Rumors the Jukebox is spending $25 million to promote this entry are absolutely unfounded…
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[5.64]
Katherine St Asaph: Lady Gaga has basically written one song, but she’s at least assigned her singles different dresses, different gratuitous languages, different syllables of the IPA. But the prechorus of “G.U.Y.” is a rip too far: G-U-Y this beat is sweet, I wanna take a ride on your please retweet. Everything is reminiscent of everything it shouldn’t be. The NES intro primes me to hear “I WANNA BE THE GUY.” The hokey spoken-word intro (excised, mercifully, from the radio edit) could be an unfortunate intro to an Enigma record even if the half-assed mess&m conceit didn’t already evoke that — like, if you are Lady Gaga and yet Natalia Kills is doing lovesexcontrolvanity more subtly than you, you’ve lost the script. That script, as Born This Way nearly was, is “Rescue Me”-guise Madonna collaborating with Witching Hour-era Ladytron, and “G.U.Y.” retains enough of it, inadvertently or not, to be a fine single. Unfortunately, it’s also a fine example of the problem with ARTPOP: Lady Gaga doesn’t have enough creative control to keep Zedd out, yet does have enough to write “Mars’s warring spirit rams into the atmosphere.” “Venus” leading directly into that = Gaga has lost contact with Earth.
[6]
Edward Okulicz: “G.U.Y.” is the least ambitious song on ARTPOP that’s not “Applause,” and even the 11-minute video can’t change that. Much of the song, especially the pre-chorus, brings to mind “LoveGame” (not a good thing) but Zedd’s production gives it a loud, dense wallop that makes it less a trifle of sex gags and more an impressively loud wall of hooks. The middle-eight is inhabited by the spirit of Samantha Fox, and the chorus is heavy synth blasts and light melodies that work together like the colloid of fat and sugar in a particularly delicious ice cream.
[8]
Brad Shoup: It’s fitting that Gaga becomes a Nabokovian figure right as she readies her most wordplayful single. Everything’s here in moderation: Gaga as field commander, as A-student, as the mournful examiner of human foibles. (The middle eight brings back Gaga-as-arena-rocker.) There’s something ridiculously soothing about this track. Could be the Röyksoppy keyboard line, or the sadness in her treatment of the refrain. It’s hard for me to turn this off.
[9]
Scott Mildenhall: The line’s already been drawn on ARTPOP, and this gives you a Good Understanding… Y. For all the power of the gigantic-Stylophone electro, there’s a real lack of melodic interest. While “love me, love me, please retweet” is a brilliant catchphrase, the paper-thin premise is completely undermined when it’s clarified that the clumsy acronyms are in fact completely normative. Could be worse, but in other words, another “Bad Romance” or four will do nicely.
[6]
Jonathan Bradley: Nothing particularly interesting is going on here as far as gender politics goes: “G.U.Y.” is fun-with-acyronyms more sophisticated than “If You Seek Amy” only because it’s an entendre slightly more than single. That shouldn’t matter per se; there’s nothing unusual about there being less to Gaga’s concepts than meets the eye. But this is disappointing because the spectacle that usually compensates for the thematic flimsiness is all but absent; while Stefani practices for the Spelling Bee, I might catch some Zedds.
[5]
Patrick St. Michel: It seems like a real possibility that Zedd is not a particularly good choice to produce other artists. He works best when his music gets top billing, and he calls for a guest vocalist to up the emotional ante. Yet his track record of making his style fit in with others is pretty shabby, his best moment coming with a Justin Bieber song that had a lot of help from Max Martin. “G.U.Y.” could have been a much better pop song — yeah, the Twitter/69 joke misses completely, but everything else is solid Gaga, from a good chorus to vague sexual politics — but the music pushing it forward seems uncommitted to anything interesting, settling in as a radio-fied version of Zedd’s buzzier cuts that still manages to be buzzy and distracting.
[5]
Anthony Easton: This adds complexity to Gaga’s worn-out formula, at least musically, but the lyrics are the same bloviating obsessiveness. It makes Madonna seem even more pathetic — she was genuinely worried about this kind of mess.
[2]
Crystal Leww: Intent matters, but so does execution. Lady Gaga gets points here for trying to challenge the boundaries of pop music, for trying to break down gender norms, and for trying to redefine what society can demand of female pop stars. Yet, for all her trying, this falls flat on its face. It’s subversive in a way that won’t change any minds at all because it’s so clunky and cloying and completely devoid of charm and cleverness. It’s a shame, too, because there are some nice little moments here from the background vocals that sing “guy” at the same as the main vocal signing “G.U.Y.” to the handclaps that create a common audio motif between this and “Applause” to that twinkly synth coupled with the crunchy synth in the second verse. These all deserve to be on a better song than one where Lady Gaga, in a desperate high school poetry attempt to keep up a theme, calls her object of affection “G.I.R.L.” or a “guy I’m romancing loves.” Making fun of her for trying seems cynical, but was there seriously no one to say “this is maybe funny in a ‘haha we’re laughing at you’ way instead of ‘haha we’re laughing with you’ way”?
[3]
Madeleine Lee: It’s hard to talk about Lady Gaga’s music without feeling like you’re declaring yourself either for or against her entire enterprise, which I suppose is how Gaga the lifestyle brand wants it. So my impulse is to say, “This song is okay, I guess, [5]”, to deny her the satisfaction of being polarizing. (Even so, that would put me in the “against” camp.) But you know what? I think this song is a bit more than okay. It’s replayable, it has a clever lyrical conceit (albeit not necessarily a radical one), and it sent me back to listen to my favourites in her catalogue, and when I finished I still wanted to listen to it again. Even “please retweet” is kind of cute. If that means I must accept everything else, so be it. You earn that 4-minute credit roll, Mama.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Like the album which observers and possibly fans regard as a disappointment, “G.U.Y.” is neither here nor there, a decent conceit encased in a chromium shell of reinforced EDM. The late Frankie Knuckles would have massaged the bit after the first chorus with a couple of mournful synth chords.
[5]
Ramzi Awn: Alien-pop is a tough look to pull off, especially since Janelle did the synths better back when she was doing it. The verses on “G.U.Y.” are unimportant, but the refrain showcases Gaga’s penchant for a hook that burns slow, and she owns it. Too bad the build-up isn’t rising to the occasion lately. Here’s to your next great verse, Gaga!
[6]