Mirror On The Ceiling

Lady Gaga “A-Yo”

Lady Gaga is a rocker at heart, and though that was obscured in her earliest, biggest hits, she’s been gradually foregrounding that aspect of her as she’s moved along starting with The Fame Monster. Some people cynically interpret this as Gaga searching for a way to reboot herself for the marketplace, but it’s really just her becoming more herself, and allowing herself the opportunity to try out types of songs – like, say, “Joanne” – that she couldn’t take a risk on when she was dominating the charts with straight-up dance pop. Gaga is at her best when she’s excitedly trying out new looks and sounds, testing the limits of her life, and being a proud freak. At a point, the conformist marketplace of mainstream pop is an unnecessary albatross for her, and being less prominent frees her of creative limitations. Gaga the cult figure isn’t going away, which means Gaga the rock star can finally thrive. This is good, just like how it was a positive development when Kanye West and Beyoncé gave up chasing hits and decided to just do whatever they wanted instead.

“A-Yo,” a collaboration with the veteran songwriter Hillary Lindsay and producer Mark Ronson, is exactly the sort of thing I want from Gaga. It leans into rock music quite a bit – it’s in her voice, it’s in the crunch of the chords, the nods to country, that vaguely Fripp-ish solo that sounds like someone playing a guitar that has neon tube lighting from a dive bar for strings – but the song is produced like a dance pop track. This is a contemporary version of the thing Michael Jackson, Prince, and Madonna did so well in the ‘80s, which is present pop music as a place where elements of all popular genres merged into something greater than the sum of its parts that welcomed all types of people. As catchy and joyful as “A-Yo” gets, I don’t think it has a chance at uniting people in that way, but I appreciate the gesture and feel like this big tent approach suits the utopian freakiness of Gaga.

Buy it from Amazon.