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Lady Gaga Throws Everything in the Pot
Mayhem isn’t quite the return to form it’s being sold as.
Every unruly stretch of activity for this milieu — a Tony Bennett tour, a country album, A S tar Is Born — is pulling on a thread that’s always been there: The city kid who, by hook or by crook, has their artistic interests engaged early on, always trying to bushwhack the space to be as formless and flowing in public as they feel in their heads. The album is — to the extent that anything the pop auteur creates can break the attraction to an uplifting hook — a bit dark, reflective of a press run that saw her alternate between white blonde and all-black glamour and frame Mayhem as a “return to Gothic dream.” But songs like “Disease,” the daughter of “Bad Romance,” serve stock Gaga self-loathing that feels more parodic than in her earlier work. “Killah” basks in plastic funk, drum-machine clatter, and percussive flows, its verses cribbing the almost funk-rap delivery from Prince’s 1987 State of the Union jam “ Sign O’ the Times.” “Zombie Boy” blends a “Hollaback Girl” — or, hey, maybe “Mickey” — chant with a beefy disco strut revealing Chic, or at least the Daft Punk songs with Nile Rodgers involved.
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