In the spring of 2011, Lady Gaga, then twenty-five years old and on the cusp of releasing her second full-length studio album, “Born This Way,” did something unexpected—at least for a pop star of snowballing fame. I’m not talking about the way she’d shown up at the Grammy Awards that year, nestled inside a giant plexiglass egg that was paraded into the venue atop a rustic palanquin. By that time, Gaga was already notorious for pulling such stunts; arriving inside the ovoid vessel—which she later claimed to have slept in for three straight days prior to her Grammys performance, as a “creative, embryonic incubation”—was not even her most outré awards-show caper. (The year before, she’d attended the MTV Video Music Awards in an outfit made entirely of raw meat, a pungent provocation that managed to draw the ire of vegans and carnivores in equal measure.) The strange act I am referring to is a stint that Gaga did, for a little less than a year, writing a magazine column describing the inner workings of her creative process. The idea to do this was hers—she’d allegedly approached Stephen Gan, the editor-in-chief of the avant-garde fashion magazine V, with the pitch. Gan told the Times that Gaga required very little editing.
The six articles that Gaga wrote for V—she called them “Gaga memoranda”—are bizarre, fascinating, and often very funny pop curiosities that read like a cross between Diana Vreeland-esque stream-of-consciousness musings and an art-school thesis. With exaggerated hauteur, Gaga explains that she does not, ultimately, have to explain herself to anyone. She is her own greatest creation, sprung from her own forehead the moment she decided to stop being Stefani Joanne Germanotta, a precocious, piano-playing Catholic schoolgirl from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and started performing gigs around the Lower East Side wearing her stage name and not much else. “Lady Gaga” was a work of artifice, she conceded, but she’d come by the act honestly. “Art is a lie,” she wrote. “And every day I kill to make it true.” Her penchant for costumes and her “natural inclination to be grand” made her seem like a “master of escapism,” she added, but “Maybe I am not escaping. Maybe I am just being. Being myself.”
There is something delightful about Gaga’s arch, grandiloquent tone in these columns. She was flirting with a scholarly affect that was rarely present in her early singles, which were built for mass dissemination. Gaga’s first album, “The Fame” (2008), is full of loud, hooky choruses and often garish goofiness, including cheesy, fun lyrics that are easy to learn and impossible to forget. In the electro-pop banger “Just Dance,” she sings about losing her phone and “getting hosed” in the club before exhorting listeners to “Just dance, gonna be okay, da-da-doo-doot.” In her second single, “Poker Face,” she made a meal out of plosive consonants, repeating the phrase “P-p-p-poker face” over a thumping beat with winning propulsion. In “LoveGame” and in “Paparazzi,” respectively, she sang about taking “a ride on a disco stick” and being “garage glamorous”—phrases that were silly enough to be smartly infectious. By the time she released “Bad Romance,” in 2009, Gaga had proved that she could make a hit, through sheer bravado, out of little more than nonsense syllables. The supremely beltable refrain, “Roma, roma-ma / Gaga, ooh-la-la,” briefly freed us all from the pressures of logic. Gaga treated the irrepressible medium of dance pop as a jet pack to send herself, like a curious astronaut, to the outer edges of fame. Since her teen years, she’d been a student of celebrity, modelling herself, from the outset, after pop stars (David Bowie, Prince, Madonna) who had managed to remain in aesthetic flux. She read Warhol biographies, and throughout her “Fame” tour showed a video of herself playing a character called “Candy Warhol.” That she pulled all of her influences directly (and unsubtly) into her work was not, in her mind, a form of pastiche but, rather, a method of invention—or, as she put it in V, in characteristically grandiose terms, “The past undergoes mitosis, becoming the originality of the future.”
Gaga is thirty-eight now—a grande dame in pop years. She is no longer the enfant terrible of the recording industry but one of its most enduring institutions. And yet I found myself thinking again of her youthful columns as I listened to her new record, “Mayhem.” Both sonically and thematically, the record, her sixth solo effort (or seventh, depending on whether you count her “Fame” rerelease, 2009’s “The Fame Monster,” as its own entity), marks a return to what her fans call her “imperial era”—those inexhaustible early years when she was obsessed with becoming globally famous, and obsessed with dissecting what becoming globally famous meant. “Mayhem” is Gaga’s first major album in five years, and her first instantly lovable, bombastic pop offering in more than a decade. (Her last LP, 2020’s “Chromatica,” was, to be fair, a dance record, but one that adopted its overarching sound from the less accessible and more melancholy tradition of industrial house music.) “Mayhem,” despite its entropic title, is at heart Gaga’s happiest record, in that it feels, at long last, more like a celebration of her myriad talents than like another contested way station on her long march through the Zeitgeist. She’s been a stadium filler and a Super Bowl halftime act but also a film actor, a TV-soap star, a fan-dancing representative at the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics, and an ambassador between pop music’s old guard (as seen in her warm collaborations with Tony Bennett and Liza Minnelli) and its new stars. In her musical output, she’s lily-padded from genre to genre, from the techno-ish “Artpop” (2013) to the stripped-down, country-twanged “Joanne” (2016) to the almost nihilistic crunch of “Chromatica.” “Mayhem,” in its buoyant, carefree way, feels like a respite from the relentless hard work—though in its unforced ease it also reaffirms that Gaga is one of the hardest-working people in the business.
“Mayhem” is, it must be said, a project full of self-citation. It is new Gaga music that channels old Gaga music, pulling from a bag of tricks that she has arguably helped to define: nonsensical chanting (in the chorus of “Abracadabra,” “amor-ooh-na-na” is a wink at “Bad Romance”); syncopated, buffeting choruses (as in the “Poker Face” callback “Garden of Eden,” in which she sings, “I’ll t-t-t-take you to the Garden of Eden”); and songs that critique the insidiousness of fame, among them “Perfect Celebrity,” a grungy, insouciant kiss-off that Gaga has described as the “most angry” song in her catalogue. (“Choke on the fame and hope it gets you high / Sit in the front row, watch the princess die.”) Somehow, Gaga’s rummaging through her own past for inspiration—alongside her main producers, Cirkut and Andrew Watt—has yielded the freshest collection of songs she has released in years. Perhaps her past has undergone enough mitosis to morph into future originality. Or perhaps, as we careen toward another possible recession and whatever further chaos the current Administration will inflict, we are ready for big, juicy, showy hooks again, the kind that overwhelm the brain with dopamine and the hips with a need to move. I cannot listen to “Killah,” the exuberantly funky, bass-slapping track that Gaga made with the French d.j. and producer Gesaffelstein, without smiling and bopping my head. Or perhaps, as Gaga has said over and over again on her indefatigable press tour for the album—which has seen her gnaw chili wings on “Hot Ones,” hold a private Spotify press conference in Greenpoint for her devoted Little Monsters fan base, and do double duty as the host and the musical guest on “S.N.L.”—she is finally making pop music from a place of devotion rather than domination. After all, Gaga is in love, engaged to a philanthropist named Michael Polansky, whom she croons about in the album’s penultimate song, the ballad “Blade of Grass.” (He is credited as a co-writer on several of the album’s songs, and Gaga has said that it was he who advised her to go back to making pop music.) For the first time, Gaga, whose many years of queenly isolation led her fans to dub her Mother Monster—the patron misfit of the misfits—is publicly discussing a yearning to start a family, retreat from the grind, loosen her vise grip on persona. In V, she’d written, “I am a show with no intermission.” Now she is talking about how the chasm between her public commitments and her private life led her to experience “psychosis,” such that she was no longer able to distinguish what was real. I’ve found it quite moving to hear her talk about how she knew that Polansky was the right partner because he simply “wanted to be my friend.”
This is all to say that the current Gaga is, ostensibly, a different—and far more relaxed—artist than the one I encountered when I met her for a New York Times Magazine profile back in 2018, when she was promoting the film “A Star Is Born” and in full-on Oscar-campaigning mode. At the time, she was playing the role of the ingénue movie starlet; when I met her at her Laurel Canyon offices (which, in studious Gagaian fashion, were situated inside the bohemian former home of the experimental-rock pioneer Frank Zappa), she wore a Marilyn Monroe-ish wiggle dress, cherry-red lipstick, skyscraper heels, and a sculpted platinum coif. In one room, she had hung a still of her crying face from the last scene of “A Star Is Born,” blown up so large that it barely fit on the wall. She was hyper-attuned to the mannerisms of a capital-“A” actress while never quite seeming as embodied off the screen as she did on it. (I still consider her turn in “A Star Is Born” to be one of the great début film performances of our era.) I could sense, from our conversations, how much effort she was putting into her prestige transformation—and also how little fun she seemed to be having.
I worried, at first, when I heard that Gaga was calling her record “Mayhem,” that it might not be all that much fun, either. To be honest, I thought that the title might be another marketing push for “Joker: Folie à Deux,” Gaga’s third film and her biggest critical flop to date, in which she plays the anarchic DC Comics antiheroine Lee Quinzel (a.k.a. Harley Quinn), a character whose animating passion is to wreak mayhem wherever she goes. That film was a distressing misstep for Gaga, not because it was a campy mess (she was the best part of the campy mess “House of Gucci,” after all) but because it was so dismissive of her natural charisma. Gaga’s co-star, Joaquin Phoenix, allegedly encouraged her to sing poorly for much of the film, robbing her performance of one of its potential pleasures. Gaga barely gets to sing or dance or even chew scenery in the film; her smile looked convincingly painted-on throughout. Fortunately, Gaga’s musical entanglement with the “Joker” sequel ended with “Harlequin,” her polished but snoozy tie-in cover album of jazz standards. “Mayhem” is not a reference to an external chaotic force wrought by a pigtailed imp but, instead, to an internal tension that Gaga claims to wrestle with daily—between the past and the present, candy-coated pop and more esoteric experimentation, the person and the disguise. To Gaga’s credit—and to the credit of that twenty-five-year-old girl writing strident columns about how art is a lie—she has never tried to assert that she is more herself now than she was before. In a recent interview with the Times, she said, “I was authentic before. That was authentically me. I just was authentically splitting off into different personalities all the time.”
Last weekend, delivering an opening monologue as the host of “S.N.L.,” Gaga, riffing on her age, joked that “most pop stars are over forty: Chappell Roan is fifty-eight, and Charli XCX, she’s seventy-five. Tate McRae . . . is my biological grandmother.” This was meant as commentary on the music industry’s cult of youth, but it also made me think about Gaga’s larger relationship to her pop-star successors. Members of a generation that’s been addled by the internet’s intrusions since birth, many of them seem much less bullish about chasing mass appeal. Roan has been vocal about her struggles with fandom, cancelling shows for self-protection and using awards speeches to call out the industry’s lack of care for its talent. Charli XCX sneers at fame’s conflicting demands all over “BRAT,” with much more open anxiety than Gaga has yet been willing to reveal. (On “Perfect Celebrity,” Gaga sings, of resurgent pressures in the age of Ozempic, “I look so hungry, but I look so good”; Charli XCX, says, more searchingly, on “Rewind,” “Nowadays, I only eat at the good restaurants / but, honestly, I’m always thinking ’bout my weight.”) Gaga herself seems to be inching toward a philosophy of self-preservation, perhaps encouraged by her younger counterparts, who may indeed be her elders in this regard. But where Gaga still feels dominant—and nearly untouchable—is onstage, where she gives everything, every time, sans fear, sans wobbling. On “S.N.L.,” she staged a dynamic version of “Killah,” spinning on the studio floor like a break-dancer and stomping through various hallways before exploding onto the main stage to perform in a red spangled leotard. Both her pelvic gyrations and her outfit nodded to Liza Minnelli, another performer who always gives of herself utterly. Gaga ended the song with a primal scream, her eyes wide and unblinking. “Mayhem” may have emerged from a softer, wiser Gaga, but she is still hitting hard where it counts. ♦
