Multi-platinum selling diva Lady Gaga is
fighting to keep her ‘Queen of Pop’ crown with a hotly-anticipated third album,
but early reception in the US and Britain has been lukewarm.
“Artpop” signals a return to the
limelight for Stefani Germanotta — known as Lady Gaga on stage and in video —
after she was forced to tone down her usually ubiquitous media presence to
undergo hip surgery.
“For ArtPop, in a symbolic way, I’ve
put myself in front of a mirror, I’ve taken off my clothes, then the makeup,
then the wigs, I’ve dressed myself with a black jumpsuit and I’ve told myself:
‘Now, you have to prove you can be brilliant without all that’”, Lady Gaga told
the magazine Grazia.
Even before its official release
next week, “Artpop” has been making the headlines.
The 27-year-old New Yorker, who
established her reputation on chart-topping songs and surrounded herself with a
constant media buzz, streamed the new album this week after it was leaked.
The artist also hinted at an
out-of-this-world publicity splash for the album’s official launch — a concert
in space.
The US Weekly magazine reported that
Lady Gaga plans to undergo a month of special vocal training to perform in
early 2015 aboard the Virgin Galactic, the passenger spaceplane being launched
by British billionaire Richard Branson to popularise space tourism.
While the third album suggest Lady
Gaga’s increasing artistic ambitions, critics in Britain and the US are not so
convinced.
“The intention of the album was to
put art culture into pop music, a reverse of Warhol. Instead of putting pop
onto the canvas, we wanted to put the art onto the soup can,” Lady Gaga said in
an interview in Britain’s Daily Mail.
Lady Gaga has collaborated with a
number of world famous contemporary artists, including Jeff Koons for the
album’s artwork, showing her as a post-modern Botticellian Venus.
But on a first hearing “Artpop”
returns to familiar themes — desire, sex, drugs, identity, celebrity, fashion,
creativity — and sounds more like Lady Gaga’s previous albums “The Fame” and
“Born this way” than it does a totally new musical experiment.
“There’s certainly some decent pop
on Lady Gaga’s new album — but the ‘art’ part is rather harder to discern”,
said the British newspaper The Guardian.
The verdict was echoed across the
Atlantic.
“Lady Gaga’s latest extravagant
exploration of her own fame, fabulousness and fearlessness is undeniably
relentless, but that doesn’t mean it’s consistently entertaining,” said USA
Today.
“Musically, it’s as big and bold,
unpredictable and diverse as Gaga herself with enough hooks and ABBA-esque
choruses to keep any pop fan smiling through Christmas and beyond,” said the
online Huffington Post.
“If Gaga wants to be taken seriously
as an ‘artist’ (like all the arty farty posturing and avant garde styling would
suggest) then she really needs to spend more than five minutes jotting down the
first rhyming couplets that spring to her mind.
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