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Q MagazineJan 7, 2014The melodies here are fine, they do a job, but nothing backs up Gag's Warholian rhetoric or scales the barmy heights of Bad Romance. [Jan 2014, p.116]
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Nov 26, 2013While it’s stronger than the messy ‘Born This Way’, Artpop feels little more culture-quaking than a good collection of fun, silly, well-crafted pop songs.
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Nov 18, 2013Her latest offering, however, lacks the key component that made the bizarre spectacles that accompanied her other albums slightly less irritating--consistently good pop songs.
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Nov 14, 2013Not a great pop album, then, but certainly the product of a great pop star.
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Nov 14, 2013For better and for worse, Artpop meets the mandate (of cranking up the cray). It's a bizarre album of squelchy disco (plus a handful of forays into R&B) that aspires to link gallery culture and radio heaven, preferring concepts to choruses.
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Nov 14, 2013For all of Lady Gaga’s talking points, the fusion of art and pop has resulted in a lot of familiar dance-pop--more artful for its campiness than its musical innovation.
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Nov 11, 2013ARTPOP wants to hide that it doesn’t have much to say.
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Nov 11, 2013She remains singularly compelling and lovable as a celebrity, even if her records don't always match up to her outsized persona. Even at their worst, they only prove that the art is sometimes unworthy of the artist.
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Nov 10, 2013Throwaways (“Jewels n’ Drugs”) and power-ballad (“DOPE”) digressions weigh heavy on the pacing, but the arch “Mary Jane Holland” and “Swine” occupy livelier turf.
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Nov 10, 2013It's no instant classic, then, but neither is it the calamity that some have foreseen, being a typically mixed Gaga outing with some ludicrous highs, questionable digressions (Jewels 'N' Drugs, in which three rappers add little to the mix; or Donatella, a charmless ode to the equally charmless Versace supremo) and plenty of not-unpleasant filler.
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Nov 7, 2013It's a decent, if flawed, pop album, its good bits good enough to keep her filling stadiums as big as the gulf between her ideas and her music.
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Nov 7, 2013Musically, it's pretty much the standard modern electro fare familiar from dozens of contemporaries, from Kylie to Britney. The dubstep riffs are more tortured in places, but when David Guetta and will.i.am are involved in a track's production--as with the bullishly shallow "Fashion!"--you're not straying from the mainstream.
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Nov 22, 2013This is two albums in a row now that were basically a bit boring, and she needs to sort it out soonish please.
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Nov 14, 2013For all that firepower, the music is catchy but tame--she's cozying up to chart-topping formulas rather than disrupting them.
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Nov 14, 2013ARTPOP is a decidedly patchy ‘Just Dance’-less disappointment.
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Nov 11, 2013That refusal to experiment as wildly as she once did reads as fear, and a pop star who’s afraid ends up sounding like the once-weird Lady Gaga does on ARTPOP: boring and normal.
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Nov 11, 2013Artpop is the third album by pop recording artist Lady Gaga. Therefore it has similarities to her previous work but is inherently different because it is a different album.
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Nov 7, 2013There are moments where she reminds us that she can still do wonderful things, but for the most part, Artpop shows us an artist who is trying to do too much all at once.
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Nov 14, 2013For as flamboyant as she is, Gaga’s never lacked sincerity; ARTPOP’s lack of substantial personal connection and its tenuous grasp on reality makes it a tough record to like.
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Nov 11, 2013With Artpop, Gaga sounds confused, disengaged, and at its worst, just downright bored.
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Nov 7, 2013Throughout ARTPOP signifier upon signifier is piled on top of sometimes brilliant melodies, creating enough room for breathless readings of Gaga’s ‘art’ certainly, but failing on the more basic level as engaging pop music.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 2,691 out of 3397
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Mixed: 222 out of 3397
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Negative: 484 out of 3397
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Nov 11, 2013
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