Lady Gaga’s Millennial Nostalgia Campaign

On the evening of Mayhem’s release last week, I walked into my local gay bar and prematurely ruined the bartender’s night. My friend and I, both millennial queers, were sharing our initial reactions to the album as we waited for drinks, when the nosey Gen Z butch tending bar interjected with an overblown “oh no.” A new Lady Gaga record, they explained, meant chaos for the night. Whatever drag queen or DJ was scheduled in the back room, it didn’t matter—the evening would devolve into “Abracadabra” on repeat. And they were not pleased. 

Lady Gaga will never go out of style with the millennial gays, at least, and in fact she might be the last of her kind: the ally pop star, from an era just before being queer and out became perfectly acceptable for a diva. When gay marriage passed in New York state in 2011, I walked out of the Billboard offices on 8th Street and there was a whole-ass parade passing by, blasting “Born This Way” all the way to Stonewall. It’s just one of many recollections soundtracked by Gaga, sometimes not by choice but because she’s been around for the entirety of my adulthood, maturing alongside my generation. Other memories include: watching her perform “Bad Romance” on a then-new episode of Gossip Girl while pregaming for the pregame in college; seeing her scandalize SXSW in 2014 with vomit-soaked performance art involving a mechanical bull—and witnessing her romance a hometown crowd not even two weeks later as she closed down Roseland Ballroom; singing “Shallow” at karaoke so many times I lost my voice for 2-3 days; telling my unhinged landlord that no, I couldn’t help her kill a squirrel in the stairwell because I was drunk in Jersey at the Chromatica tour.

Maybe I sound like a grandma recounting this stuff, but part of what I’ve been thinking about as the positive reviews of Mayhem roll in, mostly from other millennials, is how there isn’t necessarily a definitive “best” Gaga album or era—and yet this campaign is largely built on this album being a “return to form.” (I’d estimate that means 2008 to 2013, which encompassed The Fame, The Fame Monster, Born This Way, and Artpop—though poor, misunderstood Artpop might be a stretch). I get the sense from her recent NYT interview that Gaga is sorta anti-eras, and by that I mean: she’s bucking the albums where she mostly committed to one sound and a corresponding aesthetic, where she let herself be more easily defined (think Joanne, Chromatica). “They [the label] talk to you a lot about your look and what the aesthetic is for the album and the ‘brand’ of music,” she explained. “That started to affect how I made music.” Mayhem, on the other hand, “is everything I love about music but all in one place.”

At her core, Gaga is grab-bag major-label pop at its best. She has an idiosyncratic set of musical interests—from brash dance-pop and piano power-balladry to hair metal, showtunes, and what I’ll call diet gothtronica—but also a willingness to try on almost any sound for a second. This sets her apart from her peers, fellow A-list millennial pop auteurs like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, who have leaned into being album artistes and eras girlies with full commitment. I’d argue these three will be the last millennial pop stars standing at the end of the world, which I’m increasingly certain is coming soon. 

It feels like forever ago that Chromatica landed mid-pandemic, with its intergalactic mission to get the depressive masses lightly raving in their living rooms. One reason is because culture has shifted, and Gen Z stars are now in the driver’s seat of pop music’s future. A benefit of becoming the old guard is being able to press the nostalgia button when you need it. You can hear that in the recycled melody of “Don’t Call Tonight” (which recalls “Alejandro”), and you can see it in the “Bad Romance”-esque music video treatments for Mayhem. But there’s also more interesting things going on here, like the two tracks clearly influenced by Nine Inch Nails (“Disease,” “Perfect Celebrity”); the song that sounds like “Fame”-era Bowie meets late-’80s Prince (“Killah”); and how Gaga sounds kinda happy for the first time in years (homegirl is fiancéd and in love, ok?). What works less for me is when she channels other capital-p Pop Stars, like Michael Jackson (“Shadow of a Man”), “Hollaback Girl”-era Gwen Stefani (“Zombieboy”), and Swift herself (the 1989-ish “How Bad Do U Want Me”). 

I’m still not entirely sure what we mean when we talk about the “definitive sound” of Lady Gaga, but Mayhem is missing at least one thing that made me love her in the first place. Her kooky, campy, borderline-WTF sensibility has been disappearing from her work for going on a decade. No one else could write a song like “Swine” or “Judas,” or make me cry from the earnest but ridiculous plea that “I need you more than dope.” Maybe this is what happens when you mature—you stop saying silly things, or wearing outfits made entirely of raw meat or Kermit the Frog dolls, on the way to EGOTing. I’m happy for Gaga, but I also miss the weirder version that made her fame so fun to watch.