A decade ago, Lady Gaga was pop's newly anointed superstar, widely regarded as a once-in-a-generation talent who'd be reigning over the charts for the foreseeable future. Instead, she spent most of the 2010s on a perpetual commercial (and arguably creative) decline, still respected and highly visible but increasingly just an established star who performs at major televised events, not a current hitmaker. A Star Is Born and its soundtrack reversed that trend, giving Gaga her first #1 single in 8 years (propelled there by an awards show, of course) and, until last month, the top-selling album of 2019. But I'm curious if this is comeback will sustain into Gaga's next studio album or if it will do more to launch her acting career or keep her appearing at every award show for the next few decades.

Lady Gaga deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. So Happy I Could Die
2. Hair
3. Look What I Found
4. The Fame
5. Monster
6. A-YO
7. Fashion!
8. Why Did You Do That?
9. Sheiße
10. Lush Life
11. Firefly with Tony Bennett
12. Hey Girl featuring Florence Welch
13. Teeth
14. Heal Me
15. Beautiful, Dirty, Rich
16. Jewels N' Drugs featuring T.I., Too $hort and Twista
17. Government Hooker
18. Diggin' My Grave with Bradley Cooper
19. Paper Gangsta
20. Dance In The Dark
21. Highway Unicorn (Road To Love)

Tracks 4, 15 and 19 from the The Fame (2008)
Tracks 1, 5, 13 and 20 from The Fame Monster (2009)
Tracks 2, 9, 17 and 21 from Born This Way (2011)
Tracks 7 and 16 from Artpop (2013)
Tracks 10 and 11 from Cheek To Cheek with Tony Bennett (2014)
Tracks 6 and 12 from the Joanne (2016)
Tracks 3, 8, 14 and 18 from A Star Is Born Soundtrack with Bradley Cooper (2018)

Lady Gaga got off to a pretty huge start to her career, with her first 2 singles going to #1, although it took a while for "Just Dance" to get there. But I regarded her with a little bit of skepticism until "Bad Romance," at which point I was fully on board. Deluxe editions with a few new songs to extend the commercial shelflife of an album were just coming into vogue then, but The Fame Monster was probably the best example of the custom -- it added a whole new disc of 8 new songs that spawned 3 hits and is just by itself easily her best album. The original The Fame is pretty hit and miss to me, a few of the songs practically have the same beat as "Just Dance," but when I dug in recently there were some tracks that sound kind of fresh and unlike any of her hits.

I have a lot of fondness for Born This Way, I thought it really merged her bleeding edge pop instincts with her dad rock influences in an interesting way that never gelled the same way in following albums. Clarence Clemons appearing on a huge pop album just before his death was bittersweet, I love what he did there, "The Edge of Glory" is one of my favorite Gaga singles and "Hair" one of my favorite deep cuts. And I just adore that when she was at the very pinnacle of her career she filled an album with songs with titles like "Government Hooker," "Sheiße," and "Highway Unicorn."

I really don't have a lot of love for Artpop or Joanne as albums, but if you pull out the best songs there's some good stuff there. I'm glad that Lady Gaga never veered too far into hip hop (we dodged a bullet when Kendrick didn't use the version of "Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe" with her) but "Jewels N' Drugs" makes pretty excellent use of 3 rap greats. I'm still annoyed that "A-YO" never got a proper single push after it sounded great in TV ads, and I forgot that Joanne had a good Florence + The Machine duet, kind of a surprising summit of perhaps the popular music's 2 best white lady singers of the past decade.

One of the interesting things to me about A Star Is Born is that all 3 of the singles from the soundtrack were ballads. So the more uptempo dance pop songs that are Ally's hit singles in the movie narrative like "Heal Me" and "Why Did You Do That?" are deep cuts in our world. And of course the latter plays a key role in the story because Jackson Maine hates it and the audience is primed to ridicule it, too. But really, I think it's one of the better songs in the movie, better than a lot of the sleepy ballads. I've joked that in a version of A Star Is Born that's about Lady Gaga and Akon instead of Ally and Jackson, there would be a scene where Akon is backstage at "Saturday Night Live," disgusted that she's performing a song that isn't about butts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 12, 2019 at 9:15 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.