ARTPOP [Gaga's best album] is 10

A decade later, we're all little monstrosities

I’ve been known to start fights with people at parties about how ARTPOP is Gaga’s best album. Clearly, I’m trolling. I know it’s her worst. But that’s why it’s the best—in a camp sense.

It wasn’t until I read Paglia’s scathing critique of Gaga (in preparation for a podcast episode with @CamillePawglia—formerly known as @bodylessorgans, and known on this Substack as Stanley Bast—on Gaga, Madonna, and abstract art) that I came to fully understand the genius that was ARTPOP.

In my new piece for the Daily Beast, I basically argue that the album makes a brilliant commentary on the effect technocracy (“globohomo”) has over our psyches, sex drives, and sense of identity.

As a work of high camp, ARTPOP points to truth “obliquely,” as writer Susan Sontag would say, opening our eyes to reality by means of inversion—via artifice and lies. And thus, while her critics are technically “correct,” they also massively misunderstand Gaga’s genius in presenting ARTPOP to the world at the time she did.

When I first got hooked on ARTPOP, I thought of it as a guilty pleasure, not fully understanding why I was so captivated by songs that made me feel like I was being tugged back and forth between oscillating planes of existence. At one moment I was envisioning myself at a debauched rave, and the next ascending to the height of cosmic transcendence, teetering toward the verge of a mental collapse. It wasn’t until much later that I understood the immense power of what Gaga had accomplished through ARTPOP—and it was thanks in part to my realization that maybe her critics had been right all along.

Ironically, it was one of Lady Gaga’s most vehement detractors that helped me most fully appreciate ARTPOP’s significance. In the U.K.’s Sunday Times, Camille Paglia wrote a scathing profile of Gaga in 2010, saying that despite seeming “comet-like, a stimulating burst of novelty,” she was “a ruthless recycler of other people’s work.” “How,” Paglia wrote, “could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation?”

Paglia wrote that Gaga’s hold over younger millennials and Gen Z is emblematic of the discombobulated cultural paradigm they were born into. Her “fragmented and dispersed personal expression” represents “the exhausted end of the sexual revolution.” she wrote.

Our experience of reality, Paglia wrote, has been largely mediated through screens, rendering our world one “of blurred borderlines” and loss of touch with the carnality of real life. “Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions,” Paglia argued, adding that Gaga’s army of “Little Monsters” don’t have experience with performers who have “huge personalities and deep wells of passion” like Tina Turner and Madonna.

ARTPOP—released three years after that profile—is guilty of all the things Paglia accuses Lady Gaga of. And yet, the pop star is refreshingly self-aware of her absurdity. The album’s ironic, self-deprecatory tone makes for a compelling commentary that gurgles up from deep inside the technocratic, artifice-addicted culture that spawned it— much like all good feats of camp.

In this regard, ARTPOP is nothing like Lady Gaga’s previous albums. It triumphs in its lack of earnest self-seriousness and moralistic self-righteousness. Whereas The Fame was mired in conventionality and Born This Way peddled socially responsible sloganeering, ARTPOP refuses to “try to be” something. It lets artifice be artificial and chaos be chaotic, without attempting to package it up in more palatable (and thus, truly artificial) wrapping. It forgoes the naive optimism that would hold that “everything is fine!” (to borrow from the image of hell as presented by NBC’s The Good Place) because we were “born this way,” and that we are “superstars, no matter who [we] are!” Instead, with ARTPOP, Gaga held up a mirror to our solipsistic postmodern moment, opening our eyes to what we really are: quite literally, little monsters.

Continue reading at the Daily Beast.

In more Paglian terms, ARTPOP is interesting because it’s vision of human nature and sexuality is more Nietzsche/Freud/De Sade than Rousseau. This is why it’s my favorite album. For the record, I think her actual best album is Fame Monster—it’s both sonically and thematically compelling. I stand by my take that The Fame is too generic (a euphemism for MIA’s critique), Born This Way was too propagandistic, and I didn’t have to energy to take Joanne or Chromatica seriously.

I had to cut out some bits about individual songs for the sake of length. So I’ll add here:

-”Do What You Want,” which was pulled from the album post-facto after R Kelly got cancelled, is emblematic of the logical conclusions of sexual libertinism and moral relativism. The sexual decadence paraded as self-expression and fulfillment of one’s identity in Born This Way eventually devolves into violence, mechanization of the body. As the video indicates, under the reign of technocracy (under the guise of “being true to yourself” and creating your own truth), the body is reduced to its machinery. In keeping the tone with the rest of the album, it does not ignore the fact that human sexuality is tainted (whether by Original Sin, the thanatos drive, the Oedipus Complex—take your pick), unlike the flowery version that Born This Way offers. The cognitive dissonance of cancelling the song when R. Kelly was accused of sexual assault was baffling (but not really)!

-I love to remind people that “Aura” was originally called “Burqa.” Shocking that she never got cancelled for appropriating Muslim imagery. Even still, the idea that her true identity is concealed by a burqa is indeed rather interesting, and further plays with the themes of nature and artifice, and the deific role that corporate elites assume under global technocracy (the sin of shirk شِركْ…as well as the decadent tendencies within Islamic ethics and aesthetics. There’s more to be said here, inshallah I’ll find the time to flesh it out more. But for now, this clip from Elite spells out the cognitive dissonance of neolib progressivism’s attitude toward Islam.

-Lastly, I would never want this Substack to get dismissed as a platform for legitimizing conspiracy theories. So I won’t say anything about how “Mary Jane Holland” is Gaga’s attempt to cryptically describe what it’s like being an MK Ultra victim with split identities. But I will say you should take a closer look at the cover of cracks in pomo: the zine ;)

Please consider signing up for a paid subscription to this page for more riveting content. If you’re new to Cracks in Pomo, check out the About page or read up on our Essentials. Also check out our podcast on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty