On her sixth album, pop’s queen of the dramatic reinvention did something more shocking than meat dresses and humanoid motorbikes: Lady Gaga looked back.
Unlike the smooth tech-house flavour of its predecessor Chromatica, and diametrically opposed to the dinner jazz of her work with Tony Bennett, on Mayhem she returned to the operatic electroclash that powered her first two albums. There are synths that sound like a Dyson on its last legs. There are the kind of trashy guitars that contractually can only be played by someone sporting a lime mohawk, low-riding leather trousers and nothing else. There is the baby talk of her biggest hit Bad Romance, only where that was “Ro-ma, ro-ma-ma / Gaga, ooh la la” it’s now “Ama ooh na-na / Abracadabra, mutta ooh Gaga”. You can see the difference, right?
The least charitable reading is that this was a cynical, market-driven, even artistically lazy move from someone who had to centrally realign her brand after a number of failures. The broadening of her music on Artpop (2013) and Joanne (2016) hadn’t played well with the public, and while her acting and soundtrack recordings for A Star is Born were superb, her similarly ambitious work for Joker: Folie à Deux badly flopped. The Bennett duets had charm – played so incredibly straight that they were almost subversive – but they were gooey, not gaga.
And yet the song that gave her the biggest hit of her career was just as traditional: Die With a Smile, last year’s multi-billion-streaming duet with Bruno Mars. The more cynical move would have been to replicate it. Instead, when you hear it tacked on to the end of the joyously chaotic Mayhem, it sounds like Mars is holding her hostage in a Vegas casino ballroom.
Lady Gaga: Zombieboy – video
Gaga’s own explanation for the sound of Mayhem is more persuasive. She told Rolling Stone that the years she spent expanding her artistry took a psychic toll, and making Mayhem was “months and months and months of rediscovering everything that I’d lost. And I honestly think that’s why it’s called Mayhem. Because what it took to get it back was crazy.” The strength of the record, and how at home she sounded, underscored her claim that she was authentically expressing her true self.
The backing tracks are cybernetic Frankenstein’s monsters knocked together from fragments of digital sound, a natural fit for Gaga’s voice and hers alone. She leans into the hamminess that makes her great: the Meat Loaf yell at the peak of Perfect Celebrity, the flirtatious backchat on Zombieboy, the stentorian operatics of Vanish Into You. All three, plus LoveDrug, How Bad Do U Want Me and Garden of Eden, could easily have been hit singles – as it is, they are some of her very best album tracks, full of zest and zip.
At times you can hear influences from beyond the realm of pure Gaga. The vocal on How Bad Do U Want Me is reminiscent of Taylor Swift, while the backing dances tantalisingly close to Yazoo’s Only You. Killah does the same with David Bowie’s Fame. There are stray drops of Leona Lewis’s Bleeding Love on The Beast, and shades of DeBarge’s Rhythm of the Night on Shadow of a Man.
Gaga’s “come on” in Garden of Eden is a dead ringer for Rihanna’s on S&M – but that song was itself in thrall to Gaga’s earlier work, and Mayhem shows beyond doubt how influential Gaga has been. The top line of Vanish Into You, for instance, shows how much she must have informed Sia’s pop songwriting. And while Nile Rodgers-style disco guitars are now a stock element of pop, Gaga uses them not just as a signifier of nightlife, but to genuinely evoke the bliss and abandon of a mad night out.
After some projects that felt like Gaga was trying too hard to be bigger than herself, on Mayhem she settled back into exactly who she is – a feeling enhanced by the dramaturgically wonky but extremely vibey Mayhem Ball tour, which was like a goth influencer’s wedding with an infinite budget. If it all looked and sounded familiar, it’s mostly because we’ve been living in a pop world shaped by Gaga herself for nearly two decades.
