Lady Gaga – ARTPOP
Fame and fortune aside, Lady Gaga’s evolution from fringe freakshow to pop culture queen hasn’t done her any favours. Instead, it’s made her self-referential theatricality the industry expectation: little monsters like Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus have laid claim to a portion of the songstress’s fan base by aping her dramatic flair and Hollywood-gothic musicality.
Today, Lady Gaga’s claim to the hype machine throne is tenuous at best, and almost entirely dependent on the success her much-awaited comeback to 2011’s Born This Way. This is the album that will make or break her career.
Repetitive, unimaginative and bloated, ARTPOP fails in virtually every possible way. Sure, there’s the occasional earworm here and there: the titular track is a capably Madonna-esque ode to Andy Warhol, and “Gypsy” is as catchy as it is vaguely offensive. But for the most part, Gaga’s newest is the work of an old dog who’s run out of new tricks.
Never is this more apparent than in the album’s opener, “Aura,” in which Gaga attempts to show us the real her, the one “behind the aura,” while a computerized voice repeats “dance, sex, art” lifelessly. Is this a straight-faced attempt to introduce the album’s ham-handed themes, or a shallow attempt to be avant-garde? It doesn’t matter — the song is downright awful, as are the vast majority of the tracks that follow.
Though lyrics were never her strong suit, Gaga’s bon mots throughout ARTPOP are lacklustre and carelessly clichéd. “Dope,” the album’s token piano ballad and a sappy love letter to Gaga’s fans, is particularly misguided: Gaga’s impassioned refrain, “I need you more than dope,” isn’t just bad; it’s embarrassing.
There are moments here where you can almost hear the Lady Gaga we fell in love with five years ago — the unexpectedly moving bridge of “Donatella,” the banshee energy of “Manicure,” the self-parody of “Applause.” All this only makes it more painful to state the obvious: ARTPOP is a completely unmitigated disaster.
Sky Ferreira – Night Time, My Time
Now this is what I’m talking about!
Sky Ferreira’s studio debut, Night Time, My Time, is far from game-changing: it’s affable alterna-pop with just the right amount of cheek, and it’s everything a cautiously optimistic music listener like myself expects from a mainstream pop effort. No more, no less. Ferreira’s newest LP is conventional, cohesive and congenial; as it turns out, not every album has to rewrite the rules.
Producer Ariel Rechtshaid, who’s worked with such artists as Vampire Weekend and Haim, gives Ferreira’s songwriting an assembly line simplicity that nods to some of her biggest synth pop influences, such as Duran Duran and Cyndi Lauper. The verse chorus verse structure of such standouts as “24 Hours” and “You’re Not the One” are charmingly familiar, and Ferreira’s decidedly non-threatening pop star sneer helps keep Night Time, My Time from becoming overly repetitive.
By this point, Ferreira’s story is well known: she was signed at age 15, and has been caught in a maelstrom of failed pop experiments and studio squabbles ever since. Last year, she finally got her big break with the John Hughes prom night dance track “Everything Is Embarrassing,” announcing herself as the Lana Del Rey alternative we’d all been waiting for.
Night Time, My Time effectively subverts the one-hit-wonder template Ferreira briefly toyed with: all 12 tracks on the record, in their own way, recreate the unabashed joy and nostalgic haze of her breakout single. The pop rock elasticity of the guitars and the broad stroke synthesizers set the stage perfectly for Ferreira’s teen idol subversion: at no point during the album’s lean 45 minute runtime does any instrument or chord progression feel out of place.
In her own way, Ferreira proves that pop star status doesn’t necessarily equate to vapidity or acquiescence. Night Time, My Time is the sort of album that the FM radio elite have been trying — and failing — to make for decades: catchy, fun escapism that doesn’t insult your intelligence.
Throwback: Outkast – Aquemini
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was more ambitious. Stankonia had better singles. ATLiens had better lyrics, and Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik began it all. But OutKast were never better than on their third studio record: a portmanteau of Big Boi and André 3000’s astrological signs (Aquarius and Gemini), Aquemini sees the duo at the top of their game as musicians and performers.
Though their differences would eventually lead to their breakup, the balance struck between Big Boi’s dynamic boasts and André 3000’s spitfire stanzas on Aquemini is striking. The pair turn on a dime from solemn observation to bombastic wordplay, sometimes within the same stanza. Their fast-paced Georgian twang contrasts beautifully with the LP’s molasses-thick instrumentation, which includes horns, low register bass and a rip roaring harmonica solo.
The album’s most popular single, “Rosa Parks,” from its civil rights refrain to its syncopated acoustic guitar beat, seems to single-handedly carve out a place for southern hip-hop. The seven minute horn-led “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” is loose and soulful, while the dual anecdotes on the “Da Art of Storytellin’ (Part 1)” are among some of the most poignant rhymes ever put to vinyl.
Each song has its own unique tone and message; at 74 minutes, a lesser album might have seemed bloated, but each cut on Aquemini feels necessary. The duo experiment, but never lose focus — maybe that’s just a side effect of their Yin and Yang relationship, Dre being the head-in-the-clouds creative and Big the frugal businessman.
The former tends to get the lion’s share of the praise, but OutKast was always a marriage of equals: their music remains the product of two brilliant minds working in sync in a way that calls to mind the greats: Lennon and McCartney, Strummer and Jones, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg.
Aquemini was the first southern hip hop record to get a five mics rating in The Source. In the nineties, the question on everyone’s mind was, east or west? The correct answer was Georgia, and OutKast were more than happy to let everyone know.
