PARIS (AFP) – Multi-platinum
selling diva Lady Gaga is fighting to keep her ‘Queen of Pop’ crown with a
hotly-anticipated third album, but early reception in the US and Britain has
been lukewarm.
“Artpop” signals a return to the
limelight for Stefani Germanotta — known as Lady Gaga on stage and in video —
after she was forced to tone down her usually ubiquitous media presence to
undergo hip surgery.
“For ArtPop, in a symbolic way,
I’ve put myself in front of a mirror, I’ve taken off my clothes, then the
makeup, then the wigs, I’ve dressed myself with a black jumpsuit and I’ve told
myself: ‘Now, you have to prove you can be brilliant without all that’”, Lady
Gaga told the magazine Grazia.
Even before its official release
next week, “Artpop” has been making the headlines.
The 27-year-old New Yorker, who
established her reputation on chart-topping songs and surrounded herself with a
constant media buzz, streamed the new album this week after it was leaked.
The artist also hinted at an
out-of-this-world publicity splash for the album’s official launch — a concert
in space.
The US Weekly magazine reported
that Lady Gaga plans to undergo a month of special vocal training to perform in
early 2015 aboard the Virgin Galactic, the passenger spaceplane being launched
by British billionaire Richard Branson to popularise space tourism.
While the third album suggest
Lady Gaga’s increasing artistic ambitions, critics in Britain and the US are
not so convinced.
“The intention of the album was
to put art culture into pop music, a reverse of Warhol. Instead of putting pop
onto the canvas, we wanted to put the art onto the soup can,” Lady Gaga said in
an interview in Britain’s Daily Mail.
Lady Gaga has collaborated with
a number of world famous contemporary artists, including Jeff Koons for the
album’s artwork, showing her as a post-modern Botticellian Venus.
But on a first hearing “Artpop”
returns to familiar themes — desire, sex, drugs, identity, celebrity, fashion,
creativity — and sounds more like Lady Gaga’s previous albums “The Fame” and
“Born this way” than it does a totally new musical experiment.
“There’s certainly some decent
pop on Lady Gaga’s new album — but the ‘art’ part is rather harder to discern”,
said the British newspaper The Guardian.
The verdict was echoed across
the Atlantic.
“Lady Gaga’s latest extravagant
exploration of her own fame, fabulousness and fearlessness is undeniably
relentless, but that doesn’t mean it’s consistently entertaining,” said USA
Today.
“Musically, it’s as big and
bold, unpredictable and diverse as Gaga herself with enough hooks and
ABBA-esque choruses to keep any pop fan smiling through Christmas and beyond,”
said the online Huffington Post.
“If Gaga wants to be taken
seriously as an ‘artist’ (like all the arty farty posturing and avant garde
styling would suggest) then she really needs to spend more than five minutes
jotting down the first rhyming couplets that spring to her mind.”
Vanguard
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