The Grammy winner’s new album Mayhem channels the singer’s absurd glory years, writes Washington Post’s Chris Richards. It hits differently in absurd times.
The idea of big fun suggests the existence of little fun, and Lady Gaga is now the kind of pop star who can do both. Just Dance. Meat dress. Being carried down the red carpet at the Grammys inside an egg. Appearing on her album cover as a mutated motorcycle. Naming said album Born This Way. That’s big fun through and through, the very stuff that made Gaga into a household name more than a decade ago. Now, on her first proper studio album in nearly five years, it’s time for some little fun – a little disco, a little balladry; all in all, a little better than anyone expected.
To be clear, little fun still counts as fun. It’s easily had and fondly remembered, always amounting to a net positive in this brutal thing called existence. Big fun, on the other hand, requires latent effort. In pop music, it involves risk-taking, surprise-springing and a certain fearlessness toward appearing tacky – all things that Lady Gaga mastered at the apex of her relevance back in 2011, reaching the top of the charts by singing about self-acceptance at the top of her lungs.
But on this new album, Mayhem, instead of trying to generate big fun anew, she’s chosen to revisit that indelible iteration of self, and the results feel smaller. Her new dance floor dramas sound modest and efficient, and whenever the endorphin rush of melodies make it tempting to call Mayhem a return to form, we simply can’t. That form used to be larger than life. Then, life got so much larger. Good luck trying to form a mental tally of the changes that our blinkered society has gone through since this woman was strutting through the zeitgeist, clad in raw beef. In 2025, Lady Gaga knows the world has become more absurd than her.
