Lady Gaga - Million Reasons (Live At Royal Variety Performance)

Because Lady Gaga released her most recent album, Chromatica, during lockdown, she hasn't really begun to promote it as yet. What live performances there have been have taken place over video conferencing software from home. As such, I'm turning to performances from the Joanne era as they seem more apt. This Royal Variety Performance was a surprisingly demure one by Gaga, but it's a powerful one in which she is possibly channelling her inner Bassey. In direct contrast to, there's a live film of the Dive Bar tour she did to promote 2016's Joanne album, which you can watch here.

Fantasy Festival number 21: The Lineup

Liz Lawrence: Liz Lawrence released her second album of indie rock, Pity Party, last year. It featured the understated observational deadpan of 'None of my friends are OK'. She was touring earlier this year, and it's to be expected that she may well have dates planned for the future, circumstances permitting. You can find her on Insta.

The Paranoyds: Achingly cool LA punk pop band The Paranoyds have been around for a few years now. Their debut album, Carnage Bargain, was released last year. You can find them on Bandcamp.

Starcrawler: The outrageous LA garage punk band are fronted by Arrow De Wilde, the feral lovechild of Iggy Pop and Cherie Curie. They have released two albums of stomping punk classics, are terrifying live, and you can find out more here.

Natasha Kmeto: This Portland based multi instrumentalist, producer and singer makes evocative, clever, sexy feel good electronic music. You can find her on Bandcamp.

Kelly Lee Owens: "Convention-blurring techno producer/musician" is what it says on her Bandcamp, and you can't really argue with that. Her self titled, self released debut album was released in 2017 when she was still living in Wales, and quickly became both a critical and word of mouth success. Since then it seems like everybody wants to work with her. Her second album is, it is fair to say, very keenly anticipated. You can find her on Bandcamp.

AURORA: Norwegian singer, songwriter and producer Aurora has released three highly conceptual albums of electro art pop. You can find out more here.

Kelsea Ballerini: Tennessee country pop singer and songwriter Kelsea Ballerini has released three albums of country flavoured pop and cites Shania Twain as her greatest influence. As an artist who has grown up with pop crossover artists such as Twain and Taylor Swift, it's not surprising that she is able to straddle the pop and country worlds with such ease. You can find out more here.

Lady Gaga: The phenomenon that is Lady Gaga was born Stefani Germanotta in New York in 1986. She is a singer, songwriter and producer. 2008's aptly titled debut album The Fame was her breakthrough moment, and it's been non stop ever since for her. Musically, she remains a dance and pop orientated artist but, over the years, she has taken inspirations from metal, country and Americana, and even made a brief foray into the easy listening world with her Tony Bennett collaboration, Cheek to Cheek. "Do you want to be the next Madonna?" she was asked once "No" she replied "I want to be the next Iron Maiden". You can find out more here.

Fangirls

Hannah Ewens book, Fangirls, was published in July. A slender tome (it comes in at just under 250 pages) it nonetheless has a very important story to tell, that of the secret, rarely accurately depicted, world of the fangirl.

What makes Fangirls different to previous cultural accounts of fandom is that Ewens is interested in exploring female experiences of fandom in depth, and that she's not just after a quick take on the more extreme, hysterical end of fan culture. Similarly, while the book does feature accounts of One Direction fans, she goes far beyond the usual female fan/male object of desire definition of fandom. In Fangirls you will find accounts of Halsey fans, the Beyhive, Lady Gaga's Little Monsters, Amy Winehouse fans and older Courtney Love fans, amongst others.

When I come to think about the defining characteristics of previous accounts of fandom, I see them as largely falling into two camps. There's the autobiographical 'We were crazy and we were wild, but I'm now a sensible, grown up adult' school of thought and the 'They are crazy and wild and debase proper fandom with their hysteria' school of thought. I could be being simplistic, and Ewens' book certainly hints that there has been a good deal of positive work done within academia so far as fandom is concerned, but as her discussion of the fallout from a notorious One Direction documentary explores, the stereotype of the two dimensional deranged, screaming teenage girl with stalker tendencies is alive and well.

In one of the early chapters, Ewens travels to London's Brixton Academy on several nights to speak to fans queueing for various artists. She vividly portrays a world that few get to see, explaining the attraction of camping out overnight, how it fits into fan culture, how it becomes part of the social scene around an artist, part of friendship networks and cliques within the fandom.

Perhaps the most powerful moments in Ewens book are when she actively advocates for fangirls under attack, firstly in the chapter about emo and mental health, and secondly with her chapter on Ariana Grande, where she speaks to survivors of the Manchester Arena bombing. On the strength of the Ariana Grande chapter alone, this book deserves to be read and showered with awards. It's a powerful take on an incredibly dark moment in musical history that manages not to be sensationalist, is sensitive but also powerfully angry.

Similarly, the chapter on Amy Winehouse and her relationship with her young female fans is a new take on Winehouse, and makes for a far more interesting, three dimensional portrait of her than any of the usual accounts of her life written since her death.

The book closes with an account of Courtney Love's older fanbase, which includes Ewens herself, and gently demonstrates the ways in which fangirl culture goes way beyond the teenage years.

As I have written in this month's Sticks'N'Strings, my own personal experience of fangirl cultures tends to be drawn mainly from the Sleater-Kinney fanbase and the Florence + The Machine Army, neither of whom are featured in Fangirls. To be sad about that would be to miss the point of the book though: A lot of what Ewens describes is universal to every fandom, and that's what makes this book so relatable, and so needed.

Gaga's back

Lady Gaga's new album, Joanne, is a strong contender for album of the year I'd say. We are in November after all, it's relatively safe to say these things...

From the ferocious, autobiographical, high octane pop of 'Diamond Heart' through to the haunting 'Angel Down', this is a typically sophisticated pop album from Gaga, one which draws strongly on the imagery and sounds of Americana.

Take the twangy guitar samples mixed in with crunchy beats of 'A-Yo', or the much more atmospheric American Gothic balladry of 'Sinners Prayer', the more subtle country power balladry of 'Million Reasons' (which, thankfully, emerges more 'Don't Toss Us Away' than 'Stand By Your Man') or - best of all - the full on berserk cowboy baiting pop blitzkrieg that is 'John Wayne'. This song is either the best Shania Twain piss take ever or a divine marriage of Americana and glitchy electro pop. And she makes it sound effortless and so, so easy...

Which is always the issue with pop, really: Gaga is full on pop, but below the surface, there have always been clever things going on.

There's a vague sense of unease in 'Diamond Heart', with it's lyrics of defiant go-go'ng on one hand, but the line "Some asshole broke me in, wrecked all my innocence" on the other, and vulnerability and tenderness in the lament for her dead aunt in 'Joanne', and then there is the powerful state of the nation dramatic pop opera that is 'Angel Down', which more than any of the other songs on this album hints at a disconnect with modern life.

There are songs to dance to here, none the least 'Diamond Heart', 'John Wayne', and the gritty electro moody minimalism of 'Dancin' In Circles', which sees Gaga touching herself "to pass the time" while muttering "Funk me downtown". There's also the surging, diamond hard pop of 'Perfect Illusion' and the boozy girls night in anthem that is 'Grigio Girls', an ode to the powers of friendship and Pinot Grigio, with a a suitably catchy sing a long chorus.

And then there is 'Hey Girl', Gaga's duet with Florence Welch. This is a slinky Prince and the Revolution style affair, which is structured almost like a phone conversation between the two of them. It has an agreeably positive message of female solidarity and, while not such an obvious musical link with the other songs on the album, it does work, with a real sense of collaboration rather than competition that enhances the message of the song.

The collaboration with Welch seems particularly apt when you consider that both women turned 30 this year, both felt the need to take some time off before starting work on their current albums, and both seem to have a strong sense of family, and absent family members, that influences their work on occasion.

While I would say that 'Hey Girl', 'Grigio Girls' and 'Sinners Prayer' are some of the strongest moments on here, it's the work tape version of 'Angel Down' that will reduce you to tears. While the finished version is haunting and elegiac, the work tape is much more stripped down, angrier, and grittier. It is very 2016, and it feels like the song to end the year on really, in so many ways, for so many reasons.

There is footage on YouTube of Gaga performing 'Angel Down' from a balcony at the final Hilary Clinton rally in early November, which adds an extra poignancy in many ways. If we take the year from November 2015 through to November 2016, we can see that it begins with France and ends with America. It feels no accident to me that my two favourite albums of that year are Chaleur Humaine and Joanne.