ALERT: If you don’t love dance music…probably you’re not going to like the dancefloor planet Chromatica.
Disco music and underground styles have always been a home for female artists and the LGTBIQ+ community. Disco music has been related to the full spectrum of feelings, a genre made for the soul—the maximum exponent of crying your tears on the dancefloor.
Disco is also a musical genre highly related to liberation, self-love and sexuality. Three aspects of which nowadays a considerable part of society is afraid to feel. The media and a non-proper education make us weak in spirit and to be over overwhelmed by insecurities that at the end will rule of lives.
So it’s not a casualty that Lady Gaga has chosen to create Chromatica around the essence of Disco plus some influences from the club scene of the ’90s (“Enigma” or “Replay”) and spoken word. For example “Sour Candy”, which seems to use again like Katy Perry’s “Swish Swish” the sample of Roland Clark’s song “I Get Deep”, uses spoken word as many of the tracks on Chromatica.
She was looking not only for liberation from her demons but also from the public. A statement that goes at the beginning of the record with the track “Alice”:
Could you pull me out of this alive? /// Where’s my body? I’m stuck in my mind
Lady Gaga – “Alice” – Track 2
On this record, which comes without any pretensions and just with the premise that Gaga sings on the track “Free Woman” at the beginning of the 2nd verse that goes “This is my dancefloor I fought for // A heart, that’s what I’m livin’ for (Be free)”, which is, in a way quite a relief after eras that have been overhyped all over again with months in advance.
She doesn’t want to prove anything to anyone anymore in her career. She has understood that after more than a decade in the business, it comes a moment when you only need to make the music you feel and love. The music at the end is the result of the artists’ life and experiences. Only the record that is capable of maintaining the authenticity of the artists into every single note, are the ones that people enjoy the most.
There’s a massive sense of joyfulness on Gaga’s voice and quite a more lighthearted and colourful experience that I was personally expecting from Chromatica.
She’s just having a good time on the disco-jazzy-ballroom inspired track “Babylon” or having her best Eurovision fantasy along with her mentor Elton John on the top-notch “Sine From Above”. There are not as many layers as some of her previous work, but it’s to admire the straightforwardness of her music this time. What you listen, it’s what you get.
At the end this is the case of Chromatica, is a homage to what the dance floor means to all of us. The acceptance of our individualities and the liberation from the judgement of the outside. Lady Gaga is starting to find her dance floor, a home inside of her in which she’s crying her heart out while dancing to her own mistakes, experiences and right decisions. She’s just opening that space called Chromatica, to each one who wants to be gentle and learn how to live and love themselves again through the power of disco music and dance.
But let’s be clear. Chromatica is a record that doesn’t go to change the game. However, it’s still such an enjoyable, fresh and quite uplifting approach to the dancefloor, especially if we take in consideration that it comes for such a dark place for Gaga, as “911” express under the vocal effects and beats “My biggest enemy is me, pop a 911”. But in the end, nobody earned this dancefloor like her.
PS: Although I can’t forget her for changing “Free Woman” away from the excellent 90’s dark french house vibes that the demo has it. That also goes for “Babylon” which is still a classic anthem made for the ballrooms on his new form.
8,5/10
