Lady Gaga’s ‘Chromatica’: The Soundtrack to a World on Fire

Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. [View in Browser]( [Subscribe]( [Image] with Kevin Fallon Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. This Week: - Lady Gaga’s new album (!!!!!!!!!) - A new good show for people who like murder - The Jennifer Coolidge video I’ll never stop watching - A cute update about cute viral videos - The photo you’ll never unsee All Hail Our Dear Leader, Lady Gaga I’ve learned in the last few days that [Lady Gaga]( is not, in fact, singing, “I’d rather be drunk, but at least I’m alive” in her new single “Rain on Me” with [Ariana Grande](. But, cry for help as it may be that I heard it that way, the spirit, I think, is there—both of the song and of the environment in which it and Gaga’s entire new album [Chromatica]( has been released. [Alternate text]( She’d rather, apparently, be “dry” in the song, in which the two powerhouses validate the trauma that people are so often instructed to bury in order to be successful or triumphant, instead shouldering it with them to the dance floor where the epiphany happens: You can still lose yourself to bliss while carrying that weight; you can survive. It’s a song about permission. The permission to hurt. The permission to dance. And the permission to still be bitter, to want something better or different—be it dry when the rain falls or, I guess, drunk instead of...not. I hate myself. But I think Lady Gaga is telling me that’s OK! That “Rain on Me” hit on something profound in light of current circumstances ahead of the release Friday of Gaga’s new album Chromatica might be coincidental. But it’s certainly consequential. There was the presumption that, like [Dua Lipa’s fantastic Future Nostalgia]( in March, Chromatica would be a cure for quarantine malaise, a serotonin spike of synths and sass that would invigorate resigned souls and reassure us that there is a dance floor to get to on the other side of all this—even if it’s frustrating that we’re not there right now. A judicious collection of top-to-bottom kinetic club pop, Chromatica certainly is that, and as such a welcome return to a Fame Monster-era Gaga that some fans worried had been lost in the artist’s prolonged identity exploration over the years. (That is certainly not a diminishment of anything Artpop, Cheek to Cheek, Joanne, or A Star Is Born produced.) There were countdown parties and distraught social media points about the torture of the album’s release without the optimal habitat for it to be welcomed in: At a gay bar four-to-seven diluted vodka sodas in. But on further listening, especially on a morning shaded and suffocated by a [storm cloud of world news]( and the worst in human behavior, it plays much deeper than that. It’s not a release, it’s a protest. We expected the album to be catharsis, and it is. On Chromatica, dance is an essential service. Reveling is important, and always has been to Gaga. Chromatica is about, as it forever has been with Little Monsters, celebrating the everything about you that makes up you. But it also seems to have another mission. “This is my dance floor I fought for,” she sings on “Free Woman.” “We own the downtown, hear our sound.” Don’t settle. Get angry. Fight for the world you deserve. The rollout to [Chromatica]( was a lot. On the one hand, you had the lead track, “Stupid Love,” which almost entirely rejects a search for deep meaning. Any way you look at it, it’s a bop. But it debuted alongside the massive, mysterious branding of Chromatica, which seemed manufactured precisely for the parsing of deep meaning. It seemed like a return to the whole high-concept, occasionally insufferable Lady Gaga thing, which might be read as more authentic to the artistry on which she built her stratospheric career. But maybe that’s the entire ruse at play here. Often, too, a dancefloor album is misconstrued to mean busy, nothing more than a chaotic collection of beats, tricks, and energy. Chromatica is the first Lady Gaga album to eschew ballads entirely, certainly a creative pivot after the massive success of A Star Is Born. But it’s also in many ways her most stripped down album yet. The Chromatica performance art has a simple message behind it, the songs are straightforward, and its lessons are powerful. It’s about healing, both psychotic (“911”) and emotional (“Rain on Me”). It’s about worth and desperation (“1000 Doves”). It’s about vulnerability (“Sour Candy”), almost rebelliously set to her driving dance synths. She wants to be seen and validated, but also yearns to eschew that kind of superficiality in “Plastic Doll,” again rejecting the veneer of fun we often dismiss pop and dance for. Yes, many people can’t wait until dance floors reopen and they can lose inhibitions and fling sweat to Chromatica. But the album won’t be written off for that. The most persistent running theme is trauma, often explicitly (“Replay”), and what it takes to not rid ourselves or absolve it, but acknowledge it and how to carry it through life. Maybe that is through dancing. Probably, we suspect—and we don’t think it’s projection on this particularly dark day for civilization on which the album was released—it’s through something much more transgressive. Chromatica isn’t offering an escape hatch to another planet or existence. It’s forcing us to confront the one we’re in. On Chromatica, it’s open season on your personal demons, but more importantly it’s target practice on the barriers that prevent the world from being how it should be, how it deserves to be, how we’re not letting it be. We’re used to Lady Gaga being a maximalist artist, but everything here is specific and honed, from the blessedly concise running times—most tracks are barely three minutes long—to the messaging. And if you’ve made it this far and are weary from rolling your eyes at all this spelunking for significance….that’s fine. Here’s where you get maybe the most important bit: Chromatica is a great album, fun to listen to, and a fine return to—no, maintaining of—form for Lady Gaga. Good Murder, If You Like Murder I don’t know what it says about us—but, make no mistake, it is probably bad—that the most popular form of TV entertainment is murder. People love murder. They love [true-crime murder](; the more sordid the tale, the better. They love murder [when it’s an assassin]( who is also an aspiring commercial actor. They love murder when it’s real, when it’s sad, when it’s unsolved, when they already know the story, when they’ve never heard it before, when it’s the subject of a [gritty prestige drama series](, when it’s the subject of a trashy [movie of the week](, when it’s on a channel devoted entirely to talking about it, or when [it’s a group of tigers]( who possibly ate Carole Baskin’s husband. Murder-as-entertainment isn’t a cottage industry anymore so much as it is a compound of palatial estates, so prevalent as to spawn the aforementioned buffet of subgenres exploring it: In what mood would you like your homicide presented to you today? It’s that variety that makes Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story, which premieres Tuesday on USA, so interesting—a woman-scorned murder drama series that’s journeyed through the looking glass. [Image] The first season of [Dirty John](, which aired last year on Bravo based on the popular podcast, was its own significant turning point, a new kind of collision of prestige drama and trash TV. It told a story we’re used to watching unfold in certain beats of a certain tone in Lifetime movies—crassly, a “guilty pleasure”—but with a creative team and gravity that signaled elevated, “serious” television. Connie Britton, is that you? Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story threads a curlicue of meta-ness through the endeavor by tackling the Broderick case, or re-tackling it, as it’s already served as a pillar of murder-TV entertainment. Betty Broderick’s murder of her husband after he jilted her already inspired 1992’s made-for-TV movie A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story, which earned Meredith Baxter an Emmy nomination. Whatever it is you imagine in your head when you picture a clichéd murder-of-the-week TV movie (usually airing on Lifetime), this is the one that made the mold—to that point that more than one sitcom has joked about fictional versions of these movies starring Baxter. This is all to say that revisiting the case that started it all with the kind of treatment Dirty John gives it—at times compassionate and introspective, at other times leaning into beats of outrageousness—is a delicate act, one that wouldn’t work without Amanda Peet as Betty. She is very, very good, somehow playing all sides of the tonal kaleidoscope here at once, differing depending from which angle you look at it. Is she nailing the potential camp of the whole “woman scorned” thing? Is she crafting a complicated character study of what drove Betty to do this? Is she mid-breakdown? Is she calculating? When her husband sells their old house out from under her, in a rage spiral she goes to burn it down. Then she thinks better of it and decides to drive her car into his current front door instead. “What I did was crazy, but I am not crazy,” she tells a psych evaluator. It’s not easy to create a performance that lives somewhere in that space, but Peet manages it here. Jennifer Coolidge, Graduation Icon It is disappointing for this year’s graduates that they’re deprived of the usual pomp and circumstance because of COVID-related safety shutdowns. But it is also incredibly inspiring and impressive how institutions have pivoted to make the event still seem special and monumental. In other words, how else would we have gotten Jennifer Coolidge to don a cap and gown in a parlor dimly lit by scattered candelabras and howl at a gathering of possibly haunted porcelain dolls and a stuffed pug in a Frida Kahlo flower crown, “Life is a storm, my young graduates!” ([Watch it here](.) [Alternate text]( The Emerson College alum delivered an unforgettable remote commencement speech this week—sure, [Obama’s made me teary](, but suffered from a glaring dearth of dolls—that reworked a passage of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo in order to deliver a singular message of hope and laughter to the Class of 2020 and raise the question of whether the Emmy Awards should launch a new category for virtual commencement addresses. High School Musical Stars, Fellow Icons Speaking of the Class of 2020, [we’ve mentioned before]( this really lovely and smiley and genuinely pure thing from when this shutdown started and the vibe of the world was just general malaise and fear and doom and sadness. Tony-winner Laura Benanti started the [#SunshineSongs movement on Twitter](, calling for students whose high school musical performances were canceled because of quarantine to post videos of themselves singing and tag her. “I want to be your audience!! Sending all my love and black market toilet paper.” [Alternate text] They did—thousands of them, countless teenagers belting their hearts out. It was the best kind of rabbit hole to lose yourself in, one that, funnily enough, helped dig a lot of people out of a dark time with some light and cheer. And now, like everything popular and significant, it will be a TV show. Homeschool Musical: Class of 2020 is in the works for the new streaming service HBO Max, with Benanti producing. There’s no premiere date yet, but maybe it’s time to update our piece on [whether you should subscribe](. Paul Mescal’s Legs, Icons As Well Have you watched and/or masturbated to Normal People on Hulu yet? If not, I am not sure whether these paparazzi photos of lead [Paul Mescal]( will attract or repel you, but it is something I will not soon stop thinking about. [Alternate text]( Equally great: author [Sady Doyle’s perfect tweet about it](, both summarizing the nature of the internet’s collective thirst and reading it for filth. [Alternate text]( [Image] - Ramy: The surprise gem from last year is this year’s expected delight. - Below Deck: Med: Escapism has never been more of an essential service. - Quiz: It’s funny, it’s wild, it’s dramatic, and it’s all based on a true story. [Image] - Space Force: It’s not good. It’s [so surprisingly not good](. Advertisement [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( © Copyright 2020 The Daily Beast Company LLC 555 W. 18th Street, New York NY 10011 [Privacy Policy]( If you are on a mobile device or cannot view the images in this message, [click here]( to view this email in your browser. To ensure delivery of these emails, please add emails@thedailybeast.com to your address book. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, or think you have received this message in error, you can [safely unsubscribe](.