Singer Lady Gaga revealed in a recent interview with Beats 1’s Zane Lowe that the song “Angel Down,” which appears on her new album, Joanne, is about the highly publicized 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin.
“There an epidemic of young African Americans being murdered in this country. I was overwhelmed by the fact that people just stood around and didn’t do anything about it, and that the justice system continues to, over and over again, not seek justice for these families,” the six-time Grammy Award winning singer said.
“I have my ear to the ground of my fans, young African American women and boys who are terrified. … They tell me they drive in their cars, and when they hear a siren there’s a paranoia that runs through their body, that they freeze up that they can’t think.”
“This is a tremendous anxiety,” she then said, continuing, “This is something I care about. This is something that has to stop, something we all need to heal from.”
Gaga confessed that “it feels impossible” for her to be part of a conversation about whether or not there’s racial bias in America’s justice system, but admitted that the subject is too important to ignore.
“I can only hope my voice and the lyrics will reach people. It’s also a complicated thing. I’m not an African American woman, so how do I speak about those things? It feels impossible; how can I not say something,” she said, adding:
How could I possibly make an album about twerking my ass in the club? In my mind, I can’t reckon it. It feels empty. It feels irrelevant. When I go into the studio and I write, at this moment in my career, I can’t possibly think of, “Oh, what would be just fun.” … We all [can’t escape the truth], no matter how much we want to just have fun. The more we mask the shame of this anxiety, the harder it’s going to be to heal.
Gaga’s latest offering was released on iTunes and Amazon late Thursday, and the MP3 version of the album is being sold on Amazon for just $3.99.
“The deep discount is going to cause a furor since most MP3 albums are priced between $8.99 and $11.99,” wrote Showbiz 411’s Roger Friedman. “Deep discounting in the past led to an industry wide decision that albums had to be priced at a minimum of $3.49 to be eligible for the charts.”
“But pricing Joanne so low is a signal that neither Amazon nor Interscope has much confidence in the record,” Friedman said.
Watch Lady Gaga’s entire interview below:
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @JeromeEHudson.
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