Lady Gaga Saved Her Pop Star Career With ‘Abracadabra’
Lady Gaga has cycled through many iterations in the time we’ve known her: disco diva, Warholian punk, country-inflected barroom balladeer, star of movies both successful and not. But with the Grammy-night debut of her video for the new single “Abracadabra,” she’s returned to the mode many fans hold dearest: a joyfully bonkers maximalism. With a new generation of aspirants grasping for her crown, Gaga has proven that rare thing: a pop star’s pop star.
The “Abracadabra” clip debuted in a commercial break during the Feb. 2 Grammys broadcast; Gaga was in attendance as a nominee (and eventual winner) for the Bruno Mars duet “Die With a Smile.” That song has an earnest, dutiful quality; one senses both performers straining to produce a wedding-song standard. “Abracadabra,” by contrast, is about nothing but itself.
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Watching at home, I was instantly blown back in my seat; the elaborate video, depicting legions of dancers flanking two Gagas (a white-clad innocent and the wicked “lady in red” of the somewhat nonsensical lyrics) looked and felt big. The choreography is crisp and frenetic, the costumes are baroque and nod to Catholic grandeur (a rich vein for this Italian American pop queen just as it was for her forebear, Madonna). And the song’s impact has only grown; it opened at No. 8 on the global Spotify chart and has risen since then.
Then there are those lyrics. “She is the master of just like saying sounds,” my husband texted me late on Grammy night; I’d kept watching the broadcast, while he read a book and streamed “Abracadabra” an undisclosed number of times. The 2009 song “Bad Romance,” Gaga’s signature hit and the moment she leveled up her ambition, had its mesmerizing “Gaga, ooh-la-la” chorus. More than 15 years later, “Abracadabra” has … well, Genius renders it as “Abracadabra, amor-oo-na-na / Abracadabra, morta-oo-ga-ga / Abracadabra, abra-oo-na-na.”
It’s not quite wordplay Gaga’s doing, but she’s clearly savoring the ways she can toy with and draw out the song’s absurd, extravagant title. And having fun looks good on her. In the years since her 2020 album “Chromatica,” intended as a dance-floor filler, saw its release hampered by COVID, Gaga has focused on her movie career with diminishing returns (“House of Gucci,” sure; “Joker: Folie à Deux,” no way). And what music we’ve gotten from her — from “Die With a Smile” to her excavations of the American songbook for “Joker” — has tended toward proving her bona fides as a student of music history, not to, well, making sounds. Even “Disease,” the lead single for her next album, leans toward the morose; “Abracadabra” injects the campaign for that album, “Mayhem,” with a suitable dose of pure chaos.
And it comes at just the right moment. As Gaga has been scaling back, younger artists have emerged with a sense of spectacle they may well have learned from watching the “Bad Romance” video as kids. Sabrina Carpenter uses every stage she’s on — especially the Grammys — as a platform for self-parodying, ultra-glam camp. Billie Eilish’s performances are staged with
increasing grandeur as her songwriting grows still more sophisticated. And Chappell Roan — the obvious comparison to Gaga among today’s newest stars — infuses her work with a drag-inflected let’s-put-on-a-show spirit, as well as an eagerness to use costumes and makeup to help tell her stories.
What story is “Abracadabra” telling, exactly? Many, many listens and viewings deep, I feel further away from the answer. Say this much: Like too little of Gaga’s work since the glorious and triumphant one-two punch of “Bad Romance” and the “Born This Way” album, it’s done in the spirit of fun. The horned red hat Gaga wears, the growled admonition that “the floor’s on fire,” the mere concept of a “poem said by a lady in red” — it all contributes to our sense of Gaga as not just all the things she’s tried to achieve in recent years. We know she can act. We know she knows jazz and Americana. But she can, when she wants, take her imagination to the limits of sense, and keep us along for the ride. Abracadabra, indeed — it’s something like magic.
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