After years of waiting for something, anything that might resemble the Lady Gaga that fans and critics alike first fell in love with in 2008, when her debut, The Fame, was released, Gaga has seen fit to oblige the long-awaited moment for her “return to form.” Which many have said hasn’t been since 2011’s Born This Way, even though, to be fair, 2020’s Chromatica was among her best albums. But that seemed to be quickly forgotten when Gaga continued to go the more American classic/“show tune-y” route with 2021’s Love for Sale (another collaborative record with Tony Bennett following 2014’s Cheek to Cheek) and 2024’s Harlequin, a companion piece, of sorts, to the failed musical that was Joker: Folie à Deux.
And so it would seem that a large part of Gaga’s motivation behind the creation of Mayhem was “getting back to her roots” as a means to prove her worth and influence again to those who might doubt it (even select “Little Monsters”). Just as Madonna is currently doing (and has done in the past) with what she’s currently billing as Confessions II, a “sequel” to 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor. In both pop stars’ cases, doing so is not entirely pure of heart, but rather, very patently about wanting to be respected and revered again in a way they haven’t for a few album cycles. (Even though Madonna should have at least gotten more respect for narrowly escaping death and then, soon afterward, still going on the world tour she had planned—the very world tour that had driven her to overwork herself enough to become vulnerable to a bacterial infection.)
For Gaga, that doesn’t mean dance music full-stop the way it does for Madonna. Instead, it entails melding a hodgepodge of genres. In effect, being “unafraid to reference or not reference, put it in a blender, shit on it, vomit on it, eat it, give birth to it,” to borrow from one part of her perennially-memed interview that was originally about Ryan Murphy. And to allow listeners to enter “that space” on Mayhem, she chooses to commence with one of the more sonically “all over the place” tracks: “Disease.” However, as though to emphasize the dichotomy of how this album is meant to be both “pleasing” and “anti-pleasing,” Gaga opted to make “Disease” the lead single (complete with an accompanying video that finds her engaging in a bit of “Harley Quinn” behavior [considering she’s still fresh from playing that character] whilst in the confines of suburbia). As though to drive home the point that, just as she did on her first two records, she wasn’t going to kowtow to “industry standards” about what constitutes the “formula” for chart success. And, as it did with her lead singles from The Fame and Born This Way, trusting her own instincts paid off, with “Disease” becoming one of her highest-charting singles in the U.S. in recent years. That is, until she released Mayhem’s second single, “Abracadabra,” which also happens to be the second track on the album.
Equal parts dance anthem (again, in the spirit of what she was selling on her first two albums) and irascible electropop (or “darkpop,” as some prefer to call it), Gaga premiered the video for “Abracadabra” during a commercial break of the Grammy Awards. Alas, to detract from the “punk rock” vibe she was going for, the video premiere was designed, ultimately, to double as a Mastercard commercial (such is the war between “pop star” and “artist”). Nonetheless, the concept, co-directed by Gaga, Parris Goebel and Bethany Vargas was well-received, particularly by the disabled community, which praised the fact that segments of the video were shot with Gaga sitting down to engage in the choreo. Whether that was an intentional “nod” to those who can’t dance standing up, well, one supposes that’s beside the point. All that really matters is she allowed an often-underserved community (particularly in pop culture) to feel seen.
As for the opening to the video, Gaga refers to the vogue balls that Madonna and Paris Is Burning popularized in 1990, the former releasing one of her biggest hits, “Vogue,” as an homage to ballroom culture after being formally introduced to it by Jose Gutierez and Luis Camacho, members of the House of Xtravaganza. Rupaul would also later refer to those ballroom competitions on Drag Race with his own, “Category is…” competitions. So it is that Gaga, too, also commences her video (dressed as “the lady in red”) with the announcement to the dancers down below, “Category is: dance or die.” The revelers appear to choose “dance” in lieu of die. And yes, Gaga also self-references with sounds that are akin to her “gibberish” on “Bad Romance” (i.e., “Rah, rah-ah-ah-ah/Roma, roma-ma/Gaga, ooh-la-la”), this time opting for the “spell” that is, “Abracadabra, amor-oo-na-na/Abracadabra, morta-oo-ga-ga/Abracadabra, abra-oo-na-na.”
And yes, presto, change-o, the “incantation” seems to have worked on getting Gaga “back to basics.” As she does with “Garden of Eden,” which falls under the category of what Gaga would call a “2000s throwback.” Indeed, this is the track that, out of all of them, has the most pre-The Fame and The Fame era sound. And yes, to achieve that, Gaga seems to need to harken back to a certain time in her life. One when it was more believable for her to say things like, “I could be your girlfriend for the weekend/You could be my boyfriend for the night.” An interspersed “oh” throughout also reminds one of the elongated “oh” in “Bad Romance.” To be sure, one might say the very first recorded “bad romance” was the one that started in the Garden of Eden. Hence, Gaga crooning, “Take you to the Garden of Eden, poison apple, take a bite.”
The theme changes tack on “Perfect Celebrity” (which was, at one point, meant to be the title of the album). In many ways, it’s Gaga’s version of “Hollywood” and “I’m So Stupid” by Madonna, exploring the false constructs of celebrity and resenting fame for luring her in only to chew her up and try to spit her back out. As for the 90s/grunge-oriented sound, Gaga remarked to Zane Lowe that it was deliberate on her part, for that was the era during which she not only first fell in love with music, but also when she took note of how many truly great artists were lost during this decade, whether to drug overdose (Kristen Pfaff, John Baker Saunders, Bradley Nowell) or suicide (Doug Hopkins, Kurt Cobain and Michael Hutchence, to name a few). And that’s, in large part, due to the unique pressures of fame and “the lifestyle” that no one can fully fathom until they’re already “in it.”
With the opening line, “I’m made of plastic like a human doll/You push and pull me, I don’t hurt at all,” Gaga evokes certain lyrics to Chromatica’s “Plastic Doll.” But whereas that song was more “playful,” this one is more blatant in its rage toward “the industry.” Which, of course, is still centered in Hollywood (try as various wildfires might to burn it down). A place that, out of nowhere, Gaga seems to have taken a shine to over New York. And yet, her true feelings toward it emerge in the verse, “Catch me as I rebound (let all the stuff)/Save me, I’m underground (I can’t be found)/Hollywood’s a ghost town/You love to hate me/I’m the perfect celebrity.” And, as such, it’s easier for her to “Vanish Into You,” which happens to be track five on the record.
With Gaga addressing the fact that many of the songs were inspired by latent memories of a past she can’t ever fully let go of, the lyrics indicate that she might be talking to a former flame. Particularly in lines such as, “High on a hill, you called/Two lovers regret their time/Once in a blue moon, I forget you/And once in your life, you’ll be mine/Do you see me? Do you see me now?/I’ve been waitin’ for you, cryin’ out/Do you see me? Do you see me now?” In one sense, it’s a battle cry for a love lost, yet, in another, it mimics what Gaga’s erstwhile Lower East Side nemesis, “Lizzy Grant,” ended up saying on Born to Die’s “Radio”: “Baby, love me ’cause I’m playing on the radio/How do you like me now?”
As though to underscore how jealous and regretful that ex should be, Lady Gaga flexes the most on the following song, “Killah” featuring Gesaffelstein. Not just a musical flex, mind you, but one about how good she is in bed. To the point where she has the confidence to declare in the chorus, “I’m a killah/And, boy, you’re gonna die tonight/Oh, killah, killah, killah, killah/I’m a killah.” Other innuendo-laden moments appear in such verses as, “I’m ’bout to wear you out like my favorite suit/Wools paralyzed” and, of course, “Gonna make the curtains cream, believe it/Gonna make the ceiling shake for me/I’ma be a full-time bedroom diva/I’m gonna make you scream, that’s a matter of fact/I’ll be your fantasy.” Adding to the carnality of the song is the Nine Inch Nails-y backing track that also has more than a dash of David Bowie influence (specifically the song “Fame,” a reference that makes sense for Gaga). And maybe, in its way, just a hint of Stabbing Westward’s “Save Yourself.”
Living up to the album’s title vis-à-vis the sonic mayhem she wishes to create, Gaga transitions to the totally antithetical-in-musical-tone “Zombieboy.” As for the song’s moniker, any long-standing Gaga fan will recognize it as a nod to Rick Genest a.k.a. Zombie Boy, who famously appeared with Gaga in the “Born This Way” video, just seven years before he would end up falling off a balcony and dying. Apart from paying homage to Zombie Boy, the theme of the song speaks to the feeling one gets during a night out with friends (the kind of night Gaga probably had more often during her LES days) and knowing that, even though it’s getting late and you’re getting drunker, you’re still not going to be “sensible” and pack it in—surrendering to the knowledge that you’re going to look and feel like a zombie in the morning.
With the song alluding to her pre-fame past, it also alludes to the “Born This Way” era via the line, “Put your paws all over me” (an ostensible nod to, “Just put your paws up”). And, with its 70s vibe (think: Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell”), which even gives Beyoncé a run for her money in terms of paying sonic homage to that decade (something Bey is known for doing frequently on songs like “Naughty Girl,” “Blow” and “Cuff It”), Gaga conjures up images of headier days in New York (e.g., Studio 54). Even though, at this point, those “coming up” in that town at present are romanticizing Gaga’s mid- to late 00s era instead. So it is that a lyric like, “I’ll think about you in my dreams/You’re better off a fantasy,” works on many levels.
As for the Zombie Boy homage, per Gaga, “I think that Rick just was an inspiring person. And when I was working on this song, which is ultimately a big celebration song, that word just popped into my head. And that song is all about the moment in the night when you and your friends all realize that you’re going to wake up not feeling well the next day because you’re having too much fun, so it’s about being a zombie in the morning.”
On that note, “LoveDrug” (not to be confused with Kesha’s “Your Love Is My Drug”) is a mid-tempo ballad that, once again, sounds as though it’s being addressed to an ex-love. Particularly as Gaga initially acknowledges, “Pictures in my mind, they come on faster than they go.” Setting her stage in a bar (perhaps one based on Welcome to the Johnsons), Gaga paints the picture of herself trying to drink to forget. And part of helping a girl to forget is “a dose of the right stuff.” Or, to be more specific, “I just need a hit of your love drug [or, as Britney said, “I need a hit/Baby, give me it”]/I don’t wanna feel, I don’t wanna cry/So I’m gonna dance until I feel alright.” After all, this is the same woman who once said, “Just dance” (an update to Bowie urging, “Let’s dance”).
But despite the alcohol and the promise of attention from a different male at the bar, Gaga still can’t help but ruminate, “Thought we’d last a lifetime, when I’m mumblin’ alone/I taste the last words that you spoke to me like wine/My heart is in a bind, if I could bear it on my own/I wouldn’t try so hard to numb what’s left behind.” And as moody, rock-oriented guitar riffs close out the song, one is left with the impression that Gaga has used “love” her entire life to help stave off the loneliness.
A motif that ties in seamlessly to “How Bad Do U Want Me,” another emotional mid-tempo ballad that samples from Yazoo’s “Only You.” A fitting musical complement for a track that explores the roller coaster in relationships that start out with a bloke idealizing and projecting all of his fantasies onto a woman without seeing who she really is or all of her complexities. So it is that Gaga sings, “A psychotic love theme/How bad do you want me?/That girl in your head ain’t real/How bad do you want me, for real?” The “for real” part being key. And, to be sure, Gaga isn’t just speaking to lovers past on this one, but also to her current fiancé, Michael Polansky.
A man who seems to be the blueprint for the lyrics, “You’re not the guy that cheats (not the guy that cheats)/And you’re afraid that she might leave (that she might leave)/‘Cause if I get too close, she might scream, ‘How bad, bad do you want me?’” Elsewhere, Polansky could even be the inspo for the verse, “Even good boys leave/How bad, bad do you want me?/‘Causе you hate the crash, but you love thе rush/And I’ll make your heart weak every time/You hear my name, ’cause she’s in your brain/And I’m here to kiss you in real life/‘Bout to cause a scene/How bad, bad do you want me?” For the moment, Polansky’s answer appears to be, “Pretty badly.” After all, he’s the one who encouraged Gaga to go back to making pop music, so committed to that suggestion that he even executive produced the album, co-writing many of the songs, including “Don’t Call Tonight,” which has Daft Punk-esque vocal backing at times, as well as elements of “Do What U Want” (which Gaga famously whitewashed to feature Christina Aguilera in lieu of R. Kelly, who was already overtly problematic at the time that Gaga opted to collaborate with him).
In some ways, the tone and theme of “Don’t Call Tonight” also bears similarities to “Telephone,” with Gaga again asserting that she doesn’t want to be contacted by a boyfriend who did her wrong. So it is that she announces on the chorus, “Don’t call tonight, unless you wanna hurt me/Don’t call tonight, it’s not because you care/Don’t call tonight, tomorrow you’ll desert me/I can hear everything you’re sayin’ from here.” A fear of abandonment in general is what also shines through on the song, with Gaga perhaps realizing that she gravitates toward toxic relationships simply as a means to test whether or not someone will stay through all the incessant fighting and drama. This much is made clear in the verse, “You pull me close and knock me down/Then I beg to come back around/I’m so addicted to your lies, oh.” Later, however, she recognizes her own part in the “dust-up,” admitting, “Saturday morning, my head is on fire [“Zombieboy” realness]/It’s hard to blame you for your crimes when I have mine.”
Though, to be fair, like most women, she’s inculpable when it comes to enduring the constant misogyny that even mere mortals must contend with. So it is that the 70s tone continues on “Shadow of a Man,” a song that rehashes the loneliness Gaga has experienced throughout most of her career while, yes, being forced to stand in the shadow of men. Whether often being the only woman in a room full of executives or being told something scathing that a male musician never would be.
“Lonely as the streets pass me by/Life ain’t under pressure ’cause I got a plan/Starin’ at myself in the eye” reiterates a similar line in “Don’t Call Tonight,” when Gaga laments, “Stars are descending, the street signs go by/A lonely ride, I need to cry to feel alive.” In each of these verses, the vulnerability of being a woman that is so often still seen as a weakness—especially by men—is, in the end, a superpower that has helped many a struggling female musician tap into something she never would have otherwise (see also: Chappell Roan). Which is why Gaga accordingly asserts, “Can’t ignore the voice within/And a woman can’t lose, but you still pretend/‘Cause I won’t be used for my love and left out to cry.”
A certain Spice Girls intonation (namely, 1997’s “Never Give Up on the Good Times”) materializes when Gaga speeds up her vocals for the chorus, which goes, “I don’t wanna fade into the darkness tonight/Show me the light/I don’t wanna be the one to fall on the knife/To come alive/I’m about to be there, I’m about to be there/Watch me, I swear I’ll/Dance in the shadow of a man.” And it wouldn’t surprising if the Spice Girls “tribute” was intentional, what with said group being the ones to coin the phrase “Girl Power.”
Nor would it be surprising if Madonna flickering in on “The Beast” was intentional, too. After all, she’s got a song called “The Beast Within” and has been known to repeat the term “tick-tock, tick-tock” (i.e., on 2008’s “4 Minutes”). Even so, there’s more of an 80s ballad à la Phil Collins thing going on—though the werewolf imagery is decidedly more evocative of the “Thriller” video (even if Michael Jackson’s intent was to be a werecat, not a werewolf). And amid that sense of musical drama, Gaga describes, “I touch your face ‘cause I see panic, who rang the alarm?/I see you shivering, your eyes are red, your soul is gone/You’re out of breath, tick-tock, tick-tock, you’re almost out of time, yeah, yeah/Because at midnight, there’s a change in you that I have heard/You’ve kept this secret for so long, you whisper and it burns.”
While some listeners might assume that the lyrics refer to a “dangerous man” (a.k.a. love interest), Gaga conceded that the song is more likely an identification of herself as “the beast.” Or rather, her “stage persona” that is Lady Gaga. This “fame monster” is first mentioned on “Perfect Celebrity,” with Gaga dissecting the bifurcation of her selves—Stefani Germanotta and Lady Gaga—in the lyric, “I’ve become a notorious being/Find my clone, she’s asleep on the ceiling.” And it’s a bifurcation that a “normal” like Polansky has come to know well, with Gaga also explaining during her interview with Lowe, “Like what the beast is, who I become when I’m onstage, and who I am when I make my art. The pre-chorus of that songs is, like, somebody that is saying to the beast, ‘I know you’re a monster, but I can handle you and I love you.’” Something that Polansky has likely said to “Germanotta.”
The balladry and sentiment toward Polansky persist on “Blade of Grass,” which is Gaga’s version, for all intents and purposes, of Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings” (in addition to sounding a lot like, randomly enough, Ava Max’s “So Am I,” itself borrowing heavily from Anastacia’s “Left Outside Alone”). For here, too, she gave the backstory to Lowe on the inspiration behind the track, telling him, “Michael asked me how I would want him to propose to me one day. We were in our backyard and I said, ‘Just take a blade of grass and wrap it around my finger.’ And then I wrote ‘Blade of Grass’ ‘cause I remembered the way his face looked, and I remembered the grass in the backyard and remember thinking he should use that really long grass that’s in the center of the backyard.”
The sense of romanticism (maudlin though it may be) to a moment like that is accordingly delivered in the opening lyrics, “Lovers kiss in a garden made of thorns/Traces of lonely words, illusions torn/You said, ‘How does a man like me love a woman like you?’/I said, ‘Hold me until I die and I’ll make you brand new’/Come on and wrap that blade of grass/Around my finger like a cast/‘Cause even though the church burned down I’ll be your queen without a crown/I’ve been so lonely in this field/Fightin’ a battle with no shield/Come on and wrap that blade of grass/And we’ll make it last/This is the lawn of memories I mourn/I fall into your eyes, shelter from storm.”
But, inarguably, Gaga saves her most dramatic/romance-filled lines for the pre-chorus, during which she sings, “You said, ‘How does a man like me love a woman like you?’/I said, ‘Hold me until I die and I’ll make you brand new.’” Needless to say, Gaga is imagining a conversation between herself and Polansky. One that, incidentally, could have also easily taken place between Lana Del Rey and her own “mortal” husband, Jeremy Dufrene.
In any case, all this talk of death is the perfect lead-in to Mayhem’s “grand” finale, “Die With a Smile” (at least on the standard edition of the album), a song that, compared to the rest of Mayhem, feels like the least “appropriate” addition. But maybe it’s all part of Gaga’s intent to show her progression from the period when she was just starting out to now.
And, talking of that beginning period, in the requisite Zane Lowe interview about the album, Gaga had to get all cheeseball and have it conducted at what is, at least now, one of the douchiest Lower East Side bars: Welcome to the Johnsons. But, per Gaga’s account, it was a “real” dive in the mid-00s era when she was still trying to come up in the world of music. Thus, it was important, as a means to highlight her “musical journey,” to bring it back to that space when discussing Mayhem, telling Lowe from the outset, “I’m not here anymore, but Mayhem definitely began here.”
She also touches on the evolution of her musical style in albums after Born This Way, directly calling out how there was a reason Artpop was so “defiant” compared to what Gaga had done before. It was a reaction to the burden of having to now constantly live up to the persona she had created. “Wanting to break” that image instead. As she would continue to up until this point.
But Gaga wants to ensure that everyone knows Mayhem is its own thing, additionally noting to Lowe, “Even though Mayhem has my DNA in it, it also doesn’t sound, um, the way that The Fame Monster did. Or the way The Fame did, so it’s like…my way of thinking of music as being a cross-genre, being able to combine lots of different things at the same time, that is who I am as a musician, and I’ve always been that way. And that is what Mayhem is all about. It’s like the mayhem of being a nonlinear artist and, with this album, embracing that about myself instead of being like, ‘Okay, I have to fit it into this one thing.’”
At another point in the interview, she also mentions some of the questions she asked herself while recording, including, “What really does define you? And, like, what is, um, you know, what is your personal mayhem? What do you struggle with? Like what’s the thing that you’re always trying to live up to from your past?” For Gaga, that’s clearly been the identity that she forged for herself at the outset of her career. With fans and detractors alike regularly referring to that period as the benchmark she’s since failed to live up to. In the same way that many artists who “shapeshift” or “reinvent themselves” over the course of their career are subject to such comparisons, continuously being told that they should go back to “the way they were.”
But, to quote a famous Brat, “It’s a knife when somebody says they like the old me and not the new me/And I’m like, ‘Who the fuck is she?’” Lady Gaga likely has a similar feeling with regard to Mayhem. For though it’s meant to be a “return,” its true intent is to be something different entirely.
