Joanne
Lady Gaga kicks off her heels, grabs some formidable alt-rock stars, and gets down, dirty, and refreshingly intimate. Queens of the Stone Age\'s Josh Homme brings out Gaga\'s inner Pat Benatar on growling rocker \"Diamond Heart,\" after which she heads to the honky-tonk for \"A-YO\" and throws a thrashing disco party for the brokenhearted alongside Tame Impala\'s Kevin Parker (\"Perfect Illusion\"). But once she sheds the flash and excess—channeling a young Dolly Parton on \"Joanne\"—the pop superstar becomes a comforting shoulder to cry on.
Now that her peers have caught up to her visual provocations, Lady Gaga seems less like an audacious pioneer than one among many, and Joanne feels tentative, an affront to the Gaga of yesteryear.
On her flamboyant early albums, Lady Gaga’s fascination with fame led to trenchant societal observations and subversions. The tepid 2013 album Artpop reversed that trend. With its vapid, debauched commentary—the kind at which she once sneered—the record wasn’t from the perspective of an outsider looking askance at…
The girl also known as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta has stripped away the excess and triumphs with a solid pop record.
Gaga drops the strangeness for an album that could win her mainstream attention again
It's difficult not to view Joanne through the prism of Artpop, the 2013 album where Lady Gaga's expanding fame balloon finally popped.
Sometimes you have the pop zeitgeist in your grasp, and sometimes you don't. Lady Gaga's 2013 album ARTPOP certainly didn't: as pop music wa...
Lady Gaga has always been an artist to court controversy — despite being an enticing component central to her success, at times the overblown pop
While she may have eschewed the outlandish costumes, Gaga has replaced them with a different kind of pretense.
The singer strips back the excess image to produce a rootsy album that showcases her powerful voice and maybe brings us closer to the real Stefani Germanotta