Celebrating Lady Gaga’s influence and the strange worlds she comes up with
( @ladygaga / Instagram )
During the height of quarantine last year, Lady Gaga created an unearthly, pop-infused world for all of us to sink into: Chomatica (also known as her sixth studio album). Of course, leave it to Miss Gaga to give us looks and lyrics to uplift us in the time when some of the worst parts of the pandemic hit the United States.
Rain in Me was hailed as the summer’s anthem and instantly became a popular TikTok audio. But we also can’t forget about the classics, Stupid Love and of course Chromatica I, Chromatica II and Chromatica III.
Clearly, Gaga felt some sort of way about “Chromatica” for her to name three of her album’s songs after it. But… WTF is a chromatica anyway?
Chromatic in itself is both a series of musical pitches and a series of colors — put those together and you can imagine creative explosion.
In an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Gaga said, “The symbol for Chromatica has a sine wave in it, which is the mathematical symbol for sound and it's from what all sound is made from, and for me, sound is what healed me in my life, period. And it healed me again making this record, and that is really what Chromatica is all about."
She went on to say that Chromatica is about healing, and reframing your mind so all the bad stuff doesn’t take center stage (which I know we all needed last summer).
“I can reframe my life experiences and reframe also the way that the world frames life experiences to a way that I love and believe in, and that is Chromatica. I live on Chromatica, that is where I live. I went into my frame — I found Earth, I deleted it. Earth is canceled. I live on Chromatica,” Gaga said.
Lady Gaga has had a devoted cult-like following since she hit the mainstream in the early 2000’s with her instant classics like Telephone, Bad Romance and honestly just about every track she released at the time. Her iconic looks — including everything from the Kermit Coat , The Meat Dress, the faberge egg and the Alexander McQueen Armadillo shoes — made us all turn heads and inspired us to be more daring with our fashion in our daily lives. (Sans the meat, hopefully.)
With Lady Gaga’s incredible influence in mind, it only makes sense that pandemonium occurred when Oreo released a Chromatica Oreo collab this past January. Forget about a Travis Scott Big Mac, the girls want hot pink and green Oreos with a stomach-curdling amount of food dye in them!
Chomatica Oreos were selling out at 7-Eleven’s and corner stores all over the country. The Chromatica- embossed creme cookies, were quickly being seen all over TikTok and Twitter, while remaining in scarce supply. In larger cities, Gaga fans were banging down the doors to get their hands on a pack. As the next few weeks passed, we saw more and more retailers re-upping their supply of Chromatica Oreos and everyone who wanted one, was able to get their hands on one and we all realized that they don’t taste all that great anyways. I mean, it’s a vanilla Oreo drenched in food dye, what did we expect?!
To make it even more unsettling, some of y'all weirdos used Oreos to create some ... questionable food recipes. The fluorescent Oreos have been beaten down to crumbs to use as the crust for fried shrimp, fried shrimp, cheesecake and even deviled eggs. Read that sentence again and scream into the void with me, please.
Regardless of some of the strange activities fans have gotten into since landing on Chromatica (*cough deviled eggs *cough), Chromatica is definitely the perfect album to kick off this new 2020’s era. “Rain on Me” captured the perfect stage of grief yet hopeful strength that we all felt this past summer while the hype over the Chromatica Oreo release mirrored the Toilet Paper Crisis of 2020, but certainly in a more lighthearted way and in perfect time for the inauguration and at least symbolic new era for our country as a whole.
Ingrid O’Connor is an Online Writer at Rowdy Magazine. She loves poodles, Red Bull and late night talks with friends. Her big three are Pisces, Taurus & Libra and has paid for multiple professional astrological chart readings despite claiming she doesn’t believe in astrology.