Time, decidedly cruel, likes to handle irony. At the end of the 2000s, Madonna saw a competitor emerging, like her of Italian and Catholic ancestry, resulting from the New York Arty scene and follower of shaped transformism by David Bowie.
Stefani Germanotta, better known as the artist of Lady Gaga, made a shattering breakthrough from her first albumThe Fame (2008). Queen mother of dancing and provocative pop, her elder twenty-eight was never to find her crown. In 2023 and 2024, Madonna was reduced to a retrospective of her career (The Celebration Tour) with, as musicians, a recorded band to accompany his choreographies.
In 2025, it was Lady Gaga’s turn, at 38, to find himself in this delicate situation, threatened on his market by the formidable Dua Lipa. Behind a deceptive title, his seventh album, Mayhem (“Disorder”, “chaos”, a word chosen to reflect the eclecticism of its tastes and its influences) returns to the fundamentals that have built its success: energy to resell, carefully salted machine sounds by production, immediately memorable refrains.
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