Dear Gossips,   

Lady Gaga announced yesterday that she too will be touring this year. This probably isn’t a surprise, considering the success of the new album, Mayhem. Mayhem is selling well and streaming well. Several of the songs are big on social media. The album has received near universal acclaim from both critics and fans. It’s her most well-received album in years. 

 

Not that this matters, but it’s my personal favourite Gaga album of all time. So of course she’s taking it on the road. 

 

Gaga will play several shows in Singapore in May. The Mayhem Ball tour then kicks off in Vegas in July and concludes in November in Paris. It was always going to be the Hunger Games getting tickets for this but what will make this tour even more intense is that even though Gaga could sell out stadiums, she’ll be playing in arenas. 

 

Gaga said she decided to make this an arena tour “to give me the opportunity to control the details of the show in a way you simply can’t in stadiums”. The Chromatica Ball in 2022 was a stadium tour. Stadium tours ensure the most amount of people can see the artist. And generate the most amount of money. But the scale can for sure have an impact on the experience. Gaga seems to be going for intimacy here, or at least a little more intimate, and I get this for her since she would be familiar with smaller shows from her residencies in Las Vegas. 

 

I saw Gaga years ago during The Monster Ball tour at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver which seats, maybe, 3000 people? It’s a small venue and it could probably never happen again for an artist of her status – and all of us who were there, I think, knew it in the moment. That Gaga was destined for the stadiums. To have had that opportunity, then, watching an artist on the ascent, knowing for certain that the ascent would be steep, as she was just coming into her fame – I look back on it as a privilege, especially considering that my job is to study celebrity. 

In the years that have passed, Gaga has been candid about her pain, both emotional and physical. Rising to this level of fame was a struggle at times. And she was also dealing with her body breaking down, figuring out how to manage the fibromyalgia. 

 

With Mayhem though, it’s obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention – this is a pain-free Gaga, finally. You can tell in the way she’s moving, how she’s lit up from within. Gaga is performing with so much joy, so much inspiration, so much enthusiasm…and an arena setting feels exactly right for her to be able to protect all of that positivity. 

Yours in gossip, 

Lainey