Your Full-Time Bedroom Demon

Lady Gaga featuring Gesaffelstein “Killah”

Lady Gaga seems more impressive and iconic these days because we have enough pop music history on either side of her prime breakthrough years to fully appreciate exactly how great she’s always been. She’s a prestige pop star who has maintained a presence in the mainstream despite consistently making art that’s far more tasteful, intelligent, well-crafted, and challenging than the market requires. She may stumble from time to time but she’s always interesting, and her big swings often yield truly excellent songs and performances.

Gaga’s new album Mayhem doesn’t break much new ground for her stylistically, but that doesn’t have to be the goal every time. (As the late Scott Miller once told me, novelty isn’t inherently musical.) This is a record in which Lady Gaga is being Lady Gaga to the utmost extreme, and in doing so she highlights the musical quirks that set her apart from the pop girl pack. I hear it as a flex, a 38 year old veteran superstar throwing down and proving that she can still give us songs on the level of her early classics. The music is too vital to be credibly dismissed as nostalgia and mostly too weird to qualify as pandering, but like her charm offensive media blitz in support of the record, it does prompt you to go “damn, Lady Gaga is so cool, I love her.”

And you know what? Lady Gaga is sooooo cool. I love her.

My favorite of the Mayhem songs is “Killah,” a collaboration with the French electronic producer Gasaffelstein that makes the most of his gift for spiky and stylish neo-industrial grooves. It’s part of a long line of sexy, strutting glamourous pop songs but I mostly hear it as an inspired collision of David Bowie’s Young Americans with Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, with a dash of…hmm, is it Tina Turner or Grace Jones? Like most of my favorite Gaga songs, it’s mixing and merging familiar elements from the past in unexpected ways and scratches an itch I didn’t realize I had. It’s like she’s spent the past 15 years granting long-forgotten wishes I made when I was much younger, and my brain was being forged by the MTV of the late 80s through mid 90s.

Also, did you see Gaga performing “Killah” on Saturday Night Live? The staging, the blocking, the set design, the outfits, the attitude and audacity – it’s one of the very best music performances I’ve ever seen on television.

Buy it from Amazon.