‘Artpop’ by Lady Gaga: conventional pop turned chaos
If we were going to try to declare some holy trinity of flop pop albums, it’d be hard to exclude Lady Gaga’s 2013 creation, ARTPOP.
This notion might bring some controversy; “little monsters” make up a huge percentage of stan culture, and stan wars are predicated on standoms constantly competing to prove the superiority of their respective celebs. Sometimes they do this by arguing for their fave popstar’s artistic merit and talent, but usually that’s just a fallback for when said popstar isn’t doing super hot on the charts. Standoms are empowered with their star’s success, so not only do you not want your favorite singer to flop, you might even deny when they do. That’s why a lot of Gaga stans will, to this day, claim that ARTPOP (a.k.a., “artflop”) wasn’t a flop. It was.
This post is going to be pretty long, partially because the history is extensive due to Lady Gaga’s immense celebrity, and partially because ARTPOP gives us an opportunity to explore what a flop is.
We should first acknowledge that there are no set standards for what makes someone or something a “flop”–a concept that is culturally defined where the characteristics waver with every prominent example. A flop album should seemingly be defined as an album that doesn’t sell many copies, but that can only be relative to an artist’s previous work or the expectations of success. Is the 2015 album, Emotions, a successful indie record with widespread critical acclaim, or do we evaluate Carly Rae Jepsen’s success on the cultural explosion of “Call Me Maybe”?
Yes, as many little monsters will defend, ARTPOP did debut at number one, and yes, it was internationally the ninth best-selling album of its year, but that can’t prove the album’s success because success is subjective. ARTPOP might have sold more copies than a vast majority of musicians could hope to sell in a lifetime, but at 258,000 in its first week, its sales were pitifully lower than her previous album’s debut of over one-million. That album’s success doomed ARTPOP in more ways than one.
See, in the first 4-5 years of her career, Lady Gaga didn’t take a break. Her first album, The Fame, dropped in August of 2008, about a month after the explosion of her second single, “Poker Face.” That album’s tour, The Fame Ball, started the next year in May, then ended in September. One month later, she dropped a new single, “Bad Romance,” followed by an EP, The Fame Monster. By November 2009, she was touring again. The Monster Ball tour ran up until May of 2011, but the first single for her next album dropped in February. On May 23rd, a whole 17 days after wrapping up her last big release’s international tour, Born This Way, the album, debuted at number one with the highest first-week sales the US had seen in five years. The Born This Way Ball tour started in April of 2012, lasting a little under a year before being cut short by a traumatic hip injury that (among other things) has caused Gaga chronic pain ever since.
It’s imperative a celebrity stays within the public sphere enough to be “relevant,” but there is such a thing as overexposure—especially with women. If you’re on people’s TVs for too long, they’ll get sick of seeing your face, and then they’ll hate you–waiting for you to make one or a couple small slip-ups that can be re-contextualized into seemingly cancellable behavior.
For those first 4-5 years of Gaga’s career, she never went away. When she wasn’t releasing a song or album, she was making music videos or embarking on a new tour. By the spring of 2012, the general public had gotten somewhat of a break from her–the big promo for Born This Way had settled and the last single dropped nearly six months prior–but stan forums (even if the term “stan” hadn’t caught on quite yet) were still bombarded with her image because Little Monsters continued flocking to her shows and uploading their fancams (even if the term “fancam” hadn’t caught on quite yet). When Gaga broke her hip, certain sections of Twitter and Tumblr (we used to go there) were elated; “flopga” was finally falling. It seems like just a weird conspiracy theory now, but at the time, the accusation that Gaga was faking her hip injury due to low ticket sales was fairly widespread on stan forums.
By the time ARTPOP’s first single, “Applause,” dropped, whole communities were rooting against her, especially other standoms. Madonna stans had been vocally critical ever since the release of Born This Way’s title track, and many prior to. The stans of Tumblr queen, Lana Del Rey, were also turning after the leak of Del Rey’s unreleased song, “So Legit,” which aimed some obvious shade at Gaga–lyrics like “Stefani, you suck/I know you're selling 20 million/Wish they could have seen you when we booed you off in Williamsburg.”
Gaga’s marketing didn’t help as she began promising coveted prizes to the two fans who promoted her new album’s lead single the most, leading many to buy multiple copies and cry “Buy Applause on iTunes” so much it became a meme.
The campaign screamed desperation–a Justin Bieber’s “Yummy” kind of desperation–but despite its efforts, “Roar” by Katy Perry still had better sales. Even if Gaga and Katy swore they had no interest in competing with one another, the general public, and especially the standoms, saw things differently. Not only could Gaga not outsell herself, she couldn’t outsell most of her contemporaries. This would be made eventually worse with the fact that ARTPOP, the album, sold less in its first week than Katy Perry’s Prism, Miley Cyrus’s Bangerz, and Beyonce’s self-titled.
“Applause”’s live debut at the 2013 VMAs also brought mixed feelings. While it was highly praised by critics, it failed to live up to the standards Gaga had inadvertently set for herself years prior with 2009’s “Paparazzi” performance, 2011’s “You and I” performance, or even just Gaga’s 2010 attire. But this was maybe the point. During the “Applause” performance, Gaga stands on stage, her face inside what looks like a blank canvas and a track of boos playing behind the introductory instrumentals. It was intentional; Gaga knew the audience was turning against her.
This became somewhat of a theme ARTPOP’s initial promo. The day “Applause” officially dropped, so did a video on Gaga’s YouTube, called “LADY GAGA IS OVER: A FILM BY HAUS OF GAGA,” where audio boos again and subtitles flash statements like “Lady Gaga is no longer relevant” and “Ever since Born This Way, she’s a flop.” A few months later, ahead of the release of her single, “Do What U Want (With My Body),” Gaga let loose on Twitter:
Little monsters, for the most part, loved these tweets and hailed them as Gaga standing up for herself against relentless scrutiny; those outside of her standom saw it as Gaga cracking under pressure and flailing under the spotlight she herself had created. 2013-2014 is viewed by many as her “breakdown” era. Even if ARTPOP had been a raging commercial success, there’s a chance it would still be considered a flop just due to the weird public behavior surrounding it and how it effectively damaged Gaga’s overall image.
Gaga was at odds with her fame, and this conflict produces both the best and worst aspects of the album.
ARTPOP is supposedly about conflict, the name in itself a reference to pop-art, a movement injecting pop culture and commercialism into more traditional forms of art, often through ironic reproductions of what would be considered “low-brow” entertainment. Pop-art informed much of Gaga’s early work, especially in The Fame’s era, but with ARTPOP, the exploration was more explicit. She called it reverse-Warholian–as Andy Warhol had brought pop into art, Gaga wanted to bring art into pop.
Whether or not she accomplished this is still up for debate, but no one can argue, her attempts brought more chaos into her work than ever. When the album debuted in November, reactions were tepid. Few critics outright panned it, but much of the consensus challenged its lack of cohesion and many claimed Gaga’s vision seemed confused. Some tracks, like “Venus” or “Swine” were further left-field than her more radio-friendly hits; however others, like “MANiCURE,” operated mostly as pop filler next to the album’s more interesting efforts.
As much as Gaga upheld the “hybrid” nature of the music, very few of the album’s tracks seem to achieve “art” and “pop” simultaneously, prompting Sean Daly of Tampa Bay Times to call the album an “identity crisis.” Robert Copsey of Digital Spy further stated that many of the tracks sound “half-finished,” and half-finished just about covers it. I have questions, personally, concerning how complete the album actually was by its release. Producer on the record, DJ White Shadow, said of their writing process, “We never work on one song and finish it and move on. They all get worked on in rotation until literally the day we have to turn it into Interscope.” When Gaga initially premiered the songs at the iTunes festival a month before ARTPOP officially dropped, many of the songs performed on stage were slightly different from the tracks that appear on the album: “MANiCURE” had a completely different chorus, “Sexxx Dreams” had a different bridge, and the song that would become “Dope” was performed under a different name with substantially different lyrics, alternatively called, “I Wanna Be With You.”
Some of this may have been intentional, a way for Gaga to give fans a preview of the album without revealing too much and keeping the eventual release fresh, or the album just wasn’t quite done yet. That would at least explain some of the cringe lyrics. The title track contains possibly the worst two lines on the entire record: “Free my mind, artpop/You make my heart stop.” “G.U.Y.” has the confusing, “You’ll be my G.I.R.L/Guy I’m Romancin’ Loves to hold you,” which I’m still not sure makes any actual sense. “Some of us just like to read” on “Applause” sounds like it belongs on the bumper sticker of someone who’s “not like other girls.” And I would lament “slap honey on a young pancake” on “Jewels and Drugs” as well, but really the entire song should have just been scrapped.
There are some brilliant moments on the album, though; moments that maybe critics weren’t properly appreciative of.
While some criticized the song, “Donatella,” for its semi-committed lampoon of high-fashion culture–like the review from Chris Bosman at Consequence of Sound, which calls the track an attempt at “dismantling 1% culture”–this misunderstands what the song is actually trying to do. If it comes across as half-hearted satire, that’s because it’s meant to be. It’s tongue-in-cheek and a bit ironic, but never meant to insult its inspiration (Donatella Versace and Gaga are actually friends) or call for any sort of “dismantling.” The song’s intro has a level of camp that maybe only certain audiences (much of Gaga’s) can appreciate: “I am so fab/Check out:/I’m blonde/I’m skinny/I’m rich/And I’m a little bit of a bitch.” “Venus” (the best song on the album), has camp and irony all over, most notably in the bridge where Gaga rhymes “Uranus” (the colloquial pronunciation: “your anus”) with “don’t you know my ass is famous”–a line she fully screeches.
For those who appreciated Gaga’s theatrics, the ARTPOP era was quite the spectacle.
The second, and last, music video for “G.U.Y” sums up the fun side of Gaga’s visual overload. Though it wasn’t the “Telephone” sequel fans had been craving, it continued a tradition of narrative-driven pop videos, depicting Gaga as a fallen angel, rebirthed in the swimming pool of Hearst Castle and serenaded to “Venus” mimed by the cast of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (also Andy Cohen is implied to be God).
In typical Gaga fashion, the visual splendor didn’t stop with the music videos or the live performances. While she was always known for her outlandish wardrobe, ARTPOP kicked it up a notch. Mermaids, Botticelli’s Venus, and round sunglasses were of big inspiration, but there were plenty of outliers to be noted; a personal favorite is the weird yellow furry duck(?) thing that covered her head during promo appearances in Germany. While doing promo in London, Gaga walked to her hotel in a see-through white dress, her arms outstretched above her head nearly the entire time, with nothing underneath but a small, flesh-colored thong, and no shoes. Even more left-field was her final exit from that hotel where videos show Gaga walking at a glacial pace to her car before pausing to allow photographers to capture the three or four tears falling down her cheek. This happened after an interview with Miranda Sawyer, during which Gaga acted notably strange. Sawyer wrote for Irish Mirror:
“I thought she would be normal... normal, as in ‘a person able to have an everyday conversation.’ I was wrong. Silly me... I’ve been quizzing pop stars for 25 years and this was the first time one has stopped talking halfway through an answer. Just stopped. Held her hands up in the air, then folded them on her lap and discontinued speaking. Gazed into the distance for half a minute. I had to smother a giggle. And then she started talking again, as though nothing had happened.”
In a few other interviews, Gaga spoke in an accent I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist regionally.
It was unclear how much of this image was genuine and how much was a performance. Gaga would probably answer that the two needn’t be mutually exclusive, at the time collaborating with and learning under performance artist, Marina Abramovic, exhibited in a NSFW video of Gaga practicing the “Abramovic Method” (she basically walked around the woods naked and yelled one obnoxious note for as long as she could, apparently as a form of meditation).
Criticisms of Gaga being “pretentious” had plagued her since her start, and ARTPOP was only making them worse as she began exploring outside the parameters of pop in ways plenty thought were over her head, especially in her collaborations with more traditional “artists”: Jeff Koons designed the sculpture on her album cover, Nathan Sawaya created a custom piece for the “G.U.Y.” video, and Robert Wilson designed her set at the VMAs (he also captured her in video portraits for his own project), while Gaga began making constant references to Sandro Botticelli and Andy Warhol. He never mentioned her name, but Adam Levine threw some indirect shade in September 2013, tweeting:
Gaga’s response:
Her most controversial collaborations, however, drew heavier criticism than accusations of pretension.
TW: sexual assault and rape
“Applause” and “G.U.Y” are the only tracks on the record with music videos, but months before “G.U.Y.,” Gaga was filming a video for the second single, “Do What U Want (With My Body)” co-starring R. Kelly and directed by Terry Richardson. A lot of Little Monsters have come to her defense about the decision, pointing out how many people have worked with R. Kelly that have never been asked to answer for his crimes (Jay Z, Ludacris, Snoop Dogg, etc.), and while that’s true, those people aren’t also self-proclaimed activists against sexual assault, and those people didn’t feature him on a song that kind of sounds like an advertisement for rape, i.e., the lyrics, “Do what you want/What you want with my body/Do what you want/Don’t stop, let’s party.”
At the time, Gaga claimed the song is really about her relationship to the media, saying,
“To explain the meaning of the song… the public can really really scrutinize and harass the artist, and my point is that, if you’re going to harass the artist, this is the death of entertainment. It’s the death of show business. So it’s my way of stating my power, that you can’t have my heart, and you can’t have my mind, so do what you want with my body.”
When asked about R. Kelly in 2013, Gaga said she wanted him on the track because the two have both “sometimes” had “very untrue things” written about them. What those untrue things were she didn’t specify, but even before the release of Surviving R. Kelly in 2018, his predatory nature was fairly well known. In 1994, R. Kelly attempted to marry singer, Aaliyah, when he was 27 and she was just 15 years old; in 2002, a sex tape featuring him urinating on an underage girl leaked to the public; and in 2003, he was found with possession of child pornography, where charges were only dropped because the pictures were found without a valid search warrant. Gaga’s comments implied she was aware of the allegations, but simply choose to not believe them.
The music video made things worse on two counts. First, is Terry Richardson’s involvement who, by that time, had already been accused of sexual assault by multiple women (he’s since been accused a few more times and is currently under investigation by the NYPD). This was almost (but not really) forgivable. Though the allegations existed, and those women deserved to be heard and believed, Gaga had been working with Richardson for years and was far from the only artist in 2013 to collaborate with him (he also directed Miley Cyrus’s infamous 2013 video for “Wrecking Ball”). This isn’t an excuse, but to call Gaga out specifically meant implicating pretty much every other female celebrity (Lena Dunham, Lana Del Rey, Rihanna, etc., etc., etc.), and boycotting his work completely would leave you, at the time, unable to read pretty much any major pop culture magazine (Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, GQ, etc., etc., etc.). Sources also claim that Gaga was unaware of the allegations until after much, if not all, of the video was filmed and it’s rumored that this discovery is what prompted her team to cancel the release.
Second count, was the content of the video itself. Though never released by Gaga’s team, TMZ leaked select footage in mid-2014. It wasn’t flattering. Scenes depict R. Kelly as a surgeon (likely a reference to Gaga’s hip surgery), putting Gaga under anesthesia to be twerked on and touched by sexy nurses. According to TMZ, R. Kelly also spanks and makes out with a naked Gaga, possibly while still under anesthesia (I can’t be sure, the complete footage has never been released or leaked). So the video itself is pretty–for lack of a better term–rapey, but at the time, Gaga still claimed to have no qualms about the assault allegations; rather, she blamed the “delay” of the video on mismanagement by her team and lack of ample time to complete it to her standards.
Gaga has never spoken on how the allegations played a part in the video’s detainment, but in 2019 she did speak on her decision to work with R. Kelly, writing via Twitter,
“What I am hearing about the allegations against R. Kelly is absolutely horrifying and indefensible. As a victim of sexual assault myself, 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.”
Gaga then had the song removed from iTunes, streaming services, and any future vinyl or CD pressings (you can, and should, still listen to the remix with Christina Aguilera).
I can’t speak specifically on her “twisted” thinking, but it’s clear during this era that Gaga was, maybe for the first time, starting to recognize her own trauma from being raped “repeatedly” at age 19. It’s possible that the statement “do what you want with my body” was her way of dealing with this realization–a defense mechanism that partially forgave the trauma inflicted on her body through the lens that “you can’t have my heart and you won’t use my mind, but do what you want with my body.”
Personally, I don’t think the inclusion of R. Kelly was an accident or coincidence. Gaga may not have been aware of the full scope of his crimes, but she knew he was a predator, and in some ways, through her “explicitly twisted thinking,” she may have thought she was empowering herself by singing such lyrics beside him.
On the more constructive end, ARTPOP is the first album that explicitly deals with Gaga’s survival of assault–not through “Do What U Want,” but “Swine.” At the start of ARTPOP’s promotion, Gaga claimed the album was “[her] pain exploding in electronic music.” “Swine” is maybe the only song that actually lives up to this–none of the electronic songs (if we’re now excluding “Do What U Want”) seem to deal explicitly with her pain, and the only song particularly sad (“Dope”) is maybe the least electronic.
“Swine” is a song you may know from one of Gaga’s more infamous performances at the SXSW Festival where she had artist, Millie Brown (not the child actor), puke black and neon paint onto her. The performance caused a bit more controversy, though not as deservingly so as with “Do What U Want.” Most notably, Demi Lovato slammed Gaga for glamorizing eating disorders, since binging and purging is the marker of bulimia nervosa, something Demi themself has struggled with, often symptomized by self-induced vomiting.
But “Swine” isn’t about eating disorders, it’s about rape. On stage, Gaga created a visual representation of assault that’s maybe not obvious, but suitably disgusting. Before the climax of the song, she sits atop a giant mechanical bull (though donning a pig’s head of course), straddling another woman while wearing a bikini and black fishnets. In another context, two scantily clad, conventionally attractive women riding such a seedy-bar staple together, designed to make them thrust into each other, would be pretty sexy, but that pornographic fantasy is literally puked on, and Gaga screams in the midst of it, “Fuck you pop music! This is ARTPOP! Free yourself!”
Gavin Edwards of Rolling Stone said of the performance,
“The result was memorable and genuinely unsettling: even with the apron, unwanted body fluids were all over Gaga, in her skin and her dreadlocks. For the rest of the show, Gaga would have this black sheen, marking her as a metaphorical survivor of rape and an actual survivor of performance art.”
The performance may not have done much to improve the “breakdown” theory many had at the time, but leaning into Gaga’s outrageous side might have helped sway an audience more averse to generic pop. “Swine,” from its actual production to its lyrics to its on-stage performances, is everything ARTPOP should have been; full of genuine rage and taking some of the album’s biggest risks.
The album as a whole is a bit of a mess. Gaga was trying to create an amalgam of art–part Abramovic, part Bottecilli, part rave–but the elements rarely came together as harmoniously as intended. It couldn’t quite live up to its own hype, and neither could its promotion.
As with Electra Heart, the surrounding “era” that fans interact with matters for the modern pop star as much as the music, especially with an artist like Lady Gaga. Of course, little monsters wanted new songs, but they also wanted new outfits, performances, pictures, interviews, and everything else that makes up an album cycle’s promotion. ARTPOP promised a lot, but only occasionally came through.
The chief disappointment was the ARTPOP app for iOS and Android, advertised as an interactive “reverse Warholian expedition,” where fans could “share in the ‘adrenaline of fame.’” Specifically, Gaga promised, “chats, films for every song, extra music, content, gaga inspired games, fashion updates, magazines and more.” What users actually got was an app to make 3D model gifs and listen to the album if they had already purchased it. New updates and features were promised, some even had slots on the app’s home page with countdowns for their release, but they never came.
Gaga blamed much of the era’s failures on her previous management team, and fans maybe should have seen them coming when a day before the album’s launch it became publicly announced she had split from her manager of seven years. In January, discussing the “delay” of the “Do What U Want” video, she wrote on littlemonsters.com,
“Those who have betrayed me gravely mismanaged my time and health and left me on my own to damage control any problems that ensued as a result...My heart breaks from the people I have trusted and loved, who I've worked so closely with, who have used me, lied to me, worked me into the ground for their personal gain… Unfortunately after my surgery, I was too sick, too tired and too sad to control the damage on my own.”
She promised the following months would “truly be [ARTPOP’s] beginning,” but the next months didn’t bring much of note–mostly just the tour, “artRAVE: the ARTPOP BALL.” The tour was loved by fans, and a week-long residency at the Roseland Ballroom was well-received, but it was standard pop star promo, not the interactive reverse Warholian expedition fans were awaiting. For fans at the time, even those who loved the album couldn’t help being disappointed by what its era was lacking.
There’s a lot we could blame ARTPOP’s broken promises on. Gaga probably was mismanaged, and nursing a recent injury may have left her unprepared to address the project’s problems, but the biggest culprit in all of this is Gaga herself. As with the album’s actual content, Gaga zealously pursued so many things at the same time she couldn’t possibly accomplish them all.
But while some see this time as a strange stain on her career, all these missteps add a sort of charm. Gaga’s promises, however premature, came from a place of excitement. ARTPOP meant something to her, and despite a shoddy execution, it held potential to be the best in her discography. It might still be the most interesting, and it’s definitely the most ambitious.
For plenty, ARTPOP is Gaga’s greatest work–the last in her discography to embrace shameless pop. Her following ventures took as big of steps back as reasonably possible: a jazz collaboration, a watered-down country-pop album, a dramatic Oscar-nominated acting role, and a whole new public persona that’s ditched the avant-garde for old-Hollywood.
ARTPOP is a flop because it couldn’t compete in the commercial landscape its artist once ruled, and her odd antics left her fodder for public ridicule and controversy rather than serious consideration, but that doesn’t mean that this album or era of Gaga’s career is bad or even irrelevant to her current success.
There are some absolute gems on the album, tracks that might be some of the best in her discography. “Aura,” albeit featuring problematic lyrics, contains some of Gaga’s most entertaining vocal modulations, and the mix of Middle Eastern influences, mariachi, and EDM makes it a daring experiment for a mainstream popstar that ultimately pays off. “Venus” finds Gaga’s electronic expeditions traversing into the land of glam-rock, consisting of four different hooks that turn standard-sounding pop into something less conventional. Its camp lyrics, along with those on “Donatella,” feel like a nod to Gaga’s queer audience while still being so authentically Gaga it never comes across as pandering. “Swine” is the rage-filled rave-voyage the album seems intended to achieve, and it might be one of the most personal songs she’s ever released. Even songs that operate primarily as filler, like “MANiCURE” or “Mary Jane Holland,” succeed as catchy pop tracks despite not featuring the experimental production many had anticipated from the album’s promotion.
Though Gaga has somewhat stepped back from the colorful world of ARTPOP, its influence on her career holds. Her recent Vegas residency, Enigma, is in name a reference to lyrics on “Aura,” and the show’s titular character doesn’t seem too far off from the “Petga” introduction on the ARTPOP app. Video games and technology also seem to be a theme for her upcoming work, and her dabble into the world of multi-media promotion might be a preview of what’s still to come.
On a more personal level, the openness with which Gaga talks about her trauma, specifically involving her assault, began with ARTPOP. Her thinking might have been twisted and fucked up, but songs like “Do What U Want” and “Swine” explored parts of her mind left unexplored years prior.
Fans still want ARTPOP vol. 2, a project promised on-and-off since the album’s premiere, and it’s easy to see why. ARTPOP was a mess in a kind of beautiful way, and it’s possible some version of ARTPOP still resides in Gaga’s subconscious as a forthcoming magnum opus.
Her return to electro-pop with “Stupid Love” for the soon-to-be-released, Chromatica, is fans best hope of this, though it’s difficult to say what the current environment will bring of its era. Who knows, maybe since she can’t film any music videos, we might just get a quarantine-approved Chromatica app.