12 October 2018
Presenting an unexpectedly different face, figuratively speaking, Bradley Cooper here becomes the first Hollywood A-lister to have a one-off chart-topping foray into music in quite a while – since Kate Winslet with ‘What If’ at Christmas 2001, in fact, if we discount the sustained pop career of J-Lo and 2011’s ‘On The Floor’. By contrast, his co-star in the 2018 remake of A Star Is Born seems to be trying the sort of big in-at-the-top move in the opposite direction we saw with Whitney in 1992 with The Bodyguard and ‘I Will Always Love You’.
‘Shallow’ itself was also a big and unfamiliar move for Lady Gaga: as Springsteen-influenced guitar rock, yes, but also as a much-needed comeback out of the Smash Hits pop-star “dumper”. We hadn’t seen Gaga at number one in the singles charts here for seven years, since ‘Born This Way’ in 2011. Her 2014 duets album with Tony Bennett seemed like a quaint curio. None of the tracks from her 2016 album Joanne, a sort of precursor to ‘Shallow’, got into the Irish top twenty. Since the Gaga brand, in its meat-dress-wearing pomp at the start of the ’10s, had by mid-decade run itself into a tired and pastiche-prone rut of box-cut electro-pop and Berlin-techno aesthetic, her acting-rockin’ reinvention was probably a necessity and certainly smart thinking.
I haven’t seen A Star Is Born so I can’t comment on Gaga’s performance or what dramatic purpose ‘Shallow’ serves. Outside the movie, ‘Shallow’ is country-adjacent soft-rock power-balladry-slash-marketing-collateral that we mightn’t have noticed or put to the top of our charts without its star performers or movie tie-in. Cooper does his bit competently, then steps aside for Gaga to flex her powerful voice and dramatic delivery. On the music side of this project, ‘Shallow’ is functional as a record but effective as a release: Gaga returns to the top of the charts, and then in the ’20s reboots her electro-pop sound with her best singles since ‘Just Dance’, including her next number one. And I hear she’s worth seeing in House Of Gucci too.
