In 1965, Maxwell Smart, played by Don Adams, worked for the secret government agency CONTROL and battled the evil organization KAOS, foiling their schemes to take over the world. The juxtaposition of the two opposite states in the satirical spy series Get Smart probably had no bearing on Mutemath’s songs on their debut album, “Chaos” and “Control.” It’s more likely that these songs were born out of Christian themes from lead singer Paul Meany’s time in Earthsuit with Adam LaClave, the cowriter of these two songs. The New Orleans-based Alternative Rock band Mutemath released their debut album on September 26, 2006, after a lengthy legal battle with Warner Brothers Records, nearly a month after one of the most devastating hurricanes hit Mutemath’s hometown. With the chaos between the band and their label and the chaos at home, the album’s fourth track seems not only definite of 2006 but also a kind of harbinger for the economic collapse to come following the collapse of the housing market starting in 2007.
COMPLICATIONS: MY CLAIM TO FAME. Last year, “Recession Pop” trended on TikTok. The term refers to the mostly escapist pop music of the late ‘00s and early ’10s popular after the Great Recession impacted the world. The instillation of corporate bailouts left small business owners, including bands, with little money to pursue their art, but while rock and Alternative were scaling back, pop was full-blast in what seemed like an endless party. A 2009 interview with Lady Gaga in the Irish Independent called the new movement “Recession Pop,” though the term may have been used before the article’s publication. Most of this music wasn’t philosophy. Gaga’s 2009 Fame Monster single featuring Beyoncé “Telephone” summed up the movement in the song’s chorus: “Stop calling / I don’t wanna think anymore / I left my heart and my head on the dance floor.” When the world pulled out of the recession, Gaga reemerged as a thinker and a multi-faceted musician. But as history repeats itself and trends come back, Lady Gaga is back with a new brand of Recession Pop on Mayhem, an album that blends the dark aesthetics of The Fame Monster and Born This Way, but with something even more unhinged.
I KNOW YOU STAY TRUE WHEN MY WORLD IS FALSE. Musical trends in the streaming era seem to be a bit of everything, everywhere, and all at once. In 2011, when Lady Gaga released “Heavy Metal Lover” on Born This Way, heavy metal felt so displaced from the rock music that had dominated even the pop charts as late as 2008. In 2025, Mayhem isn’t any more of a rock album, but the tracks sit more comfortably with my rock albums. Gaga is a lover of music as well as a master of creating a concept. The concept this time around is chaos and mayhem, something that music is moving toward with the growing uncertainty in the economy and global politics. The fact is that we all don’t want to think anymore—overthinking might bring us to a very dark place. We need a reprieve. That’s what I didn’t understand in college when I encountered Lady Gaga’s music for the first time.
EVERYTHING AROUND’S BREAKING DOWN TO CHAOS. Talking about Mutemath and Lady Gaga in the same post seems like a stretch. The former came out of evangelical charismatic Christianity and a favorite band among youth group kids, the latter a New York Italian-Catholic-born sex-positive pop star whom evangelicals have called a harlot, but it turns out that the band and the singer’s timeline and penchant for chaos aren’t the only common threads. On The Black Sheep Podcast, MUTEMATH drummer Darren King frankly attributed his frenetic drumming style to sexual frustration, claiming that he hadn’t ejaculated—except nocturnal emissions—before the age of 25 due to his internalizing of sexual shame in strict evangelical culture. While this could have been a TMI moment in the interview, I started to think about the contrast between Christian chastity and the so-called worldly permissiveness. The third track on Lady Gaga’s Mahem, “Garden of Eden” is far from a literal Genesis account of the fall of mankind. There’s a parallelism between the Biblical account, paradise, temptation, and suggestions of a fall from grace. But what the song offers is an escape from whatever is outside of the walls of the club.
I ALWAYS SEE YOU WHEN MY SIGHT IS LOST. When I was a young evangelical, I believed in drinking in moderation and that drunkenness caused sin, never getting lost in the pleasures of drinking, only taking the edge off the anxiety. But going to a strict Christian college and sticking with mostly philosophically liberal but conservative-in-practice Adventists, I didn’t drink alcohol until later, especially because it seemed I was always driving someone somewhere. In my late 20s, I discovered that drinking could help me get out of my head sometimes. There were times when I didn’t want to think anymore. Whether it’s drinking, sex, or creative expression, Christianity often breeds repression faith leaders try to corral youth into seemingly impossible ideas written over 2000 years ago. Christians are taught that there’s no room for error. Letting off steam can be a fall from grace. Taking a tour of Lady Gaga’s “Garden of Eden” for a weekend leads to a lifetime of regret. The problem is that there is a disturbing number of “wait until marriage” Evangelicals who end up with dissatisfied partners and divorce. Is there a healthy balance? Or is the chaos that Paul Meany sings about inevitable?
Read the lyrics of “Chaos” on Genius.
Read the lyrics of “Garden of Eden” on Genius.
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