ARTPOP or ARTFLOP? Examining Gaga’s Criminally Underrated “ARTPOP”
Lady Gaga, one of the biggest female acts of all time, is known for her catchy pop hits, over-the-top fashion wackiness, and her versatility in music and media. Arguably, her legacy lies in her 2011 sophomore album, Born this Way, and in the song of the same title, immediately becoming modern day’s most prominent LGBTQ+ anthem.
Born this Way went on to sell over a million copies in the first week, reached number one in twenty-seven countries, and was a critically acclaimed success for Gaga. The famous magazine Rolling Stone placed it at #484 in their famous “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list. It was only logical that critics and the world at large expected another indisputable hit of an album for Gaga’s third project. Unfortunately, audiences and critics alike did not have the enthusiasm for the 2013 successor ARTPOP that they did for Born this Way.
Despite ARTPOP debuting at number one on the Billboard Charts, it’s first week sales of 258,000 copies (a 75% decrease from that of Born this Way) that lost Interscope Records $25 million in promotion costs and poor critical reviews gave it its nickname, “ARTFLOP.” The critical consensus around ARTPOP was that it lacked meaningful depth, was messy in its composition, and ultimately, was a let down. One criticism reads that Gaga’s, “skills as a wordsmith seem to have peaked around the time she penned the line ‘bluffin with my muffin’” and that “‘Artpop provides enough clunkers to supply several monster truck rallies.”
In my opinion, however, ARTPOP, generally and semantically, is underrated: I think it is Gaga’s most personal album that just has an out-of-the-box, playful presentation. And it’s not a bad album, far from it actually. It was just released in a time where it wasn’t appreciated.
The album ARTPOP was released on November 11, 2013, where music was a very different thing than it is today, and different from what it was in 2008 when Gaga’s Just Dance and Poker Face catalyzed her rise to superstardom. With the former, Gaga brought 80’s Europop and dance pop back into the mainstream: she created the standard that the pop acts of the time, like Ke$ha or the Black Eyed Peas, strived to meet. As Gaga continued to build on her dance pop style with Born this Way and eventually ARTPOP, the musical climate had already shifted for her target demographic, teens and young adults.
As the wacky Gaga aesthetic dimmed down, the more serious, angsty aesthetic began to rise. This is majorly attributed to the rise of mass social media usage, and in 2013, teens everywhere wanted to embody the “Tumblr aesthetic.” Tumblr, as most probably know, is a social media website where different fandoms (fan bases) mobilize and obsess with each other about their favorite artists, movies, television shows, etc. To be a “Tumblr girl” was a very specific thing: it was a resurgence of the 90’s fashion, “indie pop, ironically oversize[d] eyeglasses, and late-wave finger mustaches”. (See – the infamous photo of teens on a wall that took Tumblr by storm)
Along with the grunge fashion that came with being a “Tumblr” teen, there was certain grungy music that fit, and ARTPOP was not in that wheelhouse. The largest group of pop listeners, teens, were obsessed with dark indie pop records like Lorde’s Pure Heroine and Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die, or pop rock and punk inspired albums like One Direction’s Midnight Memories and 5 Seconds of Summer’s self titled album. The sound of ARTPOP, in simple terms, was just not trendy anymore. Nor was Lady Gaga’s over-the-top schtick. Teens in 2013 wanted relatability, that's why lifestyle Youtubers started to rise to popularity, why One Direction’s entire brand was based on their resistance to the typical boy band stereotype, why indie singers singing about (and subtly glamorizing) mental illness was popular; all because teens wanted to like people that they could be or be friends with. ARTPOP, in its presentation to the general public, was less obviously related to every individual and was more specific to Gaga’s interests and experiences, and so did not meet this new “Tumblr” standard.
Although it was not sonically or aesthetically on trend, lyrically, there was an exploration of similar personal themes as other artists; but it was ultimately overlooked because of how different it was. ARTPOP is experimental; it takes a playful approach to the themes it touches on; but I don’t think that playfulness diminishes the meaningful sentiments it expresses.
Although the light and playful nature of the lyrics and melodies have immediately turned some critics off, even saying it feels as though Gaga has, “phoned things in a bit,” I think that they greatly succeeded.
ARTPOP is an album that uses pop culture as its backdrop— we can use the philosophy of another iconic figure in pop culture; the late Andy Warhol. Warhol was a 20th century American Artist known for leading the visual movement of “pop art,” who, like Gaga, was obsessed with everything art, everything pop culture, and how to mesh the two together. Before emerging into the deeply personal world of ARTPOP, Gaga begins the album with an invitation, first: the sonically strange, Aura. To understand this introduction into the world of the album, we can turn to Warholian philosophy on life, culture, and perception.
Warhol said, “I think that ‘aura’ is something that only somebody else can see” and that “they only see how much of it as they want to.” He continues on to wonder about how you only see an aura “on people you don’t know very well or don’t know at all.”
Applying the Warholian philosophy on the essence of an “aura” to Gaga’s own lyrics, we then understand that when Gaga sings the hook, “Do you wanna see the girl who lives behind the aura?,” it is a call out to the fans who love her and to the media that have scrutinized her, to get rid of their dispositions about who they think Lady Gaga is, and see her for who she is saying she is.
The unique experience that Gaga has faced, rising to immediate stardom at such a young age as an out-of-the-box creative, has plagued her with an entire world of people who think they know what she is all about. Although we, the general public, experience this on a smaller scale, the feeling of people in our life misunderstanding us is something that is so universal and personal. Figuring out who we are as an individual is an experience that we, really, can only go through ourselves. The presentation of this sentiment is certainly something, yes, with her talking in a voice-altering effect while talking about killing her former self with a knife and taking her to Hollywood, but it's a meaningful sentiment nonetheless. Its unique, glam pop way of connecting with real emotions is what makes it so undeniably Lady Gaga.
Journalist Rose Dommu, in a 2019 article revisiting the album, agrees that “ARTPOP com[ing] from a place of such deep human pain” is what harks it as Gaga’s most personal album, instead of 2018’s Joanne. And I have to agree, because hidden behind hypnotic melodies, beat drops, and artsy metaphors, Gaga delves into personal topics that are actually extremely serious.
A very shocking performance of the song Swine, where the choreography required that a dancer projectile puke on Gaga whilst performing, was very controversial in 2013 when it happened. Swine, a song disguised by a crunchy techno-beat drop is about Gaga’s own experience as a rape victim; and the performance, as concluded by a Rolling Stone article, had a “generally unsettling” atmosphere that it created in the audience, and that the black goo stains all over Gaga for the rest of the performance, marked her as “a metaphorical survivor of rape and an actual survivor of performance art.”
Through performance art, through lyrics like, “you’re just a pig inside a human body,” Gaga has expressed the rage, anger, and fury that can follow somebody violating your body. For the women and men who have unfortunately experienced sexual assault themselves, Swine serves as a sometimes necessary “screw you” anthem. To open up about sexual assault, in any way, can be an extremely difficult thing, and to do it in song, to millions of people, is a really courageous and vulnerable act.
Not only did Gaga use songwriting as a cathartic experience following her assault, but following a severe drug addiction, as well. ARTPOP’s piano ballad, Dope, is a brief pause from the techno-pop that Gaga usually creates, and it beautifully expresses the pain, regret, and emotional toll that one goes through during and after addiction.
In an interview on Sirius XM following the release of ARTPOP, Gaga spoke about the song, saying it was an “I’m sorry to all of the people in my life” that had to see her in “a withdrawn state all of the time,” and continued on, admitting that she was “numbing [her] body and spirit” for a whole year. The lyrics sing, “...each day I cry, I feel so low from living high.”
Coming to terms with addiction, and even admitting that there is a problem in the first place, is both an extremely difficult and extremely important thing to do, and it showed millions of fans that yes, even “Lady Gaga” struggles. And considering that Born this Way marked Gaga as a modern LBGTQ+ icon, and that substance abuse affects LGBTQ+ people 21.4% more than cis-het people, coming to terms with addiction so candidly was really important to a large part of her audience. The exploration of very real issues, like sexual assault and addiction, makes ARTPOP, in my book, Gaga’s most personal work to date. Delving deep into yourself to release emotional, even traumatic, experiences takes a very brave artist, and the poor reception ARTPOP got in 2013, in the face of this bravery, in my opinion, was unfair and dismissive of its powerful semantics.
And those meaningful messages aren’t exclusive to her discussions about the more difficult things in life; but include just about everything that life has to offer. In this way, the sentiment of the title track, ARTPOP, that “ARTPOP could mean anything,” is very relevant.
There is no one way to define exactly what comes next, as Gaga says, “this concept of ARTPOP [is about] how we, the artist, beacon for our ideas and for our vision to be the most important thing that is driving culture.” And ideas are ever-changing. But what stays consistent with Gaga is her Born this Way message of self-love, acceptance, and empowerment. Empowerment in your body, in your mind, and in your heart. It’s an emotional journey, told in the most Gaga way possible.
During the writing process for the album, Gaga said that she “just want[ed] you to go home and put that record on and delve right into that thing that you are afraid nobody will believe in you for.” The album, as an agent for self-actualisation and empowerment, is actually very powerful; it journeys into different aspects of our lives; love, sex, the self; to declare out to the world that we are in charge of our art, of ourselves.
For example, the song G.U.Y., an abbreviation for “Girl Under You,” explores confidence in yourself and sexual liberation in a third-wave feminism esque track: Gaga singing that “I don’t need to be on top to know I’m worth it ‘cause I’m strong enough to know the truth.” The story of this song, told with an artsy introduction mentioning Himeros, God of sexual desire, and presented through a playful double entendre, G.U.Y., is nonetheless a celebration of the self that is oh-so Gaga: it’s tasteful, fun, and delivers her mantra of self-love and empowerment.
And as journalist Rose Dommu wrote upon revisitation of ARTPOP years after its release, if “G.U.Y. had been the lead single, we “might be living in a very different America.” (Jokingly, but seriously, justice for G.U.Y.) Dommu is not the only one to revisit ARTPOP in recent years, though.
After Gaga tweeted on the six year anniversary of ARTPOP’s release, “i don’t remember ARTPOP,” and upon revisition of the album, Lauren O’Neill, a culture journalist for Vice, concluded that “upon its 2013 release,” it was “essentially - and unfairly - declared a flop” and that it has “remained desperately underrated.” She also writes that it was only after ARTPOP that Gaga “began to seek out roles other than The Bombastic Popstar” and “it's possible that, for better or worse, the response to the record drove her to... embody her… more supposedly ‘authentic’ roles.”
In short, a perceived “flop” may have been a necessary step for Gaga’s journey into becoming the household name that she is now after winning her Oscar for the critically acclaimed film, A Star is Born. In this way, ARTPOP’s critical and commercial reception may have led to Gaga’s current success, but that doesn’t mean that it deserved to be hated as much as it was, and by a majority, still is.
Despite the history of ARTPOP hatred and the recent resurgence of revisitation to the album, it still is the “forgotten” Gaga album: it was released in the shadow of Born this Way and then forgotten behind A Star is Born. It’s a wacky, sometimes strange-sounding explosion of dance-pop that maybe is destined for only certain people to enjoy, understand, and love. After all, “ARTPOP could mean anything,” and I certainly think it means brilliance.
