Lady Gaga and the return of 'Mother Monster'

Lady Gaga is still the queen of her own empire - Photo: Billboard

In a red rubber suit with strange red fingernails, singing syllables with unclear meanings but continuously repeating mysteriously like a strange religious ritual "Amor-oo-nana/ Abra-ca-da-bra/ Morta-oo-gaga", Lady Gaga returns in the MV Abracadabra , pulling back time more than ten years ago.

The time of Bad Romance, of Born This Way, the time when we were captivated by meaningless lyrics like "Roma-roma-ma Gaga, ooh la la", the time when every time Lady Gaga appeared, people were guessing what kind of shock she would bring this time.

The MV Disease was released not long before, Lady Gaga split herself: a normal person in a floral dress, her face covered in wounds; the other personality is a black-clothed ghost with long sharp claws like the Elm Street devil, her eyes are terrifyingly red.

If Abracadabra is about a magic spell to cast a spell on the demons that surround life, Disease is a story about inner turmoil and one's own evil curse on one's life.

Lady Gaga - Abracadabra (Official Music Video)

So after a long journey of singing jazz, singing ballads, covering classic love songs (in Joker 2), acting in movies, working as... "normal people", "Mother Monster" finally revived and used a spell to revive her entire army of unruly monsters.

The two songs above are a big turning point from the first song on the album Mayhem that she revealed, Die with A Smile , collaborating with Bruno Mars.

It is a love song with the atmosphere of 1970s classic rock, melodious, nostalgic, passionate, full of emotions, somewhere close to the image of Lady Gaga in the movie A Star Is Born . It turns out that the hit is just an exception of Mayhem.

But they are also a turning point for the contemporary pop market, which is deeply influenced by Taylor Swift's musical aesthetic - relying on storytelling, honesty, simplicity, gentleness, making friends with the listener or, as one foreign critic put it, "confessional".

Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift rose to the top through her true stories. Gaga, on the other hand, initially became a superstar through her noise, her over-acting, her overwhelming audience with a myriad of complex, abstract "personas" that prevented us from seeing her true face.

If Taylor Swift is a pop realist, Lady Gaga is a surrealist or cubist, with words that flicker with mystery, stories of inner turmoil, battles of identities hidden under layers of metaphors and symbols.

In an entertainment world where Taylor Swift is so big it's jokingly called "the music industry," the avant-garde, pop art aesthetic of Lady Gaga's dance-floor, synth-pop tracks on Mayhem somehow feels a bit dated (outdated, not outdated).

Of course, Lady Gaga has never been "out of date" as some would say, but perhaps the era where she was the true shaper is over, not because she is no longer new, but because newness can also be a kind of old.

Lady Gaga remains queen of her own empire, but one in which the "colonies" under her influence are disintegrating.

Pop has changed so dramatically in less than 10 years.

Even the avant-garde, even the most avant-garde and unconventional, brings a sense of nostalgia.

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