If The Fame was a manifestation, MAYHEM is Lady Gaga’s temperature check — and a confident one at that. Now, nearly two decades into the pop star’s mountain-like career, we’ve seen her lunge in all directions to fight against, escape from and through it all, create her own artistic reality. At times, this has meant landing on entire planets that only exist in Gaga’s mind (and, by proxy, all of ours). We followed her into the past and also the future, traversing the many shifts and immersing ourselves in the whiplash of Gaga’s evolving designs. MAYHEM sees Gaga sitting with herself in full scope — where she came from, but more importantly where she is today as a result of that journey — to address the world as a multi-faceted musician whose influences are as vast and chaotic as she is.
The ‘08 energy of Gaga’s debut album that catapulted her to stardom is felt throughout this project, only now from the perspective of a 38-year-old woman who’s experienced more than she ever could have anticipated at the beginning. There’s a simplicity to that time, which she recently emphasized to Zane Lowe while at Lower East Side’s Welcome to the Johnsons, where she first explored her identity and started inventing Lady Gaga. “I’m not here anymore,” she says, “but MAYHEM definitely began here.” Then, dancing felt easy (“gonna be okay!”), sex was just a game and wealth seemed out of reach — an innocent downtown fantasy that Gaga wielded with fake blonde hair and enough references tucked inside her catsuits to bury Stefani Germanotta — at least temporarily.
Gaga’s not dressing this era in one particular look or overly expansive narrative; she’s leading music-first with an encyclopedic knowledge of all the greats and an honest reflection of who she is. Now, there’s more urgency to a night out on the dancefloor when Gaga repeats, “Hit the lights, DJ, c’mon,” like it’s a religious commandment in “Garden of Eden.” Whereas she once did it “for the fame,” singing about a “life of material” with praise, Gaga interrogates what happens when it’s finally achieved on “Perfect Celebrity” — an angry, stadium rock anthem where she admits, “I’ve become a notorious being,” and one we’re all responsible for. Then, there’s Gaga’s much deeper relationship with love, which is at the heart of MAYHEM and a response to her fiancé Michael Polansky — the discovery of love (“Vanish Into You”), the fear of love (“How Bad Do U Want Me”) and the acceptance that she has it (“Blade of Grass”).
All this is backed by instrumentation that sounds familiar, albeit developed, to that of Gaga’s discography at large. There’s the ’70s funk-inflected lip curl of David Bowie and Prince, juxtaposed against The Cure and Radiohead, rock bands who defined Gaga’s taste as a songwriter throwing back PBRs in New York dive bars. There’s early-2000s dance-pop that tastes like a straight shot of vodka and from-the-earth, gritty industrial that rattles like the walls of a gothic rave. Gaga executive-produced MAYHEM with Polansky and Andrew Wyatt, which explains it being so unapologetically her — not just one Gaga, but many Gagas at once that pull from years of absorbing music. French DJ Gesaffelstein is the only featured artist on MAYHEM, fueling this sonic push-pull with a rebellious grit and Gaga’s menacing declaration that she’s, above all, a “Killah.”
Ahead of album release, PAPER called up Gaga, bare-faced with messy blonde braids and a black beanie, to talk about MAYHEM. “My fans have wanted me to feel confident for a long time, and I do,” she says, “so here we are.”
The album is amazing, I’ve been processing it all morning. For me, “Perfect Celebrity” really stuck out as something special. In it you say, “You love to hate me, I’m a perfect celebrity.” Is there a specific experience that inspired wanting to write a track like that?
It’s so interesting you ask that because when I made [“Perfect Celebrity”], I was shocked by what it was about. It poured out of me: “I’m made of plastic, like a human doll/ You push and pull me, I don’t hurt at all/ I talk in circles cause my brain it aches/ You say, ‘I love you,’ I disintegrate.” It was a song I’d been wanting to write, but that I was maybe nervous to write. What that song is ultimately about is that, for myself and for many people now, there’s the real us and then there’s the clone of us that we project to the world — and having a complicated relationship with that, and almost raging out on that record about it.
And also being mad at myself, like that record is a little bit like, Why do I do this? I don’t understand why? Why am I a part of this thing that I have all this rage about? And also that being a celebrity nowadays, there’s an element of being able to hate the celebrity that’s part of entertainment. It’s been a long time since I’ve grappled with fame on a song. I haven’t done it for a long time, so I returned to it and it’s something I’m super nervous to talk about. Because I feel really grateful for the career that I’ve had and I love being an artist, but it kind of just came out on that song.
One of the through lines on MAYHEM that I recognized was you grappling with love, and whether or not you deserve love — whether or not you’re capable of the experience of love, but ultimately still wanting it and having it right now. What do you think MAYHEM says about your relationship to love?
What MAYHEM says about my relationship to love is that sometimes I’m a complicated person, and I don’t know that I’ve always been that easy to be with. My partner has this unique situation with me, where he’s in a relationship with both Stefani and Lady Gaga, and I’ve tried to integrate myself into one person. But my mayhem is that there’s a lot of me’s, and I’ve tried to express that in my videos so far for this record. You know, in the [album] art with the broken glass, the fragmentation, the cut up imagery, like what does it mean to be completely broken? But broken people find other broken people and then we fall in love, and then we hold each other together the best that we can.
The Gesaffelstein collaborations feel like a long time coming. In a way, I was surprised at how light some of the tracks are, like with “Killah.” I almost anticipated you two coming together to make something really dark. What was that process like for you?
He’s on a few songs on the album. We did “Garden of Eden” together as well, and we did “Blade of Grass” together. He loves classics, and there was this special moment that we shared over making music and collaborating together because I can relate to people being like, “I want you to be Gaga. I want you to do your Gaga thing,” and me sort of going like, “I don’t really know what that means. It’s like a stereotyped idea of what you want me to do.” And I was doing that to him. He loves classic music, he has a timeless soul.
So I brought an idea that Michael and I had started together, “Blade of Grass,” into the studio and worked on that with him, as well. And “Killah” is, like, totally Gesaffelstein’s thing, but it will be so surprising to people, because it’s in a way that he’s never done it before. “Killah” is an industrial funk song, I’ve also never done a record like that before. Gesaffelstein and I are both dark in that we’re just rebellious with our music. So it’s not about one sonic aesthetic, it’s about our energy. But, yeah, “Killah” is an ultra-confident song. I love that song, I loved making that song and I can’t wait to perform that song. And the bridge is one for the books to me.
Also the outro — the outros in general are so crazy and indulgent. I wanted to talk about those, specifically, and what you set out to accomplish there — and your production involvement with MAYHEM at large.
I co-produced the entire album and I was very excited to do outros on the record, because I want to dance, and I’m so excited to be dancing again. I feel like I rediscovered that on the Chromatica Ball, but I was not able to really dance in the same way for many years. So yeah, I wanted to build the performances into the music. There are some truly great outros on this album. I know it sounds probably weird to talk about your music that way, like I’m talking about my own record with so much pride, but I think it’s okay. My fans have wanted me to feel confident for a long time, and I do, so here we are.
The album title is so interesting after listening to it fully. Without diving too deep into the lyrics, it’s sonically a dance album — and especially when you’re in the middle section, it has this real ’70s funk, bright feeling, but then it’s called MAYHEM. Why did you feel that made sense for this project?
Because it seemingly all doesn’t go together. Since the beginning of my career, I’ve had people say, “Well, what is your musical style? What is your visual style? Can you explain to me who you are?” Like, “Help me digest you.” And the answer is, “No, I’m not going to help you digest me,” because I’m a chaotic artist, and my art is chaotic, and my influences, when you put them all together, they don’t make sense unless I’m the one that’s touching all of them and putting them all together.
So for me, MAYHEM was about actually embracing that about myself. And also not being literal; calling the album MAYHEM and having every record be dark, right? That is actually not what mayhem feels like to me. To me, personal mayhem and mayhem in the world is when you have opposing forces and you need tension. There’s got to be light to be tense with the dark. There has to be fragility to interact with something that’s intense for it to feel chaotic. So the album is more chaotic because of the variety of influences and the fact that it’s not homogenous. In the way I’m talking about Gesaffelstein, too, and his desire to be seen by me in the studio. I really related to that, and I wanted to bring that to this album as well, the whole me.
My fans have wanted me to feel confident for a long time, and I do, so here we are.
Photography: Kevin Lebon