Born This Way

Mother Monster throws her whole self into the pot.

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LADY GAGA BLEW THROUGH her Saturday Night Live appearance in early March with an arsenal of boisterous vocal runs and sparkly ensembles that suggested the 38-year-old singer-songwriter had put the proverbial 10,000 hours into studying mid-20th-century variety shows. The best skit, "Little Red Glasses," parodied a '90s daytime-TV ad selling the fashion accessory to a certain type of New York progressive. "I was ahead of the curve on gay marriage," Sarah Sherman shouts, "and that's where it stopped." "Me too!" affirms Gaga. The quips and backdrop of tree-hugged city-park steps lampooned the star's own class of millennial Manhattanite. It was a lived-in self-burn. The city has figured into a few projects from Gaga's hyperactive year, including the widely panned Joker: Folie à Deux, which cast Gaga as its reckless, singing Harley Quinn (who, like her, is from the Upper West Side). And for a conversation about her new album, Mayhem, the artist took Zane Lowe to Welcome to the Johnsons, a downtown dive where she once partied and wrote songs.

Gaga's referencing her points of origin more than usual.

Chromatica, the last mainline Gaga album, implied she was from space, and four years before that, Joanne tried for country-jukebox immortality. Talked into another pop album by her tech-investor and entrepreneur fiancé, Michael Polansky, who closely collaborated with her on Mayhem, Gaga whacks multiple birds with one stone. Fans of what was once a steady stream of club bangers get a ride with Gaga 1.0. If she absolutely must drag her Ms. Hyde back into the light, she's going to make it fun for herself.

It took a few years to coax Gaga back to the bop factory. Our attachment to the pop-star persona she created appears to have complicated a larger Stefani Germanotta Project: Sleek dance-pop grooves but also classicist balladry, fey art rock, and drag-amenable camp all play crucial but disparate parts.