'ARTPOP' remembered, for all the wrong reasons
I don't blame
Lady Gaga for saying she doesn't remember
'ARTPOP.' I
reviewed it, and gave it a 2/5 rating back then. The album was just... tasteless for lack of a better word. And that is just a small fish in the pond, compared to the disastrous era that spawned
ARTPOP. The project (her fourth) is deemed her most critically challenged to date. The reason for this is because (despite debuting at #1 on the BB200, and eventually going platinum in the US) it sold less than 300K in the first week. A massive drop
compared to the first week 1.1 million sales of predecessor
'Born This Way'. As a result, the nickname
'ARTFLOP' was born. During a November performance on
SNL in 2013, she
participated in softcore porn with one of the world's most renown pedophiles. I mean,
'Do What U Want' was actually a great pop song and it became a hit, but inviting
R. Kelly on board was never going to end well. Now it looks like the performance has been scrubbed off YouTube entirely (though this can still be found on
Dailymotion.) Eventually, he was later replaced by
Christina Aguilera, and Gaga has since spoken about her deep regrets for collaborating with him in the first place.
It was a dark place for Gaga in those times. She was forced to
banish certain people from her inner circle, who she felt didn't have her best interests due to their "greed of money." But what Gaga couldn't really take during the very underwhelming
ARTPOP era was the major sales slaughtering she received at the hands of
Katy Perry. She was accused of chart manipulation in an attempt to get a hit record with lead single
'Applause.' Bill Werde, the editorial director of Billboard magazine was
not having it! Also, it serves as no coincidence that Gaga's sudden amnesia of
'ARTPOP' comes on the EXACT day 6 years ago when that album was released in stores. I mean, a month before it's release, she was hyping it up to the high heavens.
So to go from this...
To THIS:
... speaks some serious volumes.
