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The other day I opened Instagram and found myself aloft on a current of nostalgia. A photograph, taken at the Super Bowl, showed Doechii, the rapper and pop mastermind who's setting standards for innovation right now, arm in arm with a serene Lady Gaga. With Doechii primed for a karate kick in a modified Miu Miu tracksuit and Gaga working a cult-leader look in head-to-toe Benedictine black, the pair looked ready for a DC comics moment that would wipe away the memories of the older star's less-than-blockbuster turn as Harley Quinn. Here were the superheroes we need: Two fearless women insisting that pop not capitulate to any conservative wave, but remain daring, confrontational and inspirationally strange.
My nostalgia was generated by a tweet Doechii posted moments later: "The little monster in me is twirlinggg," she wrote. The artist born Jaylah Ji'mya Hickmon was 12 when Gaga hit an apex with Born This Way, the career-high 2011 album that solidified the star's vision of anthemic music updating rock's liberatory gestures for a generation embracing queer inclusivity and new expressions of intersectional feminism. (Gaga was then 25, a year younger than Doechii is now.)
Born This Way, with its compelling calls for pride in individuality and support of LGBTQIA+ rights, played a key role in my own daughter's first steps toward embracing her own queer, gender-fluid identity. Like Doechii, she was a Little Monster, looking to her spiritual Mother Monster for guidance. Countless living-room dances to the album's title track ("Don't be a drag, just be a queen!"), with kids from all over our neighborhood learning fierceness by miming her videos, filled those days of self-discovery. Mine will soon graduate from college, but she remains a little monster in her heart.
Lately my daughter and I have been talking about Gaga again. The many avenues the singer-multihyphenate has pursued since putting Mother Monster on the back burner have held varying degrees of interest for us — the kid loves Artpop, I eventually fell for her revamp of A Star Is Born, both of us feel that perhaps she should have left Harley Quinn and Joker alone.
But when the singles from her album Mayhem (out next Friday) started dropping, we both got excited. From the thumping beat and octave jumps of "Disease" to the Siouxsie and the Banshees-sampling incantations of "Abracadabra," this music signaled a return to Gaga's old obsessions: dark magic, a heroic struggle with inner conflicts, the necessary risks of being vulnerable. And the videos — the first a slasher-movie style battle among many different Gagas, and the second a huge production number that reads like a demonic take on Alice moving across the chessboard in Through the Looking-Glass — fulfill Gaga's promise that Mayhem, which she's described as an album about "following your chaos," reignited the intensity she dared in her early years.
In those days I heard Gaga's music as political because I could see its effects right in front of me. The tiny monsters who came over to dance with mine were growing up in a Southern university town where public school field trips took them to theme parks with Bible dioramas and children who were different had to stick together to avoid ostracism. Gaga embraced kids like mine as her freaks, a term she revived while pointing towards its uses in the counterculture and in Black and queer subcultures like George Clinton's funk milieu and drag ballrooms. Gaga's freaks, like those earlier versions, are those who don't fit norms often by necessity but also flaunt what others might label weird, perverse, extravagant, even tragic.
So-called normal society requires freaks, unwitting or self-designated antagonists, and norms can only be challenged when such demonized folk come into consciousness and fight back. Culture contributes to that process. My comparing Gaga to Dylan in his folk-revival days (yes, I did) seemed ridiculous to some in 2011, but I had an argument: Born This Way's songs addressing longtime roadblocks to equity for women and queer folk, like organized religion, sexual puritanism and cis-het feminine ideals, and did so in the 21st-century language of club beats and meme-able imagery.
Taking a multi-media approach to the same spirit of outrage and resistance that rock music had offered the counterculture and through which club hits had nourished activists from the 1970s onward, Gaga's anthemic turn did influence the public conversation all the way to the voting booth. The album's title track did respond to particular events, debuting less than two months after the repressive U.S. military policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," a was repealed; Gaga had spoken out for that cause. (Some queer critics, like my friend Alfred Soto, found this most blatant of her liberation songs unsatisfyingly vacuous.) More often, though, she flourished by crafting what might be called adaptable political anthems. Such songs are like Swiss Army knives, sharp and adaptable to many different uses. They may have been generally inspired by shifts in the zeitgeist or even have nothing to do with social change. Yet when taken up by a particular constituency, they do necessary work.
Among Gaga's fans, her rococo arrangements, aggressive singing that often seemingly did away with language altogether, and lyrics about allying with dark aspects of herself and others to do battle or find peace made songs like "Bad Romance" and "Judas" feel redemptive. Her weird videos, pushing away the usual sexualized pop star moves for more perverse ones, enhanced their impact. Here was an expression of the abnormal that sought no redemption except on its own terms; it would not be assimilated. Her performances on tour and at televised events did the same, mounting pastiches of fantasy, religious ritual and horror in which she explored many definitions of the monstrous, from disability to ugliness, from ravishing hunger to pleasure at eros's edge.
Like the work of many queer and non-white artists before her, Gaga's deliberately alienating performances and sometimes jarring music expressed what queer theorists have called "defiant excess," a way of being out that exposes the constrictions of social norms, that shows how artificial and boring in actually may be. When she insisted that she and her fans could occupy the same central space that rock's white male heroes had long claimed — for example, when she featured Bruce Springsteen's main sideman, sax man Clarence Clemons, on "Edge of Glory" — she made it clear that there would be no compromise: Queer people would lead the way.
It's sobering to think about where LGBTQIA+ rights were in the early 2011, before gay marriage was legal and when the campaign to allow members of the military to serve while out was reaching its pitch. While insisting on the right for all to partake in common social institutions like marriage, Gaga's performances also demanded that her freaks be allowed to remain who they are. They would partake in the mainstream only if they could change it, too.
Gaga didn't greet this moment in history, or in pop, alone. As she developed her vision of cultural disruptions, she looked to obvious predecessors like Bowie and Prince (both lodestars for Mayhem, she's said) and Madonna; it sometimes seemed that she was living out the life of Dita, Madge's happily perverse Erotica-era alter ego. (Gaga could be problematic in ways similar to Madonna too, judged by some to be more magpie than ally and occasionally putting her foot in the discourse.) And she had peers who embraced generative freakiness in different ways. Janelle Monaé shared Gaga's interest in dystopian sci fi, taking it in an Afro-Futurist direction. Rihanna reached peak creativity while manifesting her own nightmare through "ghetto goth" style and the sonic experiments of Anti. The Weeknd, masked and shadowy, made hedonism his hall of mirrors, though it can't be said he did so in service of a progressive or even anti-sexist world view. Charli XCX took early cues from Gaga as she explored the disoriented mind states induced by living mostly at night.
The era that saw these artists rise coincided with digital natives fully coming to dominate the culture. Gaga's Little Monsters learned to socialize through online gaming and to overcome awkwardness, however provisionally, by creating avatars that were often very different from their real-life selves. Fantasy is their lingua franca. Learning about desire and making connections beyond the constrictions their parents and home environments would have formerly imposed, they were often demonized for being the subjects of society's cyberspace experiment.
Normcore ideal Taylor Swift may have eventually emerged as pop's social media queen, but it was Gaga's high period that showed kids — and adults — how a self could thrive or perish through multiple manifestations within imagined worlds, and how that precious ability to reinvent oneself — to become the self you need to be — could be quashed by the constrictions of a reactive society. Consider how fragile the rights of queer people are proving in 2025, as the very gains that Gaga was able to celebrate with her monsters are threatened anew legislatively and in many other ways. The violence of Gaga's fantasy worlds always nods beyond those borders, to the real oppression that people who are different must face in so-called free society.
Gaga would have been a major pop figure in anyone's history books if she'd never made an album after Born This Way. Instead, she became more interested in conventional forms of success. In this, she was again in league with her peers. In retrospect, the movements of once edgy pop music stars into other mainstreams — especially Hollywood and the lucrative beauty industry — now read as aspects of a short-lived cultural bubble that extended from Obama's second term until, arguably, this year. Even the rightward turn indicated by Trump's first presidency didn't stem the cultural tide of greater opportunity for historically stigmatized and marginalized people.
In this environment, Gaga relaxed. Like Monaé, she became an award-winning and sought-after actor, winning an Oscar nomination for her A Star Is Born role. Like Rihanna, she diversified her portfolio and became a successful cosmetics executive. She mounted a massive stadium tour for her hyperpop-influenced 2020 album Chromatica, but has also found success as an adult contemporary artist by leaning into her love of jazz standards and soft rock. Right now this normie Gaga is thriving, too — her duet with Bruno Mars, "Die With a Smile," is a Lionel Richie-style easy flowing ballad and the most successful single of 2025.
Meanwhile, the Little Monsters who grew up on "Bad Romance" have careers of their own. They've taken Gaga's mission to its next logical step. Out and proud success stories like Doechii, Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish and Troye Sivan have all tapped into not only Gaga's theatrical flair but her deployment of strangeness, pushing boundaries in presentation and performance in service of the true selves they can show best in costume. There is a difference, though, between this Little Monsters graduating class and Mother herself. Coming of age in that (I pray not) vanishingly brief window when the rights of those marked as outsiders were encoded and enforced, Gen Z artists tend to be as or more demanding than their elders, but less expressive of the challenges and possibilities of living outside the norm. They want norms to change for them — and they deserve that.
But especially in moments of social conflict like the one America is currently facing, we also need the kind of friction Gaga's first years as an icon offered. As divides are more deeply encoded and hierarchies reinforced, outsiders will need to gird themselves. They will need to be in touch with their rage and understand the ways in which they have been reviled. This calls for an ongoing confrontation with stigma and with the lingering effects of trauma; we need heroic stories that raise darkness in order to show how it might, at least symbolically, be vanquished. There is value in putting struggle at the heart of your art, as Gaga has often done.
Mother Monster may not return in exactly the form my daughter and I anticipate. "Die With a Smile" is the final track on Mayhem, and given her past chart success with the style, her career will likely feature a few more ballads made for the piano bar. But I'm hopeful that Gaga is again reading the moment and sensing the need for the grand oppositional gestures that are her forté. If Mayhem is her "throwing a party for all your demons" — an inner cleansing — it may offer a crucial outlet for expression at a time when too many people are themselves being demonized. Bring it on, Mother Monster. Fight your fights.
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