{"id":6054,"date":"2025-04-07T01:00:10","date_gmt":"2025-04-07T06:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/?p=6054"},"modified":"2026-04-13T16:57:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T21:57:12","slug":"i-always-want-to-be-remembered-for-being-a-real-artist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/?p=6054","title":{"rendered":"I Always Want To Be Remembered For Being A Real Artist"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThat is who Lady Gaga is to me,\u201d Lady Gaga tells Apple Music\u2019s Zane Lowe of creating MAYHEM. \u201cMaybe to someone else, it might be the Meat Dress or something that I did that they remember as me. But for me, I always want to be remembered for being a real artist and someone that cares so much.\u201d In that vein, Gaga set out to make her latest album\u2014which she calls her \u201cfavorite record in a long time\u201d\u2014its own thing. \u201cARTPOP was a vibe. Joanne was a sound. Chromatica had a sound. All different. The Fame Monster was more chaotic. The Fame was theatrical pop. Born This Way, to me, had more of a metal\/electro New York vibe to it,\u201d she says. \u201cI actually made the effort making MAYHEM to not do that and not try to give my music an outfit, but instead to allow myself to be influenced by everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Stream Now On Streamapse2.0<\/strong><\/span><\/a> Image Courtesy Of Apple Services.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Indeed, MAYHEM traverses\u2014and oftentimes melds\u2014the various flavors of Mother Monster\u2019s career, from the disco scene of her earliest work to her singer-songwriter era and back again. The opening tracks, singles \u201cDisease\u201d and \u201cAbracadabra,\u201d revisit dance-floor Gaga to thrilling fanfare. The spirited \u201cGarden of Eden\u201d follows the trend of what she calls \u201c2000 throwbacks.\u201d With its sparkly synths, \u201cLoveDrug\u201d might be seen as the brighter and shinier elder sibling of her early cut \u201cLoveGame.\u201d She even specifically admits the \u201celectro-grunge influence\u201d seeps its way in\u2014especially apparent in \u201cPerfect Celebrity,\u201d \u201cVanish into You,\u201d and \u201cThe Beast.\u201d The latter even shows shades of Joanne, but \u201cBlade of Grass\u201d and her Bruno Mars duet \u201cDie with a Smile\u201d really put her former folk-pop-rock persona on display.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also all incredibly personal to her. \u201cThe album is a series of gothic dreams,\u201d she says. \u201cI say it\u2019s like images of the past that haunt me, and they somehow find their way into who I am today.\u201d Below, Gaga takes us through several tracks (all in Spatial Audio), in her own words.<\/p>\n

\u201cAbracadabra\u201d<\/strong><\/span>
\n\u201cI think I didn\u2019t want to make this kind of music for a long time, even though I had it in me. And I think \u2018Abracadabra\u2019 is very much my sound\u2014something that I honed in [on] after many years, and I wanted to do it again. I felt like being stagnant was just death in my artistry. And I just really wanted to constantly be a student. Not just reinvent myself, but learn something new with every record. And that wasn\u2019t always what people wanted from me, but that\u2019s what I wanted from me. And it\u2019s the thing that I\u2019m the most probably proud of, if I look back on my career, is I know how much I grew from record to record and how authentic it all was. The thing that was most important to me was being a student of music, above everything else.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPerfect Celebrity\u201d<\/strong><\/span>
\n\u201cIt\u2019s super angry: \u2018I\u2019ve become a notorious being\/Find my clone, she\u2019s asleep on the ceiling.\u2019 It\u2019s almost comical, this idea that any time I\u2019m in the room with anyone, there\u2019s me\u2014Stefani\u2014and Lady Gaga asleep on the ceiling, and I have to figure out which body to be in. It\u2019s kind of intense, but that song, that was an important song on this album because it didn\u2019t feel honest to me on MAYHEM to exclude something that had that kind of anger in it because then it felt like I was trying to be a good girl or whatever and be something that I\u2019m not actually. Part of my personal mayhem is that I have joy and celebration, but I\u2019m also sometimes angry or super sad or really celebratory or completely insecure and have no confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShadow of a Man\u201d<\/strong><\/span>
\n\u201cThat song is so much a response to my career and what it always felt like to be the only girl in the room a lot of the time. And to always be standing in the shadow of a man because there were so many around me that I learned how to dance in that shadow.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Beast\u201d<\/span><\/strong>
\n\u201cIn that record, it is me or someone singing to their lover who\u2019s a werewolf, but what I believe about this is, this record is also about [my fianc\u00e9] Michael [Polansky] and I, and that this song is also about me and being Lady Gaga. What the beast is, who I become when I\u2019m onstage, and who I am when I make my art and the prechorus of that song is, \u2018You can\u2019t hide who you are. 11:59, your heart\u2019s racing, you\u2019re growling, and we both know why.\u2019 It\u2019s like somebody that is saying to the beast, \u2018I know you\u2019re a monster, but I can handle you, and I love you.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBlade of Grass\u201d<\/strong><\/span>
\n\u201cMichael asked me how I would want him to propose to me one day. We were in our backyard, and I said, \u2018Just take a blade of grass and wrap it around my finger,\u2019 and then I wrote \u2018Blade of Grass\u2019 because I remembered the way his face looked, and I remembered the grass in the backyard, and I remember thinking he should use that really long grass that\u2019s in the center of the backyard. Those moments, to me, at a certain point I was into the idea of fame and artifice and being the conductor of your own life when it came to your own inner sense of fame. I had to fight a lot harder to make music and dance a little bit later into my career because my life became so different that I didn\u2019t have as much life around me to inspire me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Every product\/service is selected by editors. Products\/Services you buy through these links may earn “SMG” a commission or revenue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThat is who Lady Gaga is to me,\u201d Lady Gaga tells Apple Music\u2019s Zane Lowe of creating MAYHEM. \u201cMaybe to someone else, it might be the Meat Dress or something that I did that they remember as me. But for me, I always want to be remembered for being a real artist and someone that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6055,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-streamapse-reports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6054"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6057,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6054\/revisions\/6057"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}