in my eyes, I’ve got a poem in my throat” on ‘LoveDrug’, it’s just her overblown way of saying she’s sad and tongue-tied. Seventeen years after she broke through with ‘Just Dance’, Lady Gaga remains pop’s foremost agent of impeccably crafted chaos”.
I am going to wrap things up. One of the most original and influential artists of her generation, I wanted to mark the release of an excellent new Lady Gaga album. A look back through her career. Someone who has many more albums in her. If you are fairly unfamiliar with her work or are a huge fan, this mixtape should give you a thorough representation of…
A music great.