Lady Gaga’s MAYHEM, or Miss Germanotta if you’re nasty

Billed as her “industrial” album, Lady Gaga’s 2025 album Mayhem finally puts words to the aesthetic she’s been developing as her signature pop sound for nearly two decades. I’ve been on record since 2010 saying that her sonic and songwriting debts point towards the industrial-house of KMFDM (though her occasional dubsteppy-cronch moments lean a bit more towards Front Line Assembly, and the coda to Killah is straight up early EBM). Bad Romance, Born This Way, Judas, Stupid Love, Killah, they all follow the same combo of heavy Juke-Joint-Jezebel-style synths with gospel-house treble vocals and some gruff tenor sprechstimme. At this point she could credit Sasha Koneitzko on her songs the way Beyonce credited Robin S on “Break My Soul.”

Gaga has told outlets like Elle and Consequence that influences for Mayhem include “90s grunge influence, 2000s pop influence, funk influence, ’80s influence,” “a sort of electro grunge defiance. That era in music which was a response to the music that came before it. And then David Bowie theatrical rock, Prince, Radiohead,” and Nine Inch Nails, specifically their TKTK single “Closer.” Circling around new wave, industrial, and Great Lakes regional sounds from the 80s and 90s (Prince, NIN, industrial dance, techno and house), all these explicitly-named references point to an unnamed reference that the album’s sounds evoke directly: Janet Jackson’s 80s albums.

Released a month before NIN’s debut album Pretty Hate Machine and openly and enthusiastically embraced by industrial fans as an industrial record, Rhythm Nation 1814 synthesizes just about all of these references together into a conceptual pop album. Jackson is a Chicagoland native working with Minneapolis’s Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis; they draw on sounds similar to the one Cleveland’s Trent Reznor, such as industrial, hip hop, rock, the Minneapolis sound of acts like Prince and Morris Day and The Time, house, and techno. Techno specifically is well-known to have influences from both Chicago house and new wave, with Detroit’s DJ The Electrifying Mojo spinning records by the likes of Kraftwerk and The B-52s (you can also just check out the Derek May remix of Nitzer Ebb’s “Shame” for further evidence of the techno/new wave relationship). The album includes heavier, more clearly industrial-influenced songs like the title track, tracks like “Escapade” that filter some EBM-y bass synth riffs through Jam & Lewis’s interpretation of the Minneapolis sound and translate that into a song for a pop diva, and “Black Cat”’s riff on metal. Collecting together this same range of references into an album whose tracks lean in various ways more towards some than others, Rhythm Nation provides a template for projects like Mayhem, with its industrial/EBM-y “Killah,” Taylor-Swift-meets-Kraftwerk “How Bad Do U Want Me,” and power ballad “Die With A Smile.” While listeners tend to hear references to individual artists in this mix – Prince, NIN, etc. – focusing only on the parts obscures a perhaps more significant reference at the level of the whole; Rhythm Nation is a mainstream commercial pop album that synthesizes the same set of references attributed to Mayhem. Scoring Billboard #1s in 1989, 1990, and 1991, Rhythm Nation took these then-new, underground sounds and transmitted them into the mainstream, much like Mayhem does but nearly 40 years earlier. Hearing Mayhem primarily as a NIN-influenced album overinflates Reznor’s stylistic innovations while obscuring the contributions of Jackson, Jam, and Lewis to this sound. Even if Gaga was listening to “Closer” when writing “Killah,” the fact that she did so and effectively wrote an update of “Escapade” just hammers this point home.

Gaga has described Mayhem as an attempt to return to and further define the signature sound of her early career. It makes sense for her to turn to these references both because they are sonically accurate and because in 2025 one of her previous touchpoints–Marilyn Manson–is effectively cancelled for domestic and sexual abuse. She and her team probably saw the need to shift the narrative a bit. In some respects, Mayhem also uses those references to metabolize about the last 10 years of what was trendy at Berghain (the whole industrial techno trend of like 2014-2021ish, think Phase Fatale etc.) into terms pop audiences get. 

Another reason to go back to 80s and 90s modern rock in 2025 is because that’s what all the girls are doing these days: Olivia Rodrigo did it, Chappel Roan did it, even Charli did it, though her focus was a little more on the aughts. Following Dan DiPiero’s insight that 2024’s pop girlies are adopting the queer femme strategy of performing alternative femininities against the dominant white cishetero bourgeois norm, you can see all these artists as looking back to the pre-Britney, pre-”purity ring” era for sounds to inspire/brand femininities beyond either the blonde virgins of the aughts or the empowered girlbosses of the mid-to-late 2010s. From Poly Styrene to Tina Weymouth to Laurie Anderson to Diana Iyall to Patricia Morrison, Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson, Sara Lee, Pat Place, Kate Bush, Gillian Gilbert, Liz Phair, D’Arcy, Kim Gordon, Kim & Kelley Deal, Santigold, Peaches, M.I.A. – modern rock history has plenty of models of alternative femininities. Rodrigo looks to The Breeders for a subversively suburban sarcasm, Charli echoes electroclash and party rap girls of the indie sleaze era, etc. With Mayhem, Mother Monster digs deeeeep in the crates both to prove the supremacy of her musical knowledge and chops and to remind us that she’s the OG avant-pop weirdo in the room. 

Take for example “Zombieboy,” an album track that some have likened to Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” era. From its wacky zombie-boyfriend premise to its funky disco feel and OMG THE MIXING, this track screams of August Darnell and Was (Not Was). Both artists were prominent players in the late 1970s “mutant disco” scene epitomized by the label ZE Records. Described in THE FACE in 1982 as “some middle ground between immensely accessible disco-pop and the avant-garde, without ever falling down the middle of the road” ZE Records combined the sounds of disco with avant-garde weirdness and sly social commentary…which sounds not too far off a description of Gaga’s oeuvre. Pointing us back to this extremely niche and weird part of modern rock’s past, Mayhem situates Gaga’s signature sound in the long history of avant-indie-dance. Charli may be about as old as Gaga and messy and transgressive in her own way, but in associating herself with 70s women like ZE Records’ Cristina Monet or Siouxie Sioux (“Abracadabra” interpolates a melody from “Spellbound”), Gaga tells this new generation of women pop stars who she is in their language: she’s Mother Monster, avant-garde, but a bit more mature and possessing more expertise than her younger colleagues.

Part of why I want to emphasize Janet Jackson’s precedence/influence on Mayhem is because the 2024/2025 pop girlie scene includes no Black women. Charli and Rodrigo are white-passing mixed-raced women, but Carter, Roan, and Gaga are all white (as far as anyone knows). Beyonce is still ~around~, but she’s not driving The Discourse in the way these other, younger stars are. I am reminded of Jared Sexton’s claim that multiracial liberalism remakes the classic white/non-white racial binary (think one-drop rule) into a non-Black/Black one, where the abjection of Black people and Blackness undergirds a mainstream that is otherwise racially diverse. That seems to be a good rubric for what’s going on, racially, with pop divas in 2025. Emphasizing the commonalities between Janet Jackson’s work and Gaga’s Mayhem is one way to bring Black artists and musical traditions back into this musical conversation that they have certainly impacted.