Lady Gaga — Joanne
Lady Gaga’s initial stock rose so quickly that perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the crash seemed to come just as fast. The Fame and it’s cousin The Fame Monster spun off hit after hit, and the outlandish Gaga seemed like the perfect pop star for the age.
That success continued with Born This Way, an album as anticipated as any pop record in the past decade, and one which delivered the goods, even if Gaga seemed to be more enamoured with the idea of being a spokesperson for freaks and geeks everywhere (or “little monsters” as she dubbed them) than with pushing herself forward musically.
That holding pattern didn’t really prepare anyone for the full blown failure of Artpop however— an ambitious but flawed record which Gaga started disowning merely weeks after its release. It wasn’t as bad as the reception suggested, but it showed for the first time that Gaga was fallible, and sent her into a tailspin.
Regressing to a conservative corner almost unthinkable one year earlier, Gaga enlisted Tony Bennett and crooned through The Great American Songbook on 2014’s Cheek to Cheek, before turning her hand to acting — starring in an entire season of American Horror Story - and picking up a Golden Globe award for her creepy and affecting performance in the process.
Eventually Gaga needed to return to pop, and so it is with the delivery of Joanne, arriving 3 years after Artpop. If Gaga’s profile is reduced from her peak a half-decade earlier, it is still large enough to see a flurry media coverage appear before the album was released, much of which concentrated on the “raw and personal” nature of the album, telegraphing Gaga’s intention to distance herself from the slick ambition of Artpop.
If a stripped down result was what Gaga had in mind however, her methods for getting there are at the very least seem interesting. Hiring Mark Ronson as co-executive producer and songwriting partner, and featuring a galaxy of guests at regular intervals (including Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age, Kevin Parker of Tame Impala, Beck, Father John Misty, and Florence Welch) the album seems from the outside to be an ambitious affair.
Despite this impression Joanne is indeed an attempt to scale back the artifice of Artpop — it flies through a myriad of styles from EDM through to country-tinged balladry, but it is an encapsulation of everything Gaga has done before. Josh Homme provides spiky guitar and co-writing to the tough “Diamond Heart” and “John Wayne”, “A-Yo” is ridiculous fun, and the Welch duet “Hey Girls” works nicely. But there are also a preponderance of ballads, at times weighed down by slightly portentous lyrics about the state of the world.
The great irony is that by aiming for a record completely different from Artpop, Gaga actually ends up with its mirror image. That record was hampered by its artifice over-ambition, whereas this is hampered by it’s search for authenticity and conservatism.
That makes for a good album, but not a great one, and it leaves the audience wondering when Gaga might be the one who is pushing the boundaries of pop music once again.
