The album cover to Lady Gaga’s Chromatica.

Pop CultureMay 29, 2020

Review: Lady Gaga’s Chromatica sheds conflict for club-ready bangers

Contributing writer

The album cover to Lady Gaga’s Chromatica.

Lady Gaga’s sixth album, Chromatica, sees the popstar stepping back into big pop after the experiment that was Joanne, but at what cost, asks Sam Brooks.

Since Lady Gaga’s last album, 2016’s critically shrugged off Joanne, the star has stepped as far away from her meat-dress persona as possible, collecting a Golden Globe and an Oscar to boot. But no matter how much people love Shallow – and the iconic “whoa-oh-OH-oh” that turned it into a meme – her hardcore fans have been waiting for one thing: some goddamned bangers. The soundtrack for A Star is Born has a few, but they had the sheen of character; it was Gaga in character as a trashy popstar, rather than Gaga in her full, gilded glory.

From the release of the neon-saturated Stupid Love way back in February, Chromatica signalled a return to that glory. Songs you could dance to, songs you could put on a playlist, and likely most importantly, songs you could actually see on a chart. Then the second single, the excellent disco-soaked ‘Rain on Me’, an ode to friendship duet with Ariana Grande came, and it was confirmed: We’re back in big pop territory (and also BloodPop territory, as the producer from Joanne returns for every song here.)

Chromatica is a return to genre, if not exactly to form. These are catchy, club-ready songs but within the three acts of the album (split up with string-heavy segues courtesy of M83’s Morgan Kibby), the songs can blend together in both sound and intent. The first act is full of uplifting songs like the aforementioned ‘Rain on Me’ and ‘Free Woman’, the second is full of heavier songs like ‘911’ and ‘Plastic Doll’, while the third is full of songs that are, well, for the cab home or the kebab store. This structure leaves the album feeling less like a collection of great pop songs, and more like a guide to the night out; it’s calculated in a way that allows the songs to blend into each other, rather than rub up against each other.

It’s a shame because Lady Gaga’s music thrives on that tension between songs; just go back and listen to The Fame Monster, and how those songs sound put next to each other. Gaga thrives on her contradictions; she’s at her most real and engaging when she’s at her most constructed, and at her most inauthentic when she’s being “vulnerable”. She never had to prove herself as a popstar, she had the pipes and the chops from the jump. No, it was when she stepped behind a piano that it felt like she was trying to prove something. It felt like she was saying, “Look everyone, I’m a serious musician! I play piano! I’m can do duets with Tony Bennett!” Those impulses and constructions lead us to Joanne, and you can see the vestiges of that in Chromatica’s most earnest moments. They don’t feel wrong, necessarily, just calculated; a desire to be seen as uplifting rather than actually be uplifting. For the first time, her personality sinks beneath the surface of her songs.

Two songs on Chromatica stand above the rest; one showcasing Gaga at her best, and one showcasing a more recent, of-the-moment, pop icon entirely. That pop icon is BLACKPINK, the latest world-dominating pop hydra from South Korea, who feature on ‘Sour Candy’, a two-and-a-half minute piece of taut electropop. The song succeeds not because of Gaga but in spite of her; she’s bookended by the girl group, trading off lines, raps and harmonies with a smoothness that rides that 90s house bassline, whereas Gaga’s slurred, low register clashes with it. She feels like the featured artist on her own song, the past in someone else’s present.

The other is ‘Sine from Above’ (which is much better than that laboured homonym), a duet with Elton John. It’s a monster of a pop song, with nearly as many co-writers as there are tracks on the entire album. It’s probably the only earnest moment on the album that doesn’t feel false, with Hallmark lyrics like “the sound created stars like me”, but Gaga rolling around in her high register over an angelic, DJ Sammy-esque piano line while Elton John does his Elvis-but-gay schtick hits the exact right spot. It’s a big, silly, club song that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to do anything other than get people on the floor for one last dance at any cost – there’s even a glorious drum’n’bass outro as a last ditch attempt.

Gaga is one of our greats, she’s one of the few artists who can surf trends while creating her own, and she’s able to throw forward and break ground while looking back and paying homage, all in service of a banger. Chromatica finds her back in her comfort zone, and both clubs and pop fans will love her for it, but it’s missing the edges and the conflict that made her great to start with.

You can listen to Chromatica on all streaming services now.

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Henry Oliver (right) performs with Die! Die! Die! at Auckland’s Kings Arms in 2006 (Photo: Petra Jane)

OPINIONPoliticsMay 29, 2020

What the Pace scheme did for me

Henry Oliver

Guest writer

Henry Oliver (right) performs with Die! Die! Die! at Auckland’s Kings Arms in 2006 (Photo: Petra Jane)

As part of a $175 million arts package, a new $7.5 million ‘Careers Support for Creative Jobseekers’ programme was announced today, building on ‘the most successful aspects’ of the former Pathways to Arts and Cultural Employment (Pace) programme, which ran from 2001-2012. Former Pace recipient Henry Oliver writes on what he learned on what became colloquially known as the ‘artist’s dole’.

I owe my career to Pace. Well, kind of.

In 2004, I was 22 with a fresh Bachelor of Arts. I’d known a BA wasn’t a path to steady employment but hadn’t anticipated that it could sometimes be antithetical to employment – it seemed like some recruiters of menial jobs didn’t want to hire people with degrees in things like philosophy and film studies. We were lazy, daydreamy, unreliable.

With no career opportunities, I enrolled to do a Masters in cultural studies (before it became a right-wing conspiracy theory), but two weeks before the semester started, was overcome with doubt and promptly quit. I joined a band called Die! Die! Die! and for the next three years, we played shows in every town in the country that would have us and eventually, tiny clubs and dive bars around the world.

The band wasn’t lazy, daydreamy or unreliable. From the beginning, we practised at least four days a week when we weren’t on tour. When we were, we did it relentlessly, playing everywhere we could, as many times as we could. Unlike other bands I’d been in, it wasn’t a hobby. It was fun, but it wasn’t for fun. It wasn’t a job because it didn’t pay. It was a vocation. And, in many ways, it was possible because of Pace.

I heard about Pace from other musicians. They called it the “artist’s benefit” or the “artist’s dole”. It was like a secret someone whispered in your ear, then you passed it on. I’d be told by my Winz case manager that they hadn’t heard of it or that it no longer existed. “You’ve got to get this guy,” someone told me, offering the name of an in-the-know case manager whose name I’ve long forgotten. “He’ll sort you out.”

After being transferred from the Queen St office to the Ponsonby office and getting a “good” case manager, getting on Pace was straightforward. Dealing with Winz, you have to know what you’re entitled to and ask for it relentlessly. You need a benefit mentor to tell you how it works and what you can get. And the privilege of thinking you deserve it. Die! Die! Die! toured so much, it was easy to show that we had a “pathway to arts and culture employment”. “We aren’t making enough to make a living now,” I’d tell my case manager, “but it can’t be long until we will be.” It wasn’t a lie so much as an over-indulgence of the naivety it can take to pursue a career in the arts.

Instead of the “Job Club” I had to attend on the regular dole – where we sat in a boardroom reading the classified and showing our supervisor the two jobs we would apply for that week – I’d sit in a room full of musicians and actors and painters, and one by one we’d talk about our opportunities and listen to someone talk about how to budget, how to make a basic sheet, how to find new opportunities, and how to “monetise” (the first time I heard that word) our creativity.

At the time, I thought it was all bullshit – I just wanted to play aggressive music at horrifying volume. But being on Pace taught me how to make a living from my own creativity. It gave me the opportunity to do it with a $200-a-week safety net. It gave me time to learn about how to live on an intermittent income, about balancing work that pays well with work that provides creative opportunities. It taught me how to hustle, how to find and create opportunities, how to work hard and be dependable in an industry where many people don’t and aren’t.

When I quit the band, I thought I’d said goodbye to all that. I went back to university and became a lawyer. But after three years I was ready to give up on that too. I’d been freelance writing on the side and wanted to try to make a career of it. By then, Pace was over, but my time in the band provided a blueprint of how to do it – hustle, find and create opportunities, work hard and be dependable. And I’ve been able to make a living writing and editing until recently – when I was made redundant by Bauer Media, along with 236 other people.

When you’re living it, you quickly learn that without government support, New Zealand would barely have any artists who aren’t hobbyists. The market just can’t sustain it. But that’s true of a lot of things in New Zealand: film, television, even farms. So I’m glad that Pace is back, to give people the opportunity I had – to at least attempt to turn their creative or artistic aspirations into a sustainable career. I just hope you don’t need to know someone who knows someone to find out about it. And I hope it’s not only offered at Winz’s Ponsonby office.