Lady Gaga - ARTPOP [2012]

The 999th number one album in the UK, in fact.

What will be #1000? Fire Music by Robbie Williams? Running On Empty by Jake Bugg? JLS' Greatest Hit? It's a thrill a second here.

yeah i'm just giving the album a chance to grow on me and it's doing that pretty well.

Ryan thinks one of them is her new Bad Romance, i forgot what it's called

gun or something, young gun, i don't know

maybe guy?

Not going well, all things considered

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-19/lady-gagas-25-million-art-machine-cant-buy-a-real-hit

Ouch:
http://www.kingsofar.com/interscope-loses-25-million-promotional-bet-on-lady-gaga-artpop-bomb/

$25m figure has been disputed apparently. I naively assumed that Business Week wouldn't just pluck a figure out of the air. Sales figures still bad though.

dunno if selling less than three of the biggest names/campaigns of the year is so disastrous in itself

still - i remember arguing against gaga's career going downhill circa BTW because it was just one blip, wasn't that bad an album etc, but two consecutive commercial underperformances, the second of which is also a significant artistic decline...hard to ignore that. and i don't hear ANYTHING on artpop that could turn it round, esp now they blew "do what u want" as a promo single...

and it's not even weird or deliberately abrasive enough to be classed like yeezus or blackout - poor sales but in a way those add to the album's narrative, they had a point besides spawning hits. artpop's concept is boring and her execution of it self-important and stupid (also, largely hookless).

though i think my only other keeper off it apart from "do what u want" is "swine" which is probably the legit oddest thing she's ever recorded

but seriously...like, "cake like lady gaga" is better than 90% of this

i dunno if it's the case in every country/market but iirc it was decided that "Do What U Want" is now the 2nd single instead of "Venus," which is great news obviously but yeah i dunno if that or anything else on the album offers potential for a huge turnaround.

her commercial decline isn't really that unusual or extreme imo, but having multiple #1s right at the start of her career and getting all these Madonna-type comparisons set some pretty lofty expectations that maybe could never be fulfilled.

Amusing to me that even in 2013, some journalists can't reconcile the fact that an album can reach number one without being a "hit," as many traditionally understand it. More like, I dunno, a base hit.

but seriously...like, "cake like lady gaga" is better than 90% of this

― lex pretend, Wednesday, November 20, 2013 4:55 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that song was awful cmon

i like this album the more i listen to it

not saying it wasn't xp

"cake like lady gaga" is arguably the only actively fun song she's done since the fame monster though

it's the kind of awful that makes you return to it rather than just boring awful like most of the album

specifically, the $25 million figure comes from a Katy Perry stan with an Examiner account (a penny-per-click site with minimal, if any vetting) whose "byline" is a photo of a girl she stole from somebody's flickr.

lmao those examiner articles have been hilarious. best music writing 2013.

also "do what u want" sounds so good on the radio despite the lack of "we don't give a fuuuuuuck"

I have decided I rather like this. The lack of hooks is less disappointing than the lack of lyrical content at this stage. It was always going to be another album about the intersection of art, gender politics, fashion and celebrity but it is strange that someone so adept at curating their visual identity, so heavily embedded in all four spheres and that is either working with or biting from some really heavy hitters in the culture industry has nothing of interest to say about any of it.

"cake like lady gaga" is arguably the only actively fun song she's done since the fame monster though

I think "Do What U Want" and "Sexxx Dreams" are both actively fun

also "do what u want" sounds so good on the radio despite the lack of "we don't give a fuuuuuuck"

― dyl, Wednesday, November 20, 2013 7:30 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Kells sounded fantastic going "we don't give a whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat" on SNL so i was very disappointed to hear the radio edit that just kind of awkwardly silences the first second of "fuuuu" and the last second of "uuuuck"

heard 'mary jane holland' at a bar last night and it sounded good as background music for a bar

I think I've decided I like this whole album now if I just don't play the first two tracks.

In which Chris Molanpny wonders if the album really flopped.

haha his assertion that Erotica is in retrospect a middling 3-star Madonna album will not go over well with ilx

his AC/DC rule seems like a corollary of the New Jersey album idea

we've discussed the similarities/differences in the new jerz thread iirc

we're squabbling over that one on Facebook.

ah, ground thoroughly covered in that thread I see

i made it about a minute and a half into "aura" eww that song stinks

Start at G.U.Y. and never look back.

Mentioned to Chris on twitter that the erotica comparison is still a rough one for gaga, suggesting she's achieved ditahood in half the time and a third of the hits. Also despite Gagas obv desire for Madonna parallels, a better one might be cyndi Lauper, another broadway influenced weirdo who also was showing strain by album 3 and a half, despite having better pipes and more acclaim for subversive than Madonna, who critics liked far less before success made her undeniable. In that sense, the Madonna might be Katy perry, still on her true blue.

Lauper never had an imperial phase though, right?

the cracks def showed on True Colors (which we may have discussed on the NJ thread but disqualified cuz it didn't go triple platinum or something). And I don't remember any articles devoted to analyzing What "She-Bop" Means in academic journals.

True, but Gagas was in itself secondhand. Obv all parallels like this aren't note for note - sadly we've yet to see Gagas Vibes.

my beef with Chris' argument is that even in 1992 Erotica had its defenders: the album's commercial disappointment influenced the daily press, which reacted by thinking she was due for a fall. Whereas no one has claimed ARTPOP is 5-star masterpiece.

Academics jumping the gun totally suggests she's a Lauper mistaken for a Madonna.

i had a half-formed thesis a few years ago that in our age of quirky squeaky-voiced pop queens we had a lot of Laupers and no Madonna but i couldn't bring myself to flatter most of those gals with the Cyndi comparison

It might be cool to put together a list of imperial phases or even discuss what an imperial phase is: Elton 1973-1976, Madonna 1984-1991, Diddy 1994-1999. In the podcast with sw00ds and Chris about Pet Shop Boys a few nights ago, I said Macca & Wings from 1974-76 when even a song about a doorbell got to #3.

multiple xps

divahood in half the time and a third of the hits might be appropriate for an era where that point is debated via messages limited to 140 characters

imo the main thing that sets Madonna, Cyndi, and Gaga apart from their respective contemporaries is (and this sounds corny) individuality and a willingness to play with melody. All these girls singing Dr. Luke songs are basically just working from a recipe. Even if I like some Katy Perry and Ke$ha songs, or any of the other artists who engage in that heavily streamlined, almost stamped out in a machine shop, type of single, I get the sense that they're going to regret not working harder to record different kinds of songs and release different kinds of singles.

oh I dunno: one of the problems with an album like Usher's Looking 4 Myself is that it's designed to be marketed to different audiences, therefore he throws every trend in there hoping everybody bites.

I said dita-hood not divahood.

The problem with aggressively aping an arc is you burn through it quicker. Just as rock bands try to make their sgt peppers by album three, unable to solidify their status with a Beatles for sale, gaga didn't bother creating remotely as massive a big-beyond-her-persona songbook as Madge, jumping straight to personas and outrage and like yo you forgot "angel" not to mention having a sense of humor .

Honestly the jig was up with gaga when she did that Danny zuko character at the vmas.

Have there been any bonus tracks pop up for this album yet? I just checked the Japanese/Asian versions and all they come with is remixes for Applause and a dvd of the iTunes Festival performance.

I think it's a colossal misread to think Gaga doesn't have a sense of humor, especially this go around where she's singing about strutting for Greek deities, equating love with twitter retweets and doing drunken jazzercise routines with R. Kelly on SNL.

it was definitely a reductive way to phrase it and yeah, she's getting better, but there's just something relatively guarded about her compared to '80s madonna, and the fact that you said "esp this go around" suggests you know what i'm talking about

part of why i think perry, kesha, minaj, and swift are all more plausible "new madonnas" than gaga (though kesha and minaj are definitely falling behind in that race) is that all of them get closer to madonna's "why are you offended? i'm just being me, having it all" energy, where gaga is more "are you offended yet? please be offended" - the dita thing.

I also disagree with Artpop being her Erotica. I think Born This Way was her Erotica: technically successful, mostly due to previous career highs, but seen as disappointing and not up to the artist's standards, home to a couple of hits as well as some forgettable duds and the beginning of a strong backlash of public opinion due to oversaturation. Artpop is more her Bedtime Stories; the attempt at reclamation of public interest and a return to a bit of a safer lane for the popstar, destined to very limited commercial success because it's coming off of an album where a lot of public goodwill was squandered.