The Singles Jukebox

Controversy!

[Video][Website]
[6.42]

Iain Mew: I love the single-mindedness of “Perfect Illusion,” the way that it keeps hinting at bursting into something flashier and more detached but never does, all kinds of other Gaga modes flickering but immediately vanishing. Even the key change pretty much gets subsumed within its forward momentum, as the pain there from the start just grows and throbs and grows and throbs some more, too crushing to allow anything else in.
[8]

Katie Gill: I don’t know how you can call this a “comeback single” as Lady Gaga has still made music and still been a pop culture fixture via American Horror Story since ARTPOP‘s release. But I love this song so much that I’m not gonna split hairs. Granted, the heavy focus on the chorus feels like it’s 3/4 of a song stretched out to make a full song. But that last minute kicks in hard with that glorious key change and Gaga’s vocals soaring over a backing that’s incredibly disco–which is 100% a compliment. This is a giant, loud, incredible fuck-off song, perfect for angsting and over-emoting and crying to your Livejournal. Gaga succeeds on all fronts.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Disco strings and rock dynamics — she’s still Born This Way, Queen, Stevie Nicks, and other examples of fodderstompf in her system. It’ll sound good on the radio too. Maybe she’ll finish the song by the time it happens.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Ostensibly a new song, but surely a demo from The Fame Monster animated by the force of a key change, “Perfect Illusion” is slight and too eager to please, but please it certainly does. The key change is nothing special, and people going on about it as Amazing as if a) Max Martin doesn’t exist, b) the Eurovision Song Contest doesn’t exist, or c) huge swathes of popular music history never occurred, is wearying, but it’s a  pretty fun key change anyway. “It wasn’t love!!!!” is a big hook, even if it’s cobbled together from the best bits of “Bad Romance” and “Dance in the Dark.” The rest of the chorus can’t sustain that earworm-y perfection like “Bad Romance” or “Telephone” or “The Edge of Glory” did. Even getting half-way to that level of awesome, though, is a welcome return to lead-single form for Gaga after two fairly limp ones.
[7]

William John: My first impression was that she sounds hungry. Gaga reached the summit in early 2010 and then, Clarence Clemons and heavy metal lovers aside, spent years skiing sideways, unavailingly chasing Koons. The emphasis on grander visuals became unforgiving on radio and the numbers began to dwindle. But Gaga has hustle – we’ve known that since “Just Dance” – and with a jazz album, Golden Globe and a buzzworthy performance of “Edelweiss” now in the vault, she’s now romanticised as less a broken pretender and more a Daenerys ready to pounce. The verses, slurred and hiccuping, are just hurdles standing in the way of an inevitable crevasse of a chorus, which is repeated, howled, modulated, and roared until it becomes a mantra. Add billowing disco strings for drama, chicken scratches for nostalgia, turn everything up to 11, and the transformation into “woman on a mission” is complete.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: Born This Way might, improbably, be the decade’s most underrated pop album, and perhaps the emotionally wrecked Ladytron-ness of it only appealed to me; but who is this clunky chimera of “Judas” and “Highway Unicorn” supposed to appeal to? Gaga’s palette — her outsize, ferocious alto, her counterpoint bridge, her dive-bar Bon Jovi stylings, her key change — is refreshing but thoroughly unlike what goes at radio in 2016. Yet this is the work of the hottest rising pop producers of today, who are somehow Tame Impala and Blood Diamonds (now going by BloodPop, some primo naming cynicism). It’s a nice setup: cred for the pop stars, pay for the indie stars. But you’d think this wider net would catch a decent drummer; the percussion track is just so plodding, and ruins everything.
[5]

Thomas Inskeep: I don’t hear collaborators Mark Ronson, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, or Josh Homme here — what I hear is Gaga, all Gaga, and that’s to her credit. I love her big vocal, reminiscent of Pat Benatar (and frankly, I wish this went a bit more for the rock). I love that this goes through chord changes big-bam-boom. I love that it’s done in under three minutes. I love the heavy four-on-the-floor beat. I love the “I Love Survive”-esque lyrics. And I’m growing to love the song, because it’s not an immediate grabber, it’s definitely a grower. (And it’s catchy as fuck.) Ask me what I think of this in two months; I bet I’ll like it even more. 
[8]

Crystal Leww: Lady Gaga has to be secretly a little salty that so much of what she did in the late ’00s is still around, but she has gotten other people accolades and/or massively rich (see: Beyonce taking Gaga’s revival of the music video to its most perfect form; EDM-pop still hanging on, but with the bent towards EDM rather than pop). As such, she’s seemingly leaned more into the art rather than the pop, pushing boundaries at an attempt to stumble into something that was so refreshing and captivating as The Fame singles were. ARTPOP was a Jeff Koons nightmare, but “Perfect Illusion” sounds like a turn to the Broadway stage right in time to capitalize on Hamilton hysteria. I hate Broadway musicals, and this sounds like the last part of the musical where the young character has finally ~discovered themselves~ and bursts into song and frantic dance where they fling themselves across the stage like a maniac. In other words, “Perfect Illusion” sounds like a Broadway imitation of late 80s teen film soundtracks, and it feels goofy rather than fun. While I understand that acting like a theater kid has always been part of Lady Gaga’s thing, it was way more appealing when it was balanced by the kind of production that was just as loud (see: synths). This still feels like too much and not enough.
[2]

Scott Mildenhall: So have you heard about that internet, eh? Pretty crazy stuff. Do you want to hear some incisive meditations on it? Yeah? Yeah? Oh. Fair enough to Lady Gaga: people do put on a show and hold themselves up to unrealistic standards — they have for time immemorial — but if the illusion goes as far as you being in someone else’s physical presence and still being bedazzled by their online presence then you’re probably in the minority. If pictures on a screen really are the crux of something you’ve mistaken for love, you’re probably being catfished. It’s a good job that this is all so easy to ignore. The actual sound of “Perfect Illusion” is quite unlike what anyone else is doing at the moment, shimmering like shards of a mirror hit by a hammer; gloriously, insistently unsubtle. It’s not all the way as exciting as former glories, but there’s a familiar spark.
[7]

Will Adams: I respect Lady Gaga for not really caring about sticking in the pop lane these past few years, but “Perfect Illusion” isn’t the absence of trends, it’s the absence of polish. The first few seconds are guitar-blazing greatness, and then the rest sounds like a rushed demo. The drums clump together like dough, and the key change only results in a lot of strain on Gaga’s end. Worst of all is the lazy approach to transitions (most notably at :30), which sounds like someone accidentally swiped the fader to create a quick dynamic fix. Like most of Gaga’s work, “Perfect Illusion” is packed with ideas. It’s an anomaly, though, that a large number of them are barely realized.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: The past tense in the chorus glares like headlights hitting your eyes at night: remember Gaga? Remember how she merged romance and image and performance in often increasingly fraying ways? Remember how her club pound became less about celebration and more palpably about salvation, from “Just Dance” to “Edge of Glory” and beyond? ArtPop was three years ago, but its uneven quality and rapid retreat from public consciousness makes the length of Gaga’s absence seem even greater. “Perfect Illusion” is dour and elegiac, which seems appropriate.
[6]

Cassy Gress: I can never tell with Lady Gaga whether I’m wincing because she’s done something I find truly embarrassing, or whether I’m wincing because she’s made herself more vulnerable and emotionally exposed than I could ever let myself be. Here, Gaga’s wailing into a sound-stage thunderstorm, wind and rain whipping at her face, and as I spent my first listen wondering why she chose to pronounce them “laaaahv” and “illyusion”, and if there was any reason other than Gaga being dramatic, I was suddenly surprised and disappointed at the rather abrupt ending. On second and third listens, I couldn’t even hear any vowel weirdness. Turns out that, as is usually the case, it’s more rewarding to feel emotions than to sit back and sneer at them.
[8]