This Album Deserved the Brat Treatment

People start to die off when weirdness pushes past their comfort zones.

People like quirky personalities with off-kilter traits. You know, the qualities that made up the twee era. The ones that communicate “I’m different! But only to a certain extent.”

When weirdness pushes past comfort zones, people die off.

In 2013, Lady Gaga hosted ArtRave in honor of her third studio album, Artpop. Two years had passed since her massively successful Born This Way album and fans were excited to watch the star’s latest era roll out.

With Artpop’s release, Gaga pushed the boundaries too far for commercial radio. When she wore a dress made of raw meat in 2010, audiences could manage their lasting shock because her songs were radio-friendly. Artpop is more avant-garde and references high art that could go over the average pop radio listener’s head.

So, when Lady Gaga hired performance artist Millie Brown to vomit on her while performing “Swine” at the SXSW Festival, it was too much for audiences. When she explained the connection to degradation, it was still too much.

Despite releasing such a unique body of work with Artpop, Gaga’s high-art antics overshadowed the music.

A meat dress is great for next-day work conversations. Bodily fluids… not so much.

That’s too weird.

Under pressure

“Fuck you, pop music! This is Artpop!!” Gaga screamed at the end of her “Swine” performance.

Despite the thumping electronic music, a colorful album cover and a Thanksgiving special with the Muppets, Artpop still had an overshadowing darkness.

In 2021, DJ White Shadow shared exactly how dark the Artpop period got for the artist.

"Making music and delivering it the way ARTPOP was made and delivered was particularly difficult," he posted on Instagram.

"So many scum bags trying to latch on to the train I had worked so hard to get out of the station. So much transition and turmoil. Let me tell you that I have never been so broken as a human being the day when that record was turned in. I was nearly dead."

Those familiar with Gaga lore know she was in severe physical pain leading up to Artpop’s release and after. She was at the peak of her career and the middle of her “Born This Way Ball” tour when a labral tear blew it all up. She had to cancel the remaining tour dates to prioritize her health.

Labral tears are painful and the repair process is arduous. I know because I’ve had two surgeries to repair my right hip—the same hip Lady Gaga had repaired.

Having conquered my own labral-triggered depression hole, I know how easy it is to fixate on what was taken away. For me, it was running and for Lady Gaga, it was being on top of the world. Her surgery and subsequent recovery phase would take time away from a very high-pressure, physical job.

Plus, she had to deliver a third album to her label.

Gaga had a near-impossible task ahead of her. She was coming off a No. 1 album when she headed to the studio for Artpop. Expectations were higher for her label, fans and self. And she had to do it all while recovering from surgery.

It was so dark that in 2019 she claimed she didn’t remember the album.

i don’t remember ARTPOP

Gaga did get another No. 1 album, as well as five Billboard 100-charting singles, with Artpop. The numbers put her amongst peers like Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus, but the problem with comparing Gaga with her peers is that Gaga is in a league of her own.

Born This Way, her sophomore album, also debuted No. 1—with 842,000 more first-week sales than Artpop.

In 2013, Pitchfork writer Chris Molanphy applied their AC/DC Rule to Artpop:

“… initial sales of an album are a referendum on the public's feelings about the act's prior album, not the current one.”

The name refers to AC/DC’s first No. 1 album, which “is both less acclaimed and poorer-selling, by a factor of five, than its classic predecessor.”

While Gaga’s debut, The Fame, did not reach No.1, its slow-burn nature made for a stronger cultural impact.

“Her debut full-length The Fame, with its slow sales build and string of hit songs, primed hundreds of thousands of people to line up for Born This Way in week one, resulting in that eye-popping 2011 debut,” Molanphy wrote. “But that’s when the AC/DC Rule flipped on her: Born’s shelf life was unquestionably shorter and less impressive—fewer hits, medium-size sales, general weirdness that outstripped her prior, more lovable weirdness—and so a falloff in sales, for whatever album came next, was inevitable.”

Here comes weird again.

Gaga pushed the boundaries, just not in the way her audience wanted. She emphasized the album’s art theme, but those outside the art world didn’t understand. The album cover is a collaboration with Jeff Koons and her song “Donatella” is an ode to Italian fashion designer Donatella Versace. Additionally, her collaboration with Marina Abramović left music critics confused.

While these art-world names are familiar, they aren’t in everyone’s lexicon. Those unfamiliar with Abramović’s previous works deserve to scratch their heads while their favorite pop star meditates outdoors in the nude. Combined with everything else, Artpop went over heads. It was called pretentious, half-cocked and “bizarre album of squelchy disco.”

Revisiting Artpop today

TW: sexual abuse

We weren’t ready for Artpop in 2013.

Reviewing the year’s top albums, pop had fewer BPMs than what Artpop offered. “We Can’t Stop” by Miley Cyrus has 80 beats per minute and “Roar” by Katy Perry has 90. Out of Artpop’s 14 tracks, “Dope” is the only song with fewer than 100 beats per minute.

This is also when Mumford & Sons’ gradual entrance into pop music charts propelled folk-pop to the forefront, propping up contemporaries like The Lumineers and Of Monsters and Men. It was clear pop audiences wanted their stars to slow down.

So that’s what pop did, and it stayed that way for a while.

The always-savvy Rihanna followed this trend with her 2016 album, Anti, which is considered a fan favorite. Even Lady Gaga saw massive success with her ballad “Shallow” from 2018’s A Star Is Born. The downtempo trend peaked in 2019 with Billie Eilish’s whisper-pop melodies hitting the mainstream.

By the time 2024 came around, pop radio had been enjoying lower BPMs for a decade. It was time to freshen up and Dua Lipa served as our transitional goddess, serving up a perfect record with Future Nostalgia. The disco-influenced album challenged other artists to step it up.

During Lipa’s ascension, lesser-known pop acts were working on building their strengths through experimentation.

And that’s how we got Brat Summer.

There are many parallels between Artpop and Charli xcx’s brat. Both are club-focused, with harsher and harder EDM beats than audiences are used to. They also bring a nose-up attitude, with Gaga partnering with esteemed artists and Charli xcx touting her it-girl posse.

But for Gaga, the Brat wave came too late to ride.

By 2024, Lady Gaga had completed three album cycles (if you include her musical work on A Star Is Born). Timing wasn’t the only thing Artpop had working against it. Gaga made a huge misstep in hiring a convicted rapist and pedophile for a duet on the album’s track, “Do What U Want.”

The stain that can’t be scrubbed

R. Kelly is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence for the sexual exploitation of children. He was convicted in 2021—eight years after Artpop’s release. Claiming ignorance can be excusable, but it’s not excusable when Kelly’s abuse has been in headlines and written into jokes for decades.

In 2000, Jim DeRogatis and Abdon Pallasch published a Sun-Times piece on Kelly’s crimes after receiving an anonymous tip that prompted an investigation. The story didn’t stick; however, two years later, they’d receive evidence that indicted Kelly.

"It was horrifying," DeRogatis said of the tape sent to him for evidence. "The worst thing I've ever had to witness in my life."

In 2008—five years before Artpop—Kelly went to trial and was acquitted, despite the significant evidence gathered against him.

The information was out in the open enough to reach Gaga and fans, including this one, were pissed. On the outside, Lady Gaga seemed like the only pop star that took feminism seriously, not using it as a marketing tool. Making the situation worse, she issued an extremely defensive response.

"R Kelly and I have sometimes had very untrue things written about us, so in a way this was a bond between us,” she said at a 2013 press conference in Japan.

Lady Gaga didn’t receive any goodwill with that response, considering how the song’s title and theme (“do what you want with my body”) overlapped with Kelly’s crimes.

Fans found an alternative when Gaga tasked Christina Aguilera with singing Kelly’s part of the song in 2014. However, Gaga didn’t reference her collaboration with Kelly for another five years.

She eventually came around and recognized the pain she was inflicting on her fans by aligning herself with an accused rapist. But it took an explosive documentary series featuring women who survived Kelly’s abuse to prompt her to break her silence. Singing with Christina was simply not enough.

To make amends, she pulled “Do What U Want” from streaming and halted its inclusion from all future vinyl and CD pressings.

The right answer at the wrong time.

The next era

Mayhem, Lady Gaga’s eighth studio album, has prompted fan buzz. The biggest compliment is she’s returning to her true form, the Gaga we knew from “Bad Romance” and “Judas.” The one who uses Catholic imagery to prompt satanic panic.

To quote the internet, “We are so back.”

The album, releasing tomorrow, is safe while defining a new era for the artist. And throughout her career, she’s tried it all.

She went country with Joanne, which also received the Artpop treatment. She won a Golden Globe for acting on American Horror Story, followed by an Oscar for the song “Shallow” in A Star Is Born. Her jazz albums with Tony Bennett received critical acclaim and won the duo Grammys. She performed at the Super Bowl Halftime Show in 2017, followed by President Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021.

These are feats that do not happen because someone failed; they happen because someone evolves.

Lady Gaga is still defining the game as an artist, it’s just not how we’ve wanted. Those who have seen her evolution, however, know there is much more on the way from the creative powerhouse.

Will she ever be as weird as she was with Artpop?

Maybe if the album got the brat treatment. If that happened, we could be enjoying a whole lot more weirdness right now.

But we’re not. Because people only like the idea of weird.