Lady Gaga - Artpop

With the official release of Artpop earlier this week, and Lady Gaga's press thrust about the new album, some interesting news has come out regarding the star. She is apparently addicted to marijuana claiming to smoke up to 15-20 doobies a day. Wow. That's a lot. Granted she says it was because of breaking her hip earlier in the year, but still… she's either exaggerating or just really really messed up. In the Madonna/Salvador Dali tradition of "There is no such thing as bad publicity," stupidity is always the exception. Either that, or she's the new Snoop Dogg.

Before we get to the album, Lady Gaga has also released an app to go along with the album called, what else, Artpop. It's very psychedelic and possibly, if you'll excuse the pun, drug driven, and attempts to interact with the user and allow them to interact with other little monsters.

You begin your journey with the album's opening song and concept, "Aura." The app appears that it should be able to play other tracks from the album as well, but that never worked on my iPhone at least. I guess this is a bit fun, and useful if you want connect with other monsters, but otherwise it's only fun in an "Oooh, shiny" kinda way.



On to the actual album, Artpop, I have to say I'm not all that impressed. That said, when I first heard the advance single "Applause," I hated it, then days later it had grown on me to me my favorite song of that moment. "Venus" hit me the same way, at first dislike, but then growth. Weird.



Not fond of the second single, "Do What U Want" with R. Kelly, either. The love song to "Dope" kinda stands out because of Gaga's comments, but doesn't seem like a hit to me either. Only "MANiCURE" and "Gypsy" show any first listen promise to my ears. Artpop is sadly full of fairly standard and substandard dance music. I've been a little monster since the beginning, but unless all the other songs on this collection start playing fungus and growing on me, I think she may have stumbled with this effort.