“Disease” by Lady Gaga, Wednesday, November 6, 2024
Lady Gaga has been hyping her seventh album starting this summer with a promise that it will be “nothing like Chromatica.” After releasing the Bruno Mars duet “Die with a Smile,” L7 seemed to pick up where Joanne and A Star Is Born left off--a stripped-back organic singer-songwriter songbook. But “Die with a Smile” was a stand-alone single. To make matters even more confusing, Gaga released what she called album 6.5, called Harlequin, on September 27. The album of jazz standards was produced after Lady Gaga finished filming Joker: Folie à Deux. While critics mostly panned the jukebox musical approach to the Batman villain’s sequel, the persona of Harley Quinn impressed Gaga so much that she said after filming that she “wasn’t done with the character” of Quinn. While it’s a Lady Gaga album, it is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta’s persona Lady Gaga taking on another persona--Harley Quinn. Harlequin was not the album that Gaga’s fans were waiting for. Its quick release with limited promotion makes Harlequin a solid novelty in Lady Gaga’s discography that critics praised even when the album’s associated parent film was mostly hated.
THERE ARE NO MORE TEARS LEFT TO CRY. While the wave of Lady Gaga’s comeback album slated for next February, began with the acoustic “Die with a Smile” and took a jazz detour, it seems that Lady Gaga’s next project is more conventional for the singer. At least from the October single that she released, “Disease.” If the song is representative of the anti-Chromatica that Gaga has promised us, we might be able to expect a dark pop club album similar to Born This Way and ARTPOP. Whereas Chromatica was a euphoric, sometimes escapist pop record, the lead single from her upcoming album is anything but escapism. While “Disease” instantly feels like a classic that could appear in Gaga’s early discography, Gaga brings a confessional nature from her singer-songwriter era. When Gaga did dark before, there was more of a social commentary. Songs like “Judas,” “Government Hooker,” and “Heavy Metal Lover” on Born This Way touched on the macabre that “Disease” evokes. Still, listeners can’t help but project the subjects on society rather than Gaga’s inner demons. The horror film/Tarintino-style music video that accompanies “Disease” feels like a companion to the video for “911,” a song on Chromatica that was possibly the most personal to Gaga as it was a reference to a “disease” that the singer suffers from.
I COULD BE YOUR ANTIDOTE TONIGHT. In the promotion for Chromatica’s “911,” Lady Gaga revealed her struggles with psychosis and post-traumatic stress disorder. The confessional nature of Gaga’s songwriting comes after Gaga changed directions following the critically polarizing ARTPOP. In 2015, Lady Gaga released “Til It Happens to You.” The song stripped away the persona of Gaga and allowed Stefani to tell the story of her sexual abuse and rape by a music producer when she was still a teenager. The next year, she released Joanne, an album named after her aunt that also deals with family struggles. The post-album single “The Cure,” was a song about healing after Gaga delved into the heavy subject matter on her personal album. However, any mental health professional will tell you that there is no easy “cure” for past trauma and Stefani continues to deal with these themes in her music in 2024’s “Disease.” Similarly to the speaker in “The Cure,” the speaker in “Disease” offers a cure for the disease. However, unlike the 2017 single, “Disease,” is anything but optimistic. It’s dark and dirty. The music video depicts Lady Gaga as several characters tormented by other, scary versions of herself. All along, the speaker is offering the cure for the disease. It feels like a metaphor for addiction or the mental traps of depression. While, it felt like a status quo Gaga club song, on more listens, it's more of a gothic metal song set in the trappings of a dark pop song. We’ll have to wait until February to know what the vision of L7 will be.
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