Two years after Lady Gaga’s last album, and three years since her last pop record, “Joanne” finally hits the charts. And what’s the verdict of Mama Monster’s latest delicacy for her loyal fans?
It’s pretty OK.
I wanted to love this album. I wanted this album to be the best thing Gaga has released in her entire career and all her following albums to surpass it. I wanted this record to be a masterpiece.
While it’s by no means a bad LP, it’s fair to say “Joanne” won’t be going down in history as Gaga’s most memorable release. You’re not going to go out of your way to listen to it over and over again like you did with “Born this Way” or “The Fame Monster.”
It’s just not that kind of album, and it may have been intentional by Gaga. This is a record not from the mind or the heart but the soul.
In a lot of ways, it’s the most vulnerable Gaga we have ever seen.
We have seen glimpses of this side of her before in songs like “Dope” and “Til It Happens to You” but never a whole album’s worth of content before. “Diamond Heart,” “Angel Down” and the title track show the world an uncensored, raw, true side of Gaga in the perfectly flawed flesh.
It all sounds great, too. But when you have BloodPop and Mark Ronson, two of the best producers of the last 10 years, working on your LP, what else would you expect?
Apart from the leading single, “Perfect Illusion,” maybe none of these songs will ever be played in a New York nightclub like the tracks on Gaga’s previous dance albums. With that said, “Joanne” is certainly not lacking in either rhythm or substance.
Songs like “A-YO” and “John Wayne” are perfect examples of this with their sick thumps and hip-hop beats.
These would be standard in a traditional Gaga album, but since this isn’t a traditional LP for her, these are the only songs of that style.
This leaves more room for experimentation in “Joanne’s” instrumentation. The guitar in “Million Reasons” has a Nashville twang, the synth in “Hey Girl” plays like a 1980s one-hit wonder pop tune, the backup vocals and positive energy in “Come to Mama” recall to Motown music and the spaghetti western attitude of “Sinner’s Prayer” is like Ennio Morricone at a dance club.
The stand-out song on this album is the final track, “Angel Down.” Dedicated to Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black man shot by George Zimmerman in 2012, it is a song about the social injustices being inflicted on the black community by police.
It’s a rather odd topic for a song to be sung by a white woman. It appears that Gaga no longer wants to write songs simply about her personal experiences, but about issues greater than herself.
Such a move can be career suicide for most artists, so seeing her take this step forward takes real courage. It’s the step forward that can make or break a pop artist — the difference between immortality and irrelevance.
afaulds@indiana.edu
@a_faulds9615
