At this moment in time 9 years ago, Lady Gaga captivated my heart, attention and musical playtime with her sophomore studio album Born This Way, a love letter to her past self, her relationship with God, and the everlove and support of her LGBTQIA+ fanbase, albeit despite the use of rather pejorative terms in the title track’s bridge.
“You’re black, white, beige, chola descent, you’re Lebanese, you’re Orient”
Coming from a white artist, that… doesn’t exactly stand the test of time. The remainder of the album, however, remains an excellent listen, and is certainly in the top echelons of 2010s pop albums.
Which brings us to 2020, a year which has seen no shortage of excellent pop from artists like Dua Lipa, The Weeknd and Charli XCX, in addition to newcomers such as Rina Sawayama. Never one to be outdone, Lady Gaga raised the stakes with the release of her fifth studio album Chromatica, at the end of May. Raising the stakes, however, doesn’t always guarantee a winning hand in your favor.
Gaga had started off on the backfoot when she chose to delay her album from its original release date of April 10th when coronavirus concerns were on higher alert than they are currently. The new release date was May 29th, which was when citizens all across the world forewent mass gathering warnings to protest killings of unarmed black U.S. citizens, incited by George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis earlier that week.
In an exclusive interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Lady Gaga describes Chromatica as “a journey through pain towards healing”, encouraging listeners to use the album as a vehicle to help them validate their own pain and suffering, letting it aid them in their own healing process. At this moment in time when healing is arguably more necessary than ever, Chromatica may just end up as the album which brought everyone together despite literally being more divided than ever. At the very least, it’s definitely the soundtrack to Pride Month 2020, defined by riots akin to the Stonewall riots of 1969, the catalyst for Gay Pride. Coincidentally, Chromatica happens to incorporate elements of past music crazes, repackaging and modernizing it to music enthusiasts of the 2020s.
Gaga’s sonic direction across her albums have typically had a steady cadence amongst them: a strong, attention grabbing beginning set, before slowing down in the middle, showcasing Gaga’s vocals, before ending out on a strong, climatic run of songs, sending off listeners with an optimistic note, with the exception of Joanne, which ends on Angel Down. Unlike that album, however, or any Gaga album for that matter, Chromatica uses a trio of interludes to break down the album into separate acts, better denoting which phases each individual song is tied to.
The first phase is easily the most energetic, containing the already-beloved
singles Stupid Love and “Rain On Me” a duet with Ariana Grande, which debuted at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 the weekend after Chromatica was released.
The tone starts to shift at “Chromatica II”, the instrumental taking on a more sinister and ominous approach, mood, leading into “911”, the album’s most pessimistic song. Coincidentally, it’s at this point where the album begins to wane in quality, starting with the clunkily-worded chorus.
“My biggest enemy is me, pop a 911”
An easy fix would be “dial 911”, or simply “call up 911”, but this is the lyric
which Gaga designated as the core statement from Chromatica’s centerpiece song, with a deceptively higher-quality pre-chorus and verses. It’s a comparative step down from the soul-baring “Million
Reasons” in Joanne, ARTPOP’s retroactively disowned “Do What U Want”, or even the unabashed sleaze of “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” from The Fame.
Thankfully, this seems to be the album’s low point from here on out, as the
remainder of the phase is followed by similarly existential albeit more upbeat songs, including “Sour Candy”, a collaboration with Kpop superstars BLACKPINK, who’ve previously sung alongside Dua Lipa in 2018’s “Kiss and Make Up”. The two acts combine rather well over a ‘90s Euro house beat, not entirely dissimilar to other contemporary throwback-inspired hits like Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj’s “Swish Swish” from 2017 or Slayyyter’s 2019 indiepop hit “Mine”.
Following two more dancefloor ditties in “Enigma”, a nod to Gaga’s Las Vegas residency concert, and “Replay”, the second phase is swiftly replaced with the third and final component to the record, which fittingly contains three songs.
The tertiary act starts with Chromatica III, characterized by strings which sound more hopeful and less foreboding as the previous two interludes. The act’s first song is “Sine from Above”, a yearnful, desperate song between Gaga and her musical mentor/personal hero, Elton John, set to a trance beat which wouldn’t sound out of place amongst 00s acts like DJ Sammy or Paul
Van Dyk, but in addition to the intentionally misspelled title, a sudden influx of drum ‘n bass percussion inexplicably punctures the outro, ruining the song’s momentum.
Thankfully, the act is saved by the album’s final two songs, “1000 Doves” and “Babylon”, the latter of which echoes ’90s gay nightlife, complete with its throwback disco house sound.
Upon release, Babylon earned comparisons not only to Madonna’s “Vogue”, but also to Gaga’s own back catalogue, particularly “Black Jesus † Amen Fashion”, a deluxe track from Born This Way, especially during the spoken-word hooks.
One Little Monster in particular took these comparisons one step further,
overlaying the “Babylon” acapella track onto the “Black Jesus” instrumental. It’s arguably superior to Babylon’s album version.
That’s where everything seems to come back for me, the Little Monsters. I’m
proud to have called myself one ever since Gaga coined the fanbase term for us, and anyone who knows Lady Gaga knows how closely and dearly she values her fanbase, similar to artists like Ariana Grande and Beyonce, to the point where it’s had a notable influence in her music. Lady Gaga
wants little more than to please her legions of fans worldwide, be it through
her cosmetic makeup line, Haus Labs, her unyielding, unwavering support of LGBTQ+ rights, and most importantly, providing a safe space with her music and her concerts which she pours myriad hours into perfecting so she can deliver Little Monsters what they so dearly want.
Or rather what they think they want.
It’s a common and well-held consensus to deem The Fame Monster as Lady Gaga’s best album, with many calling Born This Way marking the last “good” studio album from Mother Monster. With so many of her fans waxing lyrical over her musical output from her glory years of 2008-2011, myself included, they’ve made no bones about screaming from the rooftops in recent years beckoning Gaga to return to the groundbreaking electro-dancepop that made her a household name in music. So to appease those fans, who are not completely representative of her fanbase, she essentially created this mishmash of musical ideas from the past; particularly her own past, forgetting to write an album for the present.
The aforementioned acts of Dua Lipa and Rina Sawayama pulled this off to great effect with their respective releases earlier this year, largely in part due to their clear vision and direction for their full-length projects, identifying pop’s present, and more importantly, its future. Chromatica’s
missteps can be explained by Lady Gaga and her fans being unwilling to let the past go, whilst also trying to please too many people at once, evident in trying to pander to both the Kpop crowd with “Sour Candy” and the older music demographic with “Sine From Above”.
Pain will not simply heal with time. The pain of the past can be healed by
learning from the past, using that knowledge to evolve and grow as a person. If Chromatica is a concept album meant to be used to help heal emotional pain induced from the past, the pain won’t effectively heal when Lady Gaga centralizes the album towards the past, neglecting to learn from
it, keeping her in a cycle of undervalued albums, resulting in her doing too much to please fans, sacrificing musical integrity in the process.
Chromatica tries to make everybody happy. No artist can do that. Not even Lady Gaga.
7/10
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