Lady Gaga’s Convoluted First Interview About Her New Album Has Really Confused Everyone
The album is about colour. And math. And genetics. And equality. And a fictional universe with eight warring tribes. Oddball Gaga is back.
Lady Gaga knows how to do a press tour: with each album or project, her interviews approach performance art and are as eagerly awaited as the music itself. And judging by her first interview post announcement of sixth album Chromatica, we’re in for a wonderful ride.
After releasing lead single ‘Stupid Love’ last Friday, Gaga’s now announced Chromatica, a 16-track album out April 10 co-executive produced with Bloodpop, who Gaga worked with across her last album, Joanne. There will also be a deluxe edition with 18 or 19 tracks.
Fans are speculating that Adele, Ariana Grande and K-pop group Blackpink will possibly all feature on the record, after Gaga confirmed that some of the rumours surrounding collaborations are true. Time will tell.
Holding off on revealing the album cover, Gaga teased the album with a pink image of a sine wave — a symbol within the world-building seen in the ‘Stupid Love’ video, which featured several bright-colour wearing tribes fight on a distant planet, Chromatica.
She also sat down with Apple Music Beats.1 host Zane Lowe to talk about the album in a 15-minute interview, discussing the ideas behind the album. In it, she described how the sine wave represents “sound”, as sound healed her while making this record. As detailed in 2017 documentary Five Foot Two, Gaga has fibromyalgia, a chronic pain disease, though the quote could also be referring to her romantic life during the recording period.
“The symbol for Chromatica has a sine wave in it, which is the mathematical symbol for sound,” she said, “and it’s from what all sound is made from, and, for me, sound is what healed me in my life period, and it healed me again making this record, and that is really what Chromatica is all about.”
“It’s about healing and it’s about bravery as well and it’s really like, when we talk about love I think it’s so important to include the fact that it requires a ton of bravery to love someone.”
Later, Gaga expanded upon the album’s title, explaining that she was motivated by colours.
“[Chromatica] seems to be about colours and all the different colours and also music is made of a chromatic scale, you know?,” she said, as if we would know. “So it’s all the colours, all the sounds, you know, so we, we’re talking about inclusivity and life and also a lot of what we see around us and what we’re experiencing is math, which is very much like music and and sound is math as well.”
“So [Bloodpop and I] talked about that, and then I sort of went back and I said, ‘OK, well, yeah, it’s inclusivity but it’s really a way of thinking’,” you know, it’s not just, ‘Oh, Chromatica, we’re being inclusive with all the colours, all the people,’ and when I say, ‘All the coloUrs, all the people,’ I mean way more than we could possibly fathom.”
She continued, explaining that genetically, humans are more than one colour or shade, and that to view things chromatically is a frame of mind she now realises she’s always written from. Apologies for the wall-of-text, but it really needs to be read in full — the below quote is also just two sentences.
“I think that we’re actually operating on a completely rudimentary level where we square things off into very simplified colours when actually we’re all extremely different in a vast variety of ways that stem from both, like, genetics as well as epigenetics, like, we’re all completely different and I thought OK, well maybe, Chromatica is a frame of mind.”
“And that is my frame of mind, and I don’t know that I’ve ever made an album that wasn’t on Chromatica in some type of way, meaning like my frame of mind is always a part of my music, and this is just my way of kind of expressing, even in a both literal and abstract way, that, like, making music and putting it out into the world is my perspective on life, and it’s also my gift to the world in the best way that I can, and I think that everyone on any given day is doing the absolute best that they can do, and this is my perspective, and here it is, and it’s always been my perspective, but now I know that it was my perspective.”
Which, uh, sure. The long quote has been pulled and aggregated across media and within Gaga’s stan base, with fans poking fun at the convoluted way to say that Gaga thinks reducing humans to merely ideological, cultural or racial identities is what has continually caused pain and violence.
Instead, we should be streaming ‘Stupid Love’, which, as per the music video, will cause us all to dance as one. Stans are comparing the speech to Gaga’s interviews around the release of then-maligned, now-reappraised 2013 high-concept album Artpop.
The good sis ARTPOP is back pic.twitter.com/dyLARqejRw
— Ψ Ryade Ψ (@_Ryade_) March 2, 2020
Others are scrambling to make sense of the interview.
this quote from gaga is the equivalent of the picture where u can’t identify anything pic.twitter.com/h0psLEbPsb
— An Post Malone (@dulapeepstan) March 2, 2020
— Max (@mxmtsk) March 2, 2020
There’s even been a dramatic reading, which is a pitch-perfect impersonation of Gaga.
Lady Gaga discussing the concept behind her new album “Chromatica” pic.twitter.com/k3YUQPze1W
— CHASEICON (@chaseicon) March 2, 2020
While it’s not quite on the same critical mass level of ’99 People’ or Gaga being Italian and from New York, it’s a promising sign that this new era will offer a lot to ponder, such as genetics and math (??).
Listen to the interview below as you stare deeply into the sine wave of Chromatica.