Lady Gaga
Artpop

Summary of previous episodes. In 2011, Lady Gaga, coming off the (extremely) long tail of successes harvested during the The Fame and The Fame Monster period and crowned in the glittering frame of the Monster Ball Tour, tries to play her third winning card with Born This Way, a work that seamlessly continues from its predecessor, blending the already tested demons of fame and "sex monsters" with a dark mood between rock, deliberately pop-blasphemous, and the hidden fragility of a star sitting on the throne of the music business. The first eponymous single sounds, according to experts and amateurs, a bit too similar to Madonna's Express Yourself, a friendly anthem from 1989: the roar of plagiarism and conscious theft explodes, which unfortunately compromises, if not completely, the ideology and "concept" of the album, poorly "exploited" when considering the imposing theatricality of the Monster era. A few months after the unfortunate fifth single Marry The Night, Miss Germanotta embarks on the Born This Way Ball Tour, a collage of a bit of everything from the latest Gaga offering that clashes with the MDNA Tour of her Majesty Madonna and is interrupted at the beginning of 2013 for a serious surgical operation on her lower limbs. Badly closed the caravan of Born This Way, the dawn of the next Artpop begins to rise, postponed several times until the bomb announcement in the hot summer: the promotional package would include the release of Applause, the lead single, and thus Artpop itself in physical, digital format, and as a multimedia application packaged by the Haus of Gaga team, the latter with the daunting task of standing at the levels of the first album-app, Bjork's Biophilia.

Artpop boldly traces a new path for the neo-chameleon of pop. Tossed overboard are the dark, gloomy, monstrous, sacrilegious-blasphemous, warm, and spiritistic-malevolent galleons of the The Fame Monster-Born This Way route, Lady Gaga hops back to the origins of The Fame, the enchantingly pop rainbow of the debut, free of the swallowed crucifixes of the various Alejandro, the reckless motorcycle races in the biker-friendly Jerusalem of Judas, and even the liberal symbolism. Incensed by the criteria and fragrant incenses of the hit parades, Stefani looks avidly and voraciously at Art and forges, like a demiurge, Her "Art Pop", for which it would be reductive to think of the bland exchange of the words "pop" and "art" from the more famous Warholian epic. The courage, brazenness, perhaps even the arrogance and the "fortissimamente volli" of shaking the feline arena of the m-biz once more, do not lack the apprentice Venus, and it does not matter if the latter, in a fun and funny art history lesson, mixes in a strange theoretical ratatouille Sandro Botticelli, the Italian Renaissance, and the genius of Classical Greece: My Art Pop could mean anything, thunders the Lady in the title track, and we will all have to hush until the reckoning of her pictorial-musical-sculptural-marble creed.

Attracting with a magnet Art and Pop, understood as a universe of symbols and "things" recognized and used by the "middle" social layer, is an attempt that since Warhol many have tried to practice and in the sound sector alone we can enumerate an avalanche of forgers, from Pet Shop Boys to Grace Jones, passing through Elton John, Michael Jackson, Queen, Bjork, Goldfrapp, Annie Lennox, Madonna, and company (not to mention the chart-neglected, the underground of hidden florileges). Yet Lady Gaga, putting for a second aside disdain, preconceptions, poorly packaged stereotypes, and sterile nostalgia of the past, rolls up her sleeves abundantly, offering a repertoire of much more than decent and sufficient pieces, a veritable chest of POP pearls to savor in a "musical" starred restaurant and not at the McDonald's of easiness. Artpop, while divorcing from the severity of Born This Way, retains its electronic-synth cauldron, laid out in a varied menu of subgenres, deepening it with new proposals and latest "refinements". Here, then, is the freshly squeezed juice of Artpop: a kaleidoscope, a litmus paper of the carefree, frivolous, dancey, indifferent, disengaged but not too much, party-loving and "working-class" pop, glitter and "dirty", friendly and gangsta, a bit delayed in art history, but with remarkable potential and a magical ability to attract.

We start with Aura and already it's war to the last synth. Originally named Burqa and included in the soundtrack of Machete Kills, the track marries oriental sounds with a mighty techno avalanche before making way for the 80s-in-a-box of the robotic Venus, an undeniable homage to the namesake colleague made in Bananarama and Sexx Dreams, a chic electronic rain I dare to compare to Ivana Spagna's Easy Lady. With Do What U Want (in duo with R. Kelly) and Jewels n' Drugs Gaga stops at the hip hop-urban rest stop, distancing herself from the dance floor. Needless to say, this stop is only temporary: Swine, the new Scheisse, collapses into a deafening and thrilling electro-trance complex, while Manicure plants itself in a curious dynamic funky rock idyll. With Donatella Gaga reviews the runway territory of her friend Versace, gifting her with a "fashionista" electropop gem halfway between mockery and idolatry. The album closes with the spicy ballad Gypsy, the trance delirium of Mary Jane Holland (hymn to marijuana), the desperate lullaby Dope, and the "wrong" lead single Applause.

Hated, loved, crucified on the altar of pop, and adored by her Little Monsters prostrated before her, Lady Gaga sheds the skin of the pseudo-rocker mistress ringing the bells of the Apocalypse and wears only a trio of seashells Little Mermaid-style to cover her private parts and spread the creed of "artistic pop". Headstrong, chart clown or mainstream genius and new postmodern Madonna. The hard verdict is yours,

Lady Gaga, Artpop

Aura - Venus - G.U.Y. - Sexxx Dreams - Jewels n' Drugs - Manicure - Do What U Want - Artpop - Swine - Donatella - Fashion! - Mary Jane Holland - Dope - Gypsy - Applause