At the start of the decade, Lady Gaga worked hard to reposition pop as a high art or vice-versa—both absorbing and extending a lineage that included oddball visionaries like Andy Warhol, Klaus Nomi, Prince, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Elton John, Madonna, and Missy Elliott. Most of her avant-garde gestures were extra-musical, a string of cheeky, absurdist visions realized entirely outside of the studio and only tangentially in conversation with her bloodless dance jams (Gaga herself has referred to that early work as “soulless electronic pop”). It’s not hard, now, to recall these stunts from memory: she was sewn into a dress fashioned from slabs of flank steak for the VMAs. She hatched herself from a semi-translucent egg at the Grammys. She hired a self-described “vomit artist” to puke a steady stream of syrupy green liquid onto her bosom during a SXSW performance. Her repeated and earnest disavowal of anything remotely normative was (and remains) plainly empowering for anyone sitting at home alone in her room, feeling like a true weirdo. The idea was always to fracture and reestablish a hierarchy. Only Gaga could turn “monster” into a term of endearment.
And regardless of whether you find those moves electrifying or tedious, it's hard to overstate the value of that work as a public service—every generation’s freaks elect a champion, and Gaga was tireless, proud, and wholly devoted to the job. Her commercial success also meant that her chart peers were, for better or worse, free to get stranger, artier, and less predictable; Gaga helped usher in an era of pop in which hardly anything is too far-out (or pretentious) to play. Visual provocations of one sort or another are expected now: Sia performed “Chandelier” at the Grammys with her back to the audience, wearing a bobbed, platinum wig, while Kristen Wiig and the then-twelve-year old dancer Maddie Ziegler frolicked around her in nude bodysuits. Miley Cyrus gyrates among furries as a matter of routine.
But now that her peers have caught up, Gaga is starting to feel less like an audacious pioneer and more like one among many. Joanne, which is named after her late aunt—a sexual assault survivor who died of lupus at nineteen—experiments with rootsier idioms like country and folk, maybe as a kind of goofy gesture toward authenticity, or maybe just to distance herself further from 2013’s overblown and gloppy ARTPOP. Gaga has always sounded most comfortable belting out rich, brawny pop songs while wiggling around a piano bench, and her best tracks, like the deeply irresistible “Yoü and I,” from 2011’s Born This Way, are reminiscent of the more virtuosic fringes of glam-rock (“You and I” features inimitable Queen guitarist Brian May, a drumbeat that nods directly to “We Will Rock You,” and harmonies that very nearly recall “Bohemian Rhapsody”).
Glam—its blatant preoccupation with fame and stardom, its mischievous and inelegant tendencies, its emphasis on the theatrical, the visual, the decadent, the garish—made sense for Gaga, both for her voice (while robust and often lovely, it is not exactly nuanced; the little fissures and breaks that typically animate folk songs aren’t instinctive to her) and for her fantastical, psychedelic-leaning visual taste. A move toward singer-songwriter earnestness now—especially following Cheek to Cheek, the collection of jazz standards she recorded with Tony Bennett, itself a purposeful expression of seriousness, maturity—feels unnecessary.
Gaga has repeated Warhol’s claim that “art should be meaningful in the most shallow way,” but Warhol also insisted on a kind of surreal detachment from flesh—“Sex is so abstract,” he once said. Gaga’s disembodiment feels less deliberate. Joanne never reveals much of a narrative or stylistic through-line, and even her brief dips into indie-rock—her collaborations with Father John Misty on “Sinner’s Prayer” and “Come to Mama” (Misty is also credited as a writer on Beyoncé’s Lemonade), and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker on “Perfect Illusion” (Rihanna covered Parker’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” on Anti)—feel familiar.
Joanne is rife with visitors, though none make themselves especially known: Mark Ronson (who co-produces), Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine, Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age. “Dancin’ in Circles,” a song she co-wrote with Beck, is a clubby paean to self-love with a grody pre-chorus: “Up all night, tryna’ rub the pain out,” she chants. In 2016, masturbation-as-engine-of-escape isn’t a particularly titillating topic (in the decades since “She Bop,” Hailee Steinfeld, Nicki Minaj, Pink, the Pussycat Dolls, Britney Spears, and plenty of others have recorded tracks about getting themselves off), nor the instance of Beck-Gaga collusion anyone was hoping for (imagine, for a moment, if he had brought her “Debra”).
Though Gaga addresses a handful of serious concerns here, some topical, some personal—the murder of Trayvon Martin; what happens to a person after she dies—her treatment of them often feels clumsy if not performative (in “Angel Down,” an ode to the Black Lives Matter movement, she sings, “Angel down / Why do people just stand around?” while Ronson sadly plays a Mellotron).
Elsewhere, there are hints of a smaller, more personal arc: Gaga’s got it for someone she knows is bad news, but she’s not sure if she can walk away just yet. “Perfect Illusion,” the record’s first single, struggled to chart (it debuted at number fifteen on the Hot 100), but has a propulsive, dizzying quality that feels like a pretty good analogue for the process of completely losing your mind over someone, only to realize later you’ve been hoodwinked: “Mistaken for love, it wasn’t love, it was a perfect illusion,” Gaga bellows, her fire-hose voice big, unchecked, wild. She sounds indignant but also vaguely unhinged—like she’s figured out she’s playing a rigged game, but still refuses to fold her hand. Opener “Diamond Heart” has Homme on guitar, but the best moments are Gaga’s: “Young wild American / C’mon, baby, do you have a girlfriend?” she wonders in the chorus.
It’s the same story on “Million Reasons,” co-written with Hillary Lindsey (who collaborated with Carrie Underwood on “Jesus, Take the Wheel”), an undeniable power ballad Poison would’ve murdered in 1988: “I bow down to pray,” Gaga sings at her piano. “I try to make the worse seem better.” This kind of semi-desperate negotiating will be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has tried to will a doomed situation into something viable. Her man’s already given her a million reasons to split. “But baby, I just need one good one to stay.”
Sartorially, Gaga has recently come to favor civilian get-ups; just last week, she returned to the Bitter End, the tiny, Greenwich Village venue where she got her start, wearing short-shorts and a sheer, Bud Light-branded tank top (Bud Light sponsored her Dive Bar tour). In the video for "Perfect Illusion," she wears denim cutoffs, black combat boots, a black t-shirt, and a blonde ponytail. I sported a similar look—though with far less success—nearly every school day between 1995 and 1997. But nobody wants to immediately recognize herself in Gaga’s aesthetic; we want her to suggest a path we hadn’t thought of before, to nurture and clarify a beauty we didn’t even realize was there. Joanne feels too self-conscious, an affront to the Gaga of yesteryear—the truest self, after all, isn’t always the quietest.
