Described as the backbone of the record, Gaga did not want to experiment with the production of "Artpop", as she believed it to have an infinite aspect in it. "Artpop" was the first song developed for the album and led the composers to pursue other avenues of musical production. She co-wrote and co-produced the song with Paul "DJ White Shadow" Blair, Nick Monson, and Dino Zisis. That sounds like the most plausible definition of the lot, in no small part because its relevance rests in much more reliable hands than hers: yours."Artpop" (stylized in all caps) is a song by American singer Lady Gaga from her third studio album of the same name (2013). By subjecting it to the same criteria we apply to what is already recognized as art, Artpop could become the thing Gaga so desperately wants it to be. Which brings us back to that supposedly doomed new album. What changed? Dickens’ status “is now defended through reference to familiar terms of literary criticism (structure, irony, tragic consciousness, and so on) and, ultimately, through (his) association with other ‘literary’ figures. Or, you could do what Charles Dickens did: Wait for the people who care about such things to simply start treating you differently.Īfter all, Dickens achieved “classic” status, Mikita Brottman writes in High Theory/Low Culture, despite his use of “low cultural tools such as melodrama, scandal, burlesque, stereotype and violent action.” There are two ways Gaga’s album could go about meeting that definition, one of which involves her doing nothing at all.įirst, she could follow the path blazed by ’70s “art rockers:” create songs that, as critic John Rockwell wrote, “paralleled, imitated, or were inspired by other forms of ‘higher’, more ‘serious’ music.” (If you can detect much of that on Artpop, you have better ears than we do.) Or, to put it another way: artpop is a reconciliation of high and mass culture. submitted by “guitartard” to the website Reddit, in response to the question: “What’s the most intellectual joke you know?” “Is it solipsistic in here, or is it just me?” Does that really sound like someone with a Byrne-like attachment to the first half of her album’s portmanteau?ģ. Hell, as she repeatedly notifies us on a recent single, she lives for the applause-plause. But it’s the ‘Applause’ after that lets me know if I’ve entertained you.” So I may need your attention at first, so I can sing you my song. “Some of us are ‘artists’ in this group called ‘celebrity’,” Gaga tweeted, “and what we create doesn’t live on unless there’s an audience to remember it. Unfortunately, a yawning gap lies between that concept, which former rock critic/current sociomusicologist Simon Frith has called “an art-music niche,” and Gaga’s distinctly less utopian notion: I feel I’m successful, he replied, “when people forget the distinction between the two.” Talking Heads’ frontman David Byrne was once asked whether he makes art or product. Artpop is pop music whose main aspiration isn’t commercial success but that, ideally, attains that goal anyway. OK, so if not Lady Gaga’s definition, perhaps this:Ģ. Lyrics that name-drop Jeff Koons and Botticelli or defer to banal generalities (“Artpop could mean anything,” as the title track unhelpfully articulates)? The remorseless synthesizers, military-precision beats, guest rappers and other familiar tropes that already occupy virtually every corner of dance music? It’s a strikingly pithy statement that sounds really smart until you start thinking about it.įor starters, if the soup can is Gaga’s music, what, pray tell, is the art? “Instead of putting pop onto the canvas, we wanted to put the art onto the soup can.” That’s how Gaga herself defined it during an interview for some British cellphone provider we’d rather not name but with whom she has a commercial arrangement. Herewith, nonetheless, are three attempts at a useful definition: In the past week alone, Gaga has suffered: an ill-timed split with her manager pervasive mocking over an emotionally wobbly performance at the inaugural YouTube Music Awards and a rising chorus of jeering reviews, many of which are gleefully brutish even by the bell-curved standards of online commentary. Granted, it can be hard to focus on meaning when the contiguous racket is so much more entertaining. Lost amid the ominous racket leading up to Tuesday’s release of Artpop - Lady Gaga’s third and, if you buy the emerging narrative, already-doomed album - is the musical question at the locus of the noise: