Chromatica and ARTPOP: an album vs. an era
TRIGGER WARNING: discussions of sexual assault and rape
Midway through April, little monsters across the Internet decided to surprise Mother Monster/entertain themselves by launching a brand new pro-ARTPOP campaign.
It isn’t the first time a passionate retroactive love for Lady Gaga’s third full-length album has spontaneously erupted from her fandom; the #justiceforARTPOP movement has sprung up semi-regularly since the record’s release with its initial tepid response from music journalists and the prevailing idea that the album was a “flop.” Gaga’s claim in 2012 that she had already planned and written an ARTPOP Act II has prevailed in the back of fans’ minds for nearly a decade, making the call for “justice” part of a larger agenda to remind the popstar that much of her fanbase has not forgotten her broken promise.
Cover of Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP
Despite the album’s lack of commercial success–at least “success” relative to Gaga’s record-breaking releases prior–and the mixed response from critics, ARTPOP remains a staple of Gaga’s artistry, encapsulating all the contradictions of her celebrity that fans have come to love: ambitious but messy, ironic but sincere, self-aggrandizing but self-conscious, art but pop. And yet with all this, ARTPOP is still not known, even largely by its own cult following, as being Gaga’s best album.
Don’t get me wrong, it has masterful highlights–“Aura,” “Venus,” and “Swine” all deserve praise as being some of Gaga’s best tracks to date–but much of the criticism lobbied against the record upon its release still holds true to this day: it’s not nearly as innovative as originally hyped, it feels lyrically rushed (you’ll never convince me “Free my mind ARTPOP/you make my heart stop” wasn’t a placeholder lyric that somehow wound up on the finished product), and overall it lacks the cohesion the high-concept album promotion implied.
When Gaga released “Stupid Love” in February of last year, critics and fans alike were thrilled to hear her return to the bombastic pop she had seemingly left behind in the transition from ARTPOP to her less-camp ventures (i.e., Cheek to Cheek, Joanne, and A Star is Born). The song and its corresponding video marked a reinvention that substantially built from the EDM influences and colorful world of her early career, but Lady Gaga as an artist and a person obviously matured in the seven years between ARTPOP and the start of her latest album era. When the album, Chromatica, dropped in May of 2020, much of the critical consensus centered around Gaga’s return to and improvement upon her original sounds–namely the sounds abandoned following ARTPOP’s perceived commercial failure.
On a purely aesthetic level, both albums are unabashedly pop. With Joanne, Gaga explicitly stated a desire to appeal to middle-America through the genre trappings of country-influenced pop and soft-rock, but ARTPOP and Chromatica use theatrics and highly-produced electronics to isolate a fanbase of fellow flamboyants. Elton John is invited–accessorized, of course, with autotune and a drum’n’bass breakdown on Chromatica’s “Sine From Above”–but ballads are not (the one exception being the electro-ballad, “Dope,” on ARTPOP).
Stylistically, however, there are plenty of differences between the two records. Chromatica is heavily inspired by 1990’s house music, giving the album a greater sonic cohesion compared to ARTPOP’s messy mix of influences from EDM to R&B to rock; but the biggest distinction maybe comes in the contrast of how each album deals with Lady Gaga’s personal trauma, even if those traumas are largely the same. Both records reference Gaga’s celebrity and her complex relationship to her image, and both feature lyrics that seem directly or indirectly inspired by Gaga’s survival of sexual assault.
It’s obvious through comparative songwriting how Gaga’s perspectives on these topics have evolved. “Swine” on ARTPOP is the first track in Gaga’s discography to explicitly address her experience of being “raped repeatedly” at 19 years old in an explosion of EDM and manic delirium. Though Chromatica doesn’t make such overt references to the specific trauma of sexual assault, the resilience of surviving trauma as a whole becomes a through-line theme throughout the album–most obviously on tracks like “Rain on Me,” “Free Woman,” and “Replay”–with the emphasis of these songs remaining on the resilience of surviving rather than the righteous rage of processing your pain.
These differences prompted many to uphold Chromatica as a matured, more adult version of ARTPOP and it’s become widely accepted that Chromatica is the better album. Just looking at Metacritic scores alone (which denote a general critic consensus by creating an aggregate of a project’s reviews and their ratings), Chromatica is the highest-scoring record in Gaga’s discography, sitting at an average critic rating of 79 out of 100, while ARTPOP (excluding two obscure remix albums) remains her lowest, both with its critic score of 61 and its user rating of 7.9 (for the record, Chromatica’s user rating of 8.5 does come behind The Fame Monster’s 8.9).
Still, even not far removed from Chromatica’s release and its ongoing(ish) promotion, ARTPOP has repeatedly overtaken Gaga’s latest album as a topic of conversation in little monster stan communities.
This started a little over a month ago when a producer on ARTPOP, DJ White Shadow, made an April Fool’s Day joke saying he would imminently be dropping ARTPOP’s unreleased track “Tea.” Fans, whether they took the claim seriously or not, reacted with glee to the mere mention of ARTPOP by someone connected to the project. Soon the #buyARTPOPoniTunes movement re-emerged eight years after the album’s release, sending the record to #1 on iTunes charts in 18 countries as fans began circulating a change.org petition targeting Gaga and Interscope to release ARTPOP Act II.
Though RedOne (a producer on Chromatica) began teasing an upcoming Chromatica remix album–allegedly featuring collabs from acclaimed pop acts like Charli XCX, Rina Sawayama, and Dorian Electra–hype around ARTPOP was and is dominating the Lady Gaga standom. Conversations have become so loud that even Gaga felt urged to address ARTPOP’s growing fanbase, eventually signing the change.org petition herself and composing a message on Twitter:
Despite its place in Gaga’s discography as a perceived flop, ARTPOP remains exceptionally relevant to the Gaga standom, even if this threatens the relevance of the Gaga album currently in its promotion cycle.
The reasons are complex.
Still from Lady Gaga’s “Rain on Me (featuring Ariana Grande)” music video
For one thing, though Chromatica is typically discussed in higher acclaim than ARTPOP, it isn’t unreasonable for any individuals to prefer the latter to the former. ARTPOP is regarded as somewhat of a mess compared to Chromatica’s praise-worthy cohesion, but that messiness bestows the album with some of its more noteworthy charms. It has lower lows than Chromatica–“Jewels and Drugs” being one of the most disgraced tracks in Gaga’s career–but accompanied with those are higher highs; “Free Woman” was called by many a “highlight” of Chromatica upon release, but that song evokes a less visceral excitement from listeners than some of even the most ambivalently-reviewed tracks off ARTPOP, like “G.U.Y.” or “Mary Jane Holland.”
The messiness of the album contributes, in some way, to the abundance of retroactive respect in our current era. ARTPOP is the album of a woman who’s just begun processing her trauma, the explorations of which are far from unproblematic. The single, “Do What U Want (With My Body),” for instance, was marketed by Gaga in 2013 as a clap-back at critics surrounding the “harassment” of “the artist,” but with lyrics specifically referencing abuse done to Gaga’s body alongside her decision to collaborate with famed-predator R. Kelly, the track can easily be read as a response to rape-related trauma with which Gaga disregards her victimhood by asserting that the pain inflicted onto her body can’t produce the same trauma to her spirit–“you can’t have my heart and you won’t use my mind/but do what you want with my body.”
Gaga essentially confirmed this connection of the lyrics to her assault in 2019 whilst condemning her collaboration with Kelly, writing on Twitter:
“I made both the song and video at a dark time in my life, my intension was to create something defiant and provocative because I was angry and still hadn’t processed the trauma that had occurred in my own life. The song is called ‘Do What U Want (With My Body),’ I think it’s clear how explicitly twisted my thinking was at the time.”
Comparatively, Gaga told Paper magazine a few months prior to Chromatica’s release,
“I still work on myself constantly. I have bad days, I have good days. Yeah, I live in Chromatica, it took a minute to get here, but that doesn't mean I don't remember what happened. So if you're in pain and listening to this music, just know that I know what it's like to be in pain. And I know what it's like to also not let it ruin your life.”
If ARTPOP is the album of a woman processing her trauma, Chromatica is the album of a woman who’s learning to heal from it. If we accept that all of us are experiencing the collective trauma that is this global pandemic, it’s maybe true that Gaga’s 2013 collection of chaotic angst is more apt to deal with where we as a society are emotionally than her 2020 album can accomplish with its relative emotional stability.
Chromatica’s “Rain on Me” was declared by The Guardian in November of last year as being “the song of 2020,” with music editor Ben Beaumont-Thomas writing,
“In the minds of anyone who listened to it, [‘Rain on Me’ is] about how bad 2020 is. ‘I’d rather be dry / but at least I’m alive’ runs the chorus – being thankful for not being dead was where we reset the bar this year, and it was thrilling to hear someone sing it so honestly.”
I agree with Beaumont-Thomas and admittedly spent a bit of last year considering whether or not to get select lyrics from the track tattooed on my arm, but there is something about the sentiment of resilience portrayed on “Rain on Me” and the rest of Chromatica that occasionally rings true more as an objective than a current reality. “I’d rather be dry but at least I’m alive” is a fine statement for now, but all the material effects of this pandemic have not yet been revealed to us and it’s impossible to heal from this mass trauma as we continue to collect it.
Chromatica represents where many of us would like to be on a journey of psychological clarity, but we–like Gaga on ARTPOP–are still stuck in the process of identifying all our wounds before we can start the process of understanding them. ARTPOP offers an emotional catharsis that’s allowed to be messy, but especially for longtime, die-hard stans of Lady Gaga, it also offers a kind of respite from the current world.
By “current world,” I’m only half-gesturing to the pandemic. Huge changes are occurring in pop music and obviously, the biggest challenge lately for artists like Lady Gaga has been the hurdles of physical promotion post-covid. Most dance clubs across the United States are closed (and the ones that aren’t should be), almost every planned tour and live event from big-name pop acts was postponed or canceled throughout this last year, and even normal video productions gained whole new onslaughts of hoops to jump through just to make a simple music video legally possible.
The promotion of Chromatica has clearly been affected. Interscope Records CEO John Janick told Billboard that Chromatica’s campaign was meant to involve “one of the best rollouts planned for an album ever,” but the travel restrictions and calls for social distancing which followed COVID-19’s spread across the planet caused most of Gaga’s and her team’s plans to “evaporate” before their eyes.
Lady Gaga performing “Just Dance” at the 2008 Miss Universe pageant
If you were to go back to the start of her career, it’d appear that Gaga’s debut was predicated on an apparent mission to perform anywhere and everywhere that would have her. Her 2008/2009 public appearances ranged in venue scale, from Saturday Night Live to the VMAs to random fashion shows to a local-radio concert outside an IKEA. By contrast, in 2020/2021, the promotion of Gaga’s latest album has been sparse, with interviews, videos, and live performances few and far between. Fans are so hungry for Chromatica-related content that literal cookies have become collector’s items.
These changes in Gaga’s album promotion cycle can’t all be blamed on the pandemic. Much of these developments, both with Gaga’s evolving celebrity as well as the pop industry’s output as a whole, have been steadily accruing over the last couple of years, long before any of us had ever heard of COVID or considered “social distancing” a globalized necessity.
Due to already-in-motion changes in music consumption, the stan-adored notion of an album “era” is slowly losing its potency. Artists can drop music onto streaming platforms whenever they want, with Beyonce being a pioneering example of a big-name pop act ditching the hype of album and single announcements for sudden “surprise albums” with little-to-no warning before a project’s debut.
The fact that listeners now consume media primarily through these platforms has altered the way consumers interact with music. Songs can gain traction just by winding up on the right Spotify playlist, making traditional promotion tactics (music videos, TV appearances, live performances, etc.) increasingly irrelevant, and the marketing mayhem that is TikTok can turn random songs into hits without the need for large single-driven marketing campaigns (examples being the sudden blow-up of Lil Nas X, the retroactive love for much of Doja Cat’s Hot Pink album, and Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts” becoming a charting single two years after its initial release).
For stan culture, though, album eras are still important. The term “stan” comes from the eponymous “Stan,” a song by Eminem about a fictional “biggest fan”-turned-stalker. Of course, stans in the modern sense are not stalkers, but their dedication to their chosen faves goes beyond a passive liking for their content. Standoms require interaction: Gaga’s named standom of “little monsters” don’t just watch Lady Gaga music videos, they watch everything–interviews, red carpet appearances, candid videos of her walking to her car, etc.–and they actively contribute to little monster communities to display their devotion, making gifs, offering commentary, calling Madonna fans old, etc.
It should be no surprise, then, that Chromatica has become such a large source of disappointment for Gaga’s most dedicated stans. ARTPOP is by no means an example of a Gaga era done perfectly well–as I discussed in my previous post on the album, the era was laden with unfulfilled promises, including and especially the tease of “act II”–but it’s maybe the best example of a Gaga era filled to the brim with shit to interact with. ARTPOP only produced two music videos within its campaign (a third was scrapped before completion), but throughout the era, live performances were kept in constant rotation. Gaga sang in a warehouse full of Jeff Koons sculptures upon the album’s release, rocked out with the Muppets in a “Holiday Spectacular” alongside Elton John and Ru Paul, let a girl puke on her at a Doritos-sponsored music festival, and performed the final event at New York’s iconic Roseland Ballroom, all before embarking on ARTPOP’s official promotional tour in May of 2014.
In addition to that, the Haus of Gaga (Gaga’s behind-the-scenes creative team) organized a press conference to display the “world’s first flying dress,” released their own interactive ARTPOP app for iOS and Android, and at one point claimed that Gaga would be the first artist to perform in space while Gaga embarked on a myriad of TV performances, interviews, and public appearances. I know that two paragraphs ago when I mentioned stans watching videos of Gaga walking to her car, I wasn’t making a great case for stans not being actual stalkers, but it’s important to note that Lady Gaga is an artist who utilizes such moments to add to her iconography, often wearing extravagant costumes as extensions of her performance art any time a photographer is near. This was especially true in 2013 while promoting ARTPOP. Case in point, this 2013 video of her leaving a hotel in London after a very strange interview with Miranda Sawyer:
The nostalgia fans have for ARTPOP doesn’t just represent the love they share for the album (but seriously: justice for “Mary Jane Holland”), it’s also the outcome of a changing pop landscape. Taylor Swift’s last two (non-re-released) albums were dropped within hours of being announced, while Ariana Grande’s latest was released within a month of announcement. Neither artist appears to have plans of a promotional tour and though we could easily blame that on the ongoing pandemic, the need to embark on a traditional marketing campaign was becoming less urgent well before 2020 or the spread of COVID-19. Ariana already released two albums within a year before embarking on her 2019 tour for either or producing a long-running singles-led campaign. In 2019, Selena Gomez was also publicly admitting that she wasn’t planning a tour for her then-upcoming Rare album before any public shutdowns were on the horizon. Rare wound up with an exceptionally brief marketing campaign, entertained for only a few months before Selena turned her attention to projects like her Rare Beauty makeup line and HBO Max cooking show.
This has all had a somewhat uncomfortable effect on the state of stan culture, something little monsters were once at the center of given the stan-in-mind output of Lady Gaga’s early career.
Until Chromatica, ARTPOP was the last pure pop album Lady Gaga ever released before the downfall of overexposure prompted her to course-correct into collaborative jazz albums and a new old-Hollywood-inspired public persona. Even with Chromatica’s in-spirit return of Lady Gaga to the dance floor, the current social landscape ridden with safety concerns in favor of social distancing means we probably won’t be returning to a physical dance floor for a little while longer–likely over a year after Chromatica’s release depending on your location–and the current pop landscape still leaves questions for what a big album campaign would even look like once we’re out of this Hell.
Despite Chromatica’s success as an album, ARTPOP still remains Gaga’s last great pop era. It is a messy album and by extension a messy time in Gaga’s career, but it makes sense that fans would succumb to that messiness at a time when we all feel burdened with the emotional chaos of this increasingly fucked up world. At least in 2013, when Gaga was reckoning with her trauma on stage, we could all flail around in the monster pit beneath her–as little monsters remedying our angst through Mother Monster’s electronic appropriation of her own.