As the singer releases her sixth solo album Mayhem, let’s celebrate her as a champion of queerness, reinvention and disobeying the algorithm
There rarely is only one Lady Gaga. The video for “Disease”, the first proper single from her new album Mayhem, opens with her in a white dress, lying on the hood of a car. It is being driven, we soon find out, by another version of her, this time dressed in black. The two Gagas sing at each other menacingly for a while, from either side of the windshield. Eventually, a third Gaga appears, and drags white Gaga away. The pair end up fighting on the pavement, then running away. Black Gaga looks on.
In “Abracadabra”, the second single, she wears a red latex outfit, adorned with intimidating pins and nails, topped with a huge, spiky hat. “The category is,” she says as the video begins, “dance … or die.” We then move to the arena she is overseeing, which is filled with dancers clad in white – including Gaga herself. Not for the first time, the singer is the judge and the one being judged; the performer and the audience. And the way she walks with her red cane – how could it not be a nod to the video for her song “Paparazzi”, from 2009? The disjointed, jerking movements are eerily similar.
It’s clear that Gaga knows her pop culture references – it’s hard to see some of her looks in “Disease” and not think of Madonna’s “Frozen” – but, on the whole, her main inspiration is herself. Some of the details will only be spotted by obsessives, but others are more blatant. The lyrics “Abracadabra, amor-oo-na-na / Abracadabra, morta-oo-ga-ga” are a clear echo of “Rah, rah-ah-ah-ah / Roma, roma-ma / Gaga, ooh-la-la” from the iconic “Bad Romance”.
This doesn’t mean she has stagnated as a singer-songwriter. Instead, it should be seen as Gaga doing exactly what she said she would. Interviewed by the Independent in 2009, as she crashed into the mainstream, she described herself as “a bit of a Warholian copycat”. As she argued at the time, “Some people say everything [in music and fashion] has been done before, and to an extent they are right. I think the trick is to honour your vision and reference and put together things that have never been put together before … I like to be unpredictable, and I think it’s very unpredictable to promote pop music as a highbrow medium.”
Echoing those comments, Rachel Syme wrote in the New York Times in 2018 that Gaga “read Andy Warhol’s books and realized that what most people want, when they dream of fame, is not necessarily wealth or power but limitlessness: the ability to change”.
Stefani Germanotta has been a world-famous artist for almost two decades. A gifted pianist from a young age, she studied method acting for 10 years and gained admission to a New York music school at 17. Before signing her first major contract, she haunted the bars of Manhattan as part of “pop burlesque rock show” Lady Gaga and the Starlight Revue. Fame came knocking quickly after that.
Since then, she has used her Gaga persona to speak out on a number of issues, often surrounding the queer community. In 2010, she attended an awards ceremony dressed head to toe in raw beef, as a protest against the US military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which prevented openly LGBTQ people from serving in the army. She spoke at the National Equality March in 2009, campaigned on anti-gay bullying in American schools and was ordained as a minister to marry two of her female friends. Most recently, she has loudly opposed a raft of transphobic policies announced by President Trump.
When it comes to music, she is just as hyperactive. Gaga has released dance-pop and electronic albums; she has strayed into pop, rock, techno, and released not one but two albums of jazz standards with the legendary singer Tony Bennett. She has been happy and sad, broken and defiant, fun and furious. Often, she has been several of those things at once.
At first glance, for example, her last album Chromatica was a joyous one. She had long pink hair and jumped around with Ariana Grande. But there’s a darker undertone to the songs and as Gaga revealed to Vogue a year after its release, “I don’t think I’ve ever been in more pain in my life than when I was making that record.” Mayhem, by comparison, seems dark and ominous but the music radiates with glee. Germanotta is 38 years old and seems to be wildly in love with her fiancé, tech entrepreneur Michael Polansky. By all accounts, she is thriving.
Her recent success wasn’t a given. Last year, she played Harley Quinn in Joker: Folie à Deux, a movie that was panned by – well, everyone. It was corny where it should have been camp; dour when it should have been spiky. Back in 2021, she starred in House of Gucci, which, while not as unpopular as the Joker sequel, still received what we may politely call “mixed” reviews. In order to prepare for her role as Italian socialite Patrizia Reggiani, Gaga, who is of Italian descent herself, had “lived as her for a year and a half” and “spoke with an accent for nine months”, as she told Vogue. Despite this, a slightly embarrassed dialogue coach told the Daily Beast that she actually sounded more Russian than Mediterranean.
That is, in effect, the Lady Gaga story: you never know what she will do next, or whether it will be any good, but you can be sure that she’s worked hard and taken it all incredibly seriously.
This is a refreshing approach for a pop megastar to take in 2025, especially considering the way her contemporaries deal with their craft. Taylor Swift, arguably the most famous singer of the century, delivers album after album of similar-sounding songs. The themes remain the same – love and loss, relatable alienation, the trials of young womanhood – and so do the vocals and arrangements. Her last tour mentioned the various “eras” she has gone through but, to the untrained ear, there isn’t much separating albums like 1989 and Midnights. She plays it safe and the fans adore her for that; they know what to expect, and she always delivers.
Beyoncé reinvents herself, but she rarely takes risks. If Queen Bey releases a club album, she will be releasing the best club album of the year. If she chooses to try her hand at country music she will work on this new direction for many years, as she did with Cowboy Carter, collaborating with over 70 writers across the album.
Lady Gaga, the third sister of pop’s triumvirate, refuses to play it safe. When she was 23, she told the Independent that “right now, the only thing that I am concerned with in my life is being an artist. I had to suppress it for so many years in high school because I was made fun of, but now I’m completely insulated in my box of insanity and I can do whatever I like.”
That she is seemingly still operating with the same mindset a decade and a half later is heartening. It would be easier for her to obey the algorithm, and give the fans something predictable to chew on. She has the money and fame to make sure that she never fails again, but she has chosen to keep taking risks instead. There will be victories and there will be failures; the only guarantee we have is that she has poured all of herself into it, and sincerely believes in whatever she has just put out.
Mayhem, as it happens, is fine. It has ups and downs. It doesn’t always know what it wants to focus on, and so sometimes it feels like it’s firing from every cylinder at once, with suitably chaotic results. In a review for Vulture, Craig Jenkins wrote that “if you come for one flavor, you misunderstand the depth of the Gaga palate”. Mayhem isn’t a masterpiece, and that’s the best thing about it. Long may our flawed queen continue to reign.
This article is from New Humanist’s Summer 2025 issue. Subscribe now.
