Lady Gaga
Artpop

The pretentious conjectural architectures that have orbited around ARTPOP (uppercase, Heaven forbid) since its first official communications invoked Art, promising its inclusion within the pop music context (a "reverse Warholian expedition", quoting Gaga herself), but it's evident that merely evoking Botticelli or Jeff Koons does not suffice to fill with meaning a vessel that appears only superficially lacquered.

Starting from the opening Aura, which renders, in its four and a half minutes of uptempo techno with a mariachi twist, how the author is confusing eclecticism in the compositional phase with a senseless, self-referential chaos, Gaga desperately tries to sound experimental and cinematic (the mechanical spoken intro of G.U.Y., the “cosmic” opening of Sexxx Dreams, the theatrical clap-dance of Applause) perhaps forgetting how the overproduction, or perhaps simply subpar songwriting, leaves each song sounding sterile and, ultimately, massified and aligned with the rest of the electro-pop scene.

The desire to give a broader meaning to the oper(ett)a seems almost superfluous, even if only for the choice to refer to it as an ideally tripartite work (in which the album's center, Artpop, acts as a lever for the extremes Aura and Applause, both ending the lyrics with the word "Artpop"), but it turns out to be little more than stylistic finesse gone astray, considering the void of which everything else is suffused, starting from the pretentious black featuring in Jewels And Drugs (the worst) to the mimetic parodic homage of Donatella.

Gaga, in the end, manages to entertain only when she reduces the experiment to its bare minimum by banally returning to the disengaged form of her early works: G.U.Y., which lacks a bit of melody in the chorus, actually leans on a splendid synth line; MANiCURE, declaredly a filler from the title, relies on a quick-hook beat to flit through subtly sexual themes, amplifying a tendency that’s admittedly too explicit in Sexxx Dreams, and while the confessional anthem of Gypsy harks back to some episodes of her sophomore dark-romantic release, the balanced Do What You Want remains, to date, one of her best singles.

It's a pity that the rest, that is the conceptuality the author wanted to imbue in the work, collapses irreparably under the enormous weight of her hyperbolic declarations and the massive gap between ambitious intentions and the final product. This is certainly not Art, and Lady Gaga, despite her excellent vocal ability and an uncommon "catalytic" capacity, is not David Bowie. Despite "her Artpop can mean anything,” as she specifies in the hypnotic but redundant title track, almost burying and nullifying the entire glossy artistic facade, the truth is that after listening, there's really little or nothing left. What a pity.