Hey everyone, DJ Louis here just dropping a little preview of our latest pop pantheon

all access episode. This is of course our Patreon channel where we're dropping at least three

bonus episodes of the show per month and also offering a ton of other perks like access to our

Discord channel and so much more. On this episode, on the eve of Lady Gaga's Chromatica's third anniversary, I invited my friend

Matthew Perpetua along with his friend, Molly Mary O'Brien, on the show to discuss the album

and how we reacted to it in the time, how our thoughts have evolved over time, what it portends

for Gaga's career, moving forward, where it situates her in the pop space, and what we like about

it, what we don't like about it, what influenced it, what works on it, what doesn't work on it.

It was such a fun conversation, and I'm so excited for you guys to hear it.

So here's a little preview.

If you enjoy what you hear, you can hear the rest of that episode plus all of our bonus content

and so much more at patreon.com slash pop pantheon or by clicking the link in the show notes of

this episode.

Gaga, I think, got so big.

The expectations around her were so huge that you then get to like a born this way,

which is really only coming out, you know, two or three years into her career.

She's got the peak of her success.

Everyone's paying attention to her.

And she makes this kind of wild-sounding record that, of course, is at once very successful,

but also very divisive. I think that album was the moment where there was a lot of casual Gaga fans that were like into bad romance and shit like that, that were kind of like, eh, this is kind of gay, this is kind of campy, this is a little bit out there. Like, there was a lot of success off of the fumes of how big the first era had been. But the record, I think, in terms of how the general public felt about it, was really divisive. I remember when the first single came out, people being like, screech. You know what I mean? So I have sort of thought about every subsequent Gaga album as like a weird pivot to try to find her equilibrium again after that. So it's like art pop, we now think of it as kind of an unhinged record because it definitely is.

But that was an answer in some ways to born this way's headier, queer kitty sort of thing.

The whole idea for art pop was like, I'm going to go back to making music that's about frivolous fantasy and sex and fun. And that was kind of the idea. Of course, she's always shoehorning 10 million other ideas into there, but that was the idea of art pop. But it was still completely overblown. And the record was seen as a massive underperformer.

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