Do you remember when studio albums told stories? When you bought a CD and listened to every song on it, in order? There was no shuffle, and if you wanted to make a playlist you had to burn it onto a disc, so musicians gave their albums narrative arcs, a thesis, or at least a consistent theme. There would be a single vibe.
But in the age of Spotify and YouTube and TikTok, that doesn’t happen anymore. Albums are designed to be torn apart, their constituent songs—and even certain hooks within those songs—sprinkled across the internet, one for every playlist. If you want to see what I mean, listen to Lady Gaga’s sixth studio album Mayhem, which was released Friday, and is the perfect album for the streaming era: something that doesn’t sound like an album at all.
The album begins with two hard-hitting club hits (“Disease” and ”Abracadabra”), followed by a derivative pop song (“Garden of Eden”) that sounds like it was produced to be licensed for a sex scene in a CW show. After a brief detour into mom rock (“Perfect Celebrity”), the album turns to Bowie-esque disco with a track called “Zombieboy,” which my husband said sounded like “a good RuPaul track, which is still a bad song.”
There’s one song, “How Bad Do U Want Me,” that sounds so much like a Taylor Swift track that some are convinced the song was a secret collaboration between the two, and another that sounds like a half-hearted Whitney Houston impression called “The Beast.” Finally, and unfortunately, the album ends with “Die with a Smile,” inexplicably featuring Bruno Mars—a song that is what I like to call a “CVS ballad,” the sort of slow, not-too-sad track that you first hear in the pharmacy and then somehow, everywhere.
The uncharitable interpretation of this album is that it’s a mess. The charitable interpretation is that Gaga is versatile—something she’s already spent two decades proving. The album’s title, Mayhem, acknowledges how disorganized it is—there’s not even a clear genre. The message to critics seems to be: The chaos is intentional. A bit of ass-covering? Or is Gaga just playing the new game?
In the age of streaming, pop stars have to give us as much as possible to stay ahead. The club hits, the gay club hits, the TikTok tracks, the scream-in-the-shower song, and a little something to pump into the Marshalls dressing room. Mayhem has them all, a song or two for every playlist.
Gaga isn’t the only one to succumb to this dynamic. Two of the most successful pop stars of all time have recently done the same thing. Last year, Taylor Swift dropped a bloated 16-track album, The Tortured Poets Department. The album is one-third very slow, very sad breakup songs; one-third vengeful diss tracks aimed at everyone from Kim Kardashian to Swift’s own fans; and one-third miscellaneous songs, including one about Florida featuring the least Floridian person ever to live, posh English singer Florence Welch. Tortured is apt.
Released the same month was Beyoncé’s equally too-long country album Cowboy Carter, which is similarly a roller coaster of vibes, in a way that’s more jarring than genius. It ranges from an unforgivable rewrite of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” to a painfully sappy duet with Miley Cyrus, to an interlude where Beyoncé literally sings opera. Beyoncé did a song called “Levii’s Jeans,” the target audience for which was apparently not the listener, but—you guessed it—Levi’s Jeans. She is now doing a collaboration with the company, proof that albums are not only designed with Spotify, but also sponsorship, in mind.
Fans lapped up the album, because, well, it’s Beyoncé. Ditto Taylor Swift. But I doubt anyone will be listening to these albums in ten years’ time.
The worst part is, it doesn’t have to be this way. Some artists are bucking the trend and proving that people still love it when albums tell stories. Last year’s sleeper hit was Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, an album that had a narrative arc: It was a lesbian bildungsroman that straight sorority girls could listen to, and it even had a few tracks you could play in a mall. But Chappell was able to do it because she wasn’t that famous when she recorded it, so she could take a risk. Pity the titans trying to stay relevant by giving everyone what they want, and end up achieving nothing.
If you missed it, read River’s review of the controversial, genre-defying musical, “ ‘Emilia Pérez’ and the Curse of Oscar Bait.”
