A few weeks ago the quite popular singer Lady Gaga announced some things about her new album, ARTPOP – things such as its release date (11 November), the fact it would be an album and an app and, finally, that it would be "a reverse Warholian expedition". The statement was accompanied by an image, which has since been followed by a slow drip of other, seemingly disparate images involving self-made artwork, piercings, the licking of hands and sad clowns. While we suspect she doesn't always know exactly what's going on, we thought it might be fun to figure out what on earth it all might mean.
The various eras of Gaga's career have been as heavily defined by their looks as they have by the music. The Fame era was a sort of David LaChapelle fantasy, a land of neon colours and lightning-bolt makeup. For The Fame Monster, she turned to fashion photographer Hedi Slimane to create darker, simpler looks that usually involved her crying black tears or hiding behind a veil. While Born This Way's album cover featured Gaga morphing into a motorbike and was – let's not beat around the bush here – an abomination, the earlier promo shots, taken by Nick Knight, were strangely beautiful, with Gaga's face augmented by what appeared to be devil horns. So where would she go next with the ludicrously titled ARTPOP album?
The welding mask picture
Shot by Dutch photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin – perhaps most famous for their work with Björk – the first image to emerge from this new campaign (see top of post) was almost disappointingly, well, normal. That said, she is wearing what looks like a fancy perspex welding helmet, or some sort of new optometry experiment (more on that later). So what clues do we get about the album? Well, we know that she's still keen on calling it ARTPOP, as that is tattooed on her arm. We can also hazard a guess that the album might be quite "direct" and "stripped back", perhaps; but then she was topless and gazing at the camera in most of the Born This Way pictures and that album turned out to have more bells and whistles on it than an album made specifically to be performed with only bells and whistles. Perhaps, as with all the best moments of Gaga's career so far, it means very little other than it's a nice picture that will get people talking.
The 'leaked footage' teaser video
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch ARTPOP trailer
ARTPOP will exist not just as an album, but also as an app, so expect to see a lot more "visual content" in the lead-up to its November release. The first of these, a brief teaser video, emerged 10 days after she announced her comeback, and again features a relatively plain-looking Gaga slowly licking and swallowing the tips of what looks like a mechanical hand. Again, the theme seems to be about stripping Gaga back, and once again there are no outfits made of meat or Muppets to distract from the art. The general feel of it is almost uncomfortably direct. Towards the end, we hear a conversation between Gaga and someone off-camera, which implies that the clip was shot almost as an outtake during something else – a full video shoot, perhaps. There's already a sense that all these disparate images and elements might make more sense once collected together in the app, or that in taking you behind the scenes, Gaga is deconstructing herself. Or something.
The septum piercing video
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch Lady Gaga septum piercing video
While it's nice for fans to see behind-the-scenes footage of their favourite pop star shooting a video, or perhaps on set at a posh photoshoot, Gaga wants her fans to see everything – including her getting her septum pierced. Makeup-free and wearing an old band T-shirt, Gaga lays perfectly still while a tattooed man clamps a bolt through her nose, the camera operator hovering just far enough back for us to at least miss out on seeing any actual penetration. In the context of the whole ARTPOP campaign so far, this clip might hint at some sort of pleasure/pain paradox, or perhaps a song about finding beauty in pain. Or, as one comment underneath the video confirms, it's a statement for her fans: "She is so Brave … i couldn't do that cause im afraid." Gaga's reaction would probably be along the lines of, "Of course you could do it, we are all brave together, you were born this way", etc.
The naked circuit-board sofa picture
A few weeks ago Gaga sent her 39m Twitter followers into spasms of delirium by changing her profile picture to that of an egg. Not the egg she emerged from at the 2011 Grammy awards, but more prosaically, the egg that pops up when you delete your profile picture. Over the weekend the egg was replaced by a picture of a naked Gaga (apart from some black boots) sitting, I presume uncomfortably, on a chair made of old circuit boards. On her face sit what look like the most elaborate pair of glasses this side of a Timmy Mallet convention. The computer stuff may hint at a glitchier, more electronic sound (yes, we're clutching at straws here). It also seems to conflate modernity with the kind of thing you see in a 1980s film like Weird Science or Flight of the Navigator. Maybe we're getting some old-school techno? Maybe Gaga's launching her own range of sofas with DFS? Perhaps she's just bored of Specsavers frames? Maybe she just likes the juxtaposition of the natural and the technological? Or by showing the working mechanisms of things like computers, she is making them more human? I'm exhausted.
The clown-face cover for Applause
Perhaps the most interesting image to emerge so far is the cover for ARTPOP's first single, Applause. Referencing Pierrot the clown, it again focuses on Gaga's face, with her makeup artfully smudged and her expression a captivating mix of sadness, relief, surprise and confusion as to why her top seems to be slowly engulfing her. In an interview with Women's Wear Daily, she explained that the cover was part of the Applause video and was chosen to reflect the vulnerability that comes in the moments straight after a performance: "It's the end of the night after the show," she said. "When I look at it, I see that there is a longing for the applause. I see that there is a void that is leaking on stage, that the performer is leaking, that the art is sort of becoming something else in front of your eyes. Something more human, something more honest." Gaga also said that, despite the sadness of the cover art, the music itself is "very fun", which sort of confirms the suspicion that a lot of these images are, in fact, picked for how they look rather than for any inherent meaning. There's always been a sense with Gaga that ideas are picked because they sound good said out loud or written down – meaning can be attached later, if at all.
It's something Gaga confirmed in the interview after the journalist tries to make sense of it all: "It's interesting how you view things, and you look at it like, 'I'm a pop icon,' and [you wonder], 'Is this the image of the album? Is this the direction? Who came up with it?' I think that's so interesting because it's exactly the kind of thing we're trying to destroy." Gaga went on: "When you watch each image and you watch each thing come out, they might not look exactly the same. [I'm not] defined by the same designer, or defined by the same haircut, or defined by the same icon. The statement is that I'm not one icon. I'm every icon."
