FROM GRITTY NYC CLUBS TO THE GRAMMYS, THE MULTI-HYPHENATE CONTINUES HER REIGN AS POP’S UNLIKELY QUEEN, TEARING UP THE CHARTS AND FILM FESTIVALS ALIKE (SHE’S AN ACADEMY AWARD WINNER, TOO). HER LATEST LP, HARLEQUIN, INSPIRED BY HER ROLE AS HARLEY QUINN IN JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX, DROPPED THIS FALL, AN UNCONVENTIONAL BLEND OF POST-MOD POP AND BYGONE BLUES
BY DAN SALAMONE
Lady Gaga has seemed to leap from massive success to massive success, across multiple media, for the entirety of her nearly 20-year career as a pop and film superstar. Her 2008 debut, The Fame, not only christened her as an astonishingly talented newcomer, but also went on to sell over five million copies, becoming the fifth best-selling record of 2009 with two number one smash singles: “Poker Face” and “Just Dance.” When it came time for the seemingly inevitable sophomore slump, she released an even better-received followup record in 2011, Born This Way. That record sold more than one million copies in the first week alone, en route to becoming the third biggest record of 2011. It also scooped up two Grammy Awards for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance (“Bad Romance”) and Best Short Form Video (also “Bad Romance”).
Yet perhaps the most interesting element of Lady Gaga’s sophomore record has nothing to do with sky-high sales (it sold more than five million physical copies in an era when record sales were almost exclusively digital). In Born This Way, the rising icon displayed a blossoming, restless muse with far more influences than one finds with a standard-issue, chart-crashing pop diva. Within that record is a vast mélange of genres. Yes, pop and dance music are ably represented, but so are heavy metal, glam rock, disco, and house music. Her third album, Artpop, followed in this fun, kitchen-sink approach to pop music, leaning harder on her dance roots to craft a brilliant glitter ball of an album that also became one of the best-selling records of both 2013 and 2014.
So what do you do when you’ve already released three era-defining albums that are among the most celebrated and best-selling long players of all time? Well, obviously, you make your next record a foray into musical genres that were au courant when your own parents were born, performed with an artist who last invaded the pop charts about four decades ago (Tony Bennett). That album was Cheek to Cheek, a sumptuous love letter to the jazz and swing records of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. Like the three records before it, this eccentric charmer hit Number 1 on the Billboard Chart, and yielded another Grammy, this time for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album.
It’s this weird, whimsical, lovely 4th album that is the clearest antecedent to Lady Gaga’s latest, Harlequin. The album is a companion piece to her widely praised performance in the widely reviled 2024 film, Joker: Folie a Deux. Both critics and audiences turned on the seemingly impossible-to-fail Joker sequel, marking it one of the biggest bombs in modern film history. Yet no one in the press has faulted Lady Gaga’s participation in this legendary cinematic bungle, noting she seemed like the one person who got what the jukebox musical sequel could have been. Her new album perfectly captures the melancholic grandeur of the film that might have been. Like Cheek to Cheek, the record is a fascinating synthesis of the music (jazz) of a bygone era with her own powerfully unconventional take on modern pop music. In addition to her once again playing in currently unfashionable genres, the record explores the mental illness of her character in the film in a much deeper and less programmatic way. Though one can definitely fault some of the head-smackingly obvious song choices that director Todd Phillips brought to the picture (“Smile,” “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” and “That’s Entertainment”), Lady Gaga brought a nuanced, fascinatingly feral understanding of her character that she also explored in this record. If you can divorce your experience of the record from the source material, you’ll find an album of traditional jazz standards brought to brilliant life by Lady Gaga’s wonderfully weird psychology and bone-deep love for a vintage genre that is mostly, and unfortunately, lost on modern generations.
Lady Gaga
