The anxiety of influence, a phrase that the literary critic Harold Bloom coined in 1973 to describe the struggle to write innovative poetry, lives on today in the form of reheated nachos. In internet slang, to reheat someone else’s nachos is to take old, soggy ideas and serve them up as if they’re fresh. An interviewer recently asked Lady Gaga to reply to the accusation that she was doing just that with “Abracadabra,” her new single that conjures many of her older songs. “My nachos are mine,” she replied. “I invented them, and I’m proud of them.”
That assertion of ownership was hard earned. After all, when Gaga was rising to fame while running around in bubble dresses and spewing fake blood on live TV 15 years ago, pundits commonly alleged her to be a hack, a poser. The rapper M.I.A. called Gaga a “mimic” and said that “none of her music’s reflective of how weird she wants to be or thinks she is.” Madonna quipped that her shtick was “reductive.” The skepticism had some basis—Gaga really did borrow from musical provocateurs before her (the foremost being, yes, Madonna). But she, like many of them, understood the truth about influence: If you perform fiercely, hybridize cleverly, and tell a riveting story, the generic can be made mythic.
Gaga’s seventh album, Mayhem, calls back to those early, head-rush days of her career. Back then, she seemed determined to keep pushing in ever-stranger, more aggressive directions—until she triggered media mockery with 2013’s Artpop, on which every track gave the impression of being four separate ones competing for attention. Gaga then turned down the tempo and started making jazz and soundtrack fare, with only occasional and fairly minor pop detours. Mayhem makes a return to her trademark sound, but it also, more important, recalls her foundational ethos. It is a muscular, gutsy, never-a-dull-minute work of bricolage. It’s also a warm, strangely moving collection about the passage of time.
Mayhem opens with two singles, “Disease” and “Abracadabra,” that revive the Halloween-ish fun of 2009’s The Fame Monster, an EP about toxic love rendered in operatically belted gibberish. But the third track, “Garden of Eden,” signals broader ambitions. Gaga sings in the girlish manner of her 2008 debut album, The Fame: The syncopated beat evokes her hit “Paparazzi”; the “Bad Romance” melody is used as harmony. Yet these familiar elements interlock in a way that feels fresh with possibility. It’s not a new song trying to imitate a classic song—it’s a new song about the sensation of listening to a classic song. “I’ve been feelin’ this familiar feeling / like I’ve known you my whole life,” she sings, in a sly description of pop’s fundamental pleasure.
As the album develops, it highlights all sorts of Gagaisms: oompah synth squirts, melodies that are like stammered sea shanties, vocals that swing between pageant-queen preening and gutter-punk growls. Gaga also shows her expertise as a music geek, drawing from sources as varied as Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Nine Inch Nails, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. The retro vibes hang heavy at times, approaching Austin Powers–ian kitsch. But the homages are never rote—every choice is skewed and supercharged. “Abracadabra” speeds through references with the ferocity of a sprinter tackling an obstacle course. The noisy funk of “Zombieboy” opens into a bridge that hits like a sun-shower on a hot day. “LoveDrug” imagines what a duet between Daft Punk and the E Street Band would sound like.
The mixture of concepts serves an emotional purpose. Gaga’s rise to success was, in her telling, rough to live through; she has talked about experiencing sexual assault, personal betrayals, mental- and physical-health issues, and the pressures of public scrutiny. Her previous pop album, 2020’s Chromatica, sought to sublimate those wounds in sleek, strangely frigid dance music. Mayhem, by contrast, is explosive, chaotic, and much more interesting. The artist is diving into what she’s called her “gothic dreams” about her early adulthood, and trying to reclaim the fun parts of those years without denying the bad.
The results make for sharp drama. On “Perfect Celebrity,” she wails in a nauseated, ’90s-grunge tone of voice while confronting the horrors of fame: “Sit in the front row, watch the princess die.” “Vanish Into You” uses a disco beat and cabaret piano to portray a sort of puppy love that seems idyllic but also sinister, verging on codependent. One track later, on the wonderfully unhinged “Killah,” she’s a nightclub seductress, sticking cigarettes in her suitors’ eyes.
A huge distance exists between the feral energy Gaga brings to songs like these and the earnest, even meek presence she’s cut in public in recent years. She’s no longer a leather-jacketed barfly on the Lower East Side hustling to her big break, nor is she the hot young thing causing mischief on the red carpet. She’s a happily engaged 38-year-old Oscar winner who wants kids and self-identifies as “boring.” But Mayhem is about using music as archeology to excavate unruly parts of one’s own identity. “Driving home to your favorite song / and you scream so loud ’cause you’re all alone,” she chants hypnotically on “Don’t Call Tonight,” in one of the album’s many passages about being transported by listening.
You can call the feeling she’s trying to evoke nostalgia—you might even say it’s like microwaving congealed chips. But so much of art is led by creative people searching for something lost in their past and making something original in the process. The supposed “mimic” that Gaga’s rivals and idols once accused her of being is now seen as the original pop diva to a wave of young singers such as Chappell Roan and Addison Rae—who are, to some extent, using Gaga’s playbook to tell their own tales. Years from now, we may enjoy the results of yet another generation trying to re-create the jolt of Mayhem.
