Analysis: The Crashing and Burning of Lady Gaga
Let’s be honest: Artpop is a stiff. A bad one. And if you believe the rumours, $25 million was spent marketing an album that no one seems to want. What happened? The New York Post takes a look:
Just five years ago, Lady Gaga exploded on the scene with her debut album, “The Fame.” She had an invented backstory as an art-school freak (in reality, she was a rich private-school graduate from the Upper West Side), a raft of witty, sophisticated pop songs and an ever-changing visual presentation that pulled from the greatest eccentrics of the 20th century, from Schiaparelli to Leigh Bowery — all thanks to a small, tightly knit team of stylists, collaborators and advisers that she called the “Haus of Gaga.”“I don’t feel that I look like the other perfect little pop singers,” she told Rolling Stone in 2009. “I think I look new.” Indeed, Lady Gaga felt like the first pop star since David Bowie to approach every aspect of performance sideways. In a landscape populated by earnest, business-minded, on-brand idols like Taylor Swift, Alicia Keys, Carrie Underwood and Katy Perry, here was this glorious freak show with mass appeal, a kook with genuine talent.
And, as suddenly, it seems the public at large is now exhausted by Lady Gaga. Even she admits it: “People think I’m finished,” she told Britain’s Guardian newspaper in September.
What’s gone so wrong?
