Even the devil himself, limping from hell himself, would not be able to resist this music: he would dance wildly with the instruction: "The category is dance or die". In the video clip, Lady Gaga is both Pushkin's Queen of Spades and the Red Queen from Alice through the looking glass, and any nameless creature from Bosch's pleasure garden triptych... and many more. Music and painting are inextricably linked
Lady Gaga is definitely bringing order to the sugar mill of popular music. Although too young for the world of rock and roll dinosaurs - which, among other things, opened the door to her extravagant appearance in today's show business - it seems that she somehow remembers the time when "The Beatles" and "The Rolling Stones" were pop, and avant-garde artists did wonders in the sphere of art rock. Her universe therefore expands much more in the direction of David Bowie and Prince than, say, the expected Madonna, although comparisons between them are inevitable. But while Madonna remains stuck in her youthful harem, which has obviously been fulfilling all her erotic fantasies for years, Lady Gaga is ambitiously intending to turn the world upside down. And she succeeds in that, every opportunity. Because her new album Mayhem the first one is big and maybe the biggest record in 2025.
Stephanie Joan Angelina Germanotta (1986), born into an upper-middle-class New York family, had to earn her current star status, however, through hard work from the ground up. In this sense, responsible and disciplined from a young age, Lady Gaga played the piano as a four-year-old, only to be further fascinated by acting and art in general. The decade spent at the Lee Strasberg Institute for Theater and Film was clearly not wasted - Lady Gaga has achieved several notable roles, such as the one in Bradley Cooper's film A Star Is Born from 2018 - and in the meantime she made a real audio-visual masterpiece of herself, which has been confirmed countless times during her now 20-year-long and respectable career.
You certainly remember Lady Gaga proudly walking around in a dress made of slices of raw meat at the 2010 MTV Awards, or just a month later emerging from a giant glowing egg at the 53rd Grammy Awards. An act worthy of one Ziggy Stardust. Sorry, real artistic act, in fact. Because the British classic Francis Bacon posed for "Vogue" in 1962 with beef halves hanging over him symmetrically like wings, similar to the scene from his famous painting "Figure with meat" from 1954. And "The Beatles" had that notorious "butcher" American album cover Yesterday and Today from 1966. And then there's "The Undertones" cover compilation All Wrapped Up, in which a woman is dressed in bacon and sausages around her neck instead of a necklace. Lady Gaga, without any doubt, studied all those "incidents" and entered the tradition with a clear attitude and humor.
Her current album Mayhem the goods are with a genius error. It's supposed to be about stupidly catchy tunes and brain lobotomizing, but instead Lady Gaga is here practicing shrewd mental skills that are second to none. Kicking off this grand pop culture experiment with the track "Disease" - the very title of which evokes discomfort and suspicion among the masses - Lady Gaga with gusto drives rebellious nails into the chest of anesthetized palanquin, through open worship of vibes from the legacy of the bands "Queen" or "Depeche Mode": think "Another One Bites the Dust" and "Master and Servant". A very Nirvana-esque musical introduction eloquently testifies to the correctness of the label electro-grunge in this case. In the accompanying video, visually resembling a perverted double of the great alternative heroine of the nineties Alanis Morissette, Lady Gaga adds the demonic horror of "The Prodigy" from the same decade, openly confirming on whose side her heart lies.
In some imaginary remake of the movie Dogma only she could be God in person, both female and male.
The follow-up "Abracadabra", based on elements of the wonderful song "Spellbound" by "Siouxsie and the Banshees" from 1981, captivates and lingers in the head like the cry of an army of strange dreamlike beings, beings that reside not only in your body but also in your head. The brilliance of Lady Gaga's artistic imagination seems to reach its maximum here - her darker eloquence and leaning towards the sentiment of bands like "The Cure" is evident in all the most famous tracks from this record. But the fun never really ends. Even the devil himself, limping from hell himself, would not resist: he would dance wildly with the instruction: "The category is dance or die". In the video, Lady Gaga is both Pushkin's Queen of Spades and the Red Queen from Alice through the looking glass, and any nameless creature from Bosch's pleasure garden triptych… and many more. Music and painting are inextricably linked.
What is life but a dream, after all, Lewis Carroll himself said.
Album Mayhem - whose name in translation means: chaos, violent disorder, mutilation - Lady Gaga, at the age of 40, considers both the future and her own authorial past and fame. Through a rite of primordial, frenetic play as some own version Rites of spring, but also through the motif Doppelgänger, she faces all varieties of herself, like that girl in The Chemical Brothers' long-ago "Let Forever Be" video. There is also teenage nostalgia for their pop heroines. In the song "Garden of Eden" we hear echoes of Britney Spears from her best days, which in Lady Gaga's reading is actually a compliment: "I could be your girlfriend for the weekend/You could be my boyfriend for the night". The transience of youthful relationships in a loose disco, where bodies are intimately exposed to each other under the flashes of light, realizing the longed-for intimacy "as if they have always known each other" - is the basis of a serious author's release Mayhem: “Bodies gettin' close under the lights/(Oh) I've been feelin' this familiar feeling/Like I've known you my whole– life/(Oh) Take you to the Gard–n of Eden/Poison apple, take a bite (Oh)”. Do you notice the similarity to Bowie's Berlin expertise of human loneliness and the pressure the individual is subjected to in the song "DJ" from the album Lodger (1979)?
Alternative deadline, industrial, "Nine Inch Nails", St. Vincent, techno funk... whatever comes to mind, with Lady Gaga it takes on a human, sensual, but never vulgar aura. Whether she's honestly confessing her crush on "Vanish into You," or paying tribute to Duran Duran's "The Wild Boys" (or even to a much greater extent to producer Nile Rodgers) in her own track "Zombieboy," Lady Gaga is the frenetic superstar of tomorrow, a sort of Marina Abramović in pop's Garden of Eden.
Hasn't the time already come for the woman who fell to Earth?
The three-story underground garage in Skerlićeva Street is 10 meters from the depot of the National Library of Serbia, warns the Plenum of this institution and tries to save the entire written treasure of Serbia with a petition
Goran Vasić, the acting director of the Republic Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments, sent without the knowledge of the employees a proposal to revoke the status of a cultural monument for the General Staff complex, they claim, and that is why they are asking those who put him in that place, the Government of Serbia, to replace him
The mayor of Zrenjanin canceled the competition for funding projects during the year of the Capital of Culture. What does that actually mean?
The exhibition "Partibrejkers - be yourself", on the occasion of 40 years since the release of the first album of this famous band, tells the story of Canet, Anton, Ljuba and Manzanera, who defined rock and roll in the Yugoslav regions
A lie is a powerful tool, you can achieve anything with it. But the truth is also powerful. If you want to accept the truth, then you can't do it partially, you have to decide whether you want to know and accept the whole truth and live according to it, or you have to persist in lies that can comfort you better. Red or blue pill
Anyone who condemns the regime's targeting of people from the media, the non-governmental sector, the opposition and universities, must not agree to this targeting of RTS editors and journalists either.
The government of Đur Mazut is "counter-revolutionary", focused on retaliation and state and street violence against opponents of the regime
Depriving Dejan Ilić, an intellectual with an impeccable life and work biography, of his freedom, without the slightest meaningful reason, is just one of the brutal indicators that the regime has turned against its own citizens and is entering a phase of terror
Vučić and Šešelj: Where I stopped, you continue
The return of radical violence subscribeThe archive of the weekly Vreme includes all our digital editions, since the very beginning of our work. All issues can be downloaded in PDF format, by purchasing the digital edition, or you can read all available texts from the selected issue.
See all
