The 2020s File Feature
Zombieboy
Zombieboy by Lady Gaga: A Character Study from MayhemLady Gaga Returns to Her ElementThere is a version of Lady Gaga that the mainstream came to know through…
01 The Story
Zombieboy by Lady Gaga: A Character Study from Mayhem
Lady Gaga Returns to Her Element
There is a version of Lady Gaga that the mainstream came to know through ballads and Oscar nominations: the stripped-back, earnest singer whose vulnerability in A Star Is Born and its accompanying music reached audiences who had never connected with her earlier theatrical work. That version of Gaga is real. But so is the one who arrived first, the performance artist raised on New York's Lower East Side who understood spectacle as a form of honesty rather than a deflection from it. Zombieboy, arriving on her 2025 album Mayhem, belongs firmly to that original Gaga, the provocateur with something to say through the mask.
The Character at the Center
Zombieboy is named for Rick Genest, the Canadian model and performance artist known for his extensive skull and skeleton tattoos who had appeared in Gaga's earlier work and whose death in 2018 affected her visibly and publicly. A song carrying that name is therefore a tribute in the register that Gaga does best: through art rather than sentiment, through persona and sound rather than eulogy. The track takes on the character as its subject while celebrating the kind of radical self-presentation that defined Genest's public existence. This is pop music as memorial and manifesto simultaneously.
Eighty-Five on the Hot 100
On the Billboard Hot 100 dated March 22, 2025, Zombieboy debuted and peaked at number 85, spending one week on the chart. The album Mayhem generated significant cultural conversation upon release, and the chart placement for individual deep cuts reflected the streaming patterns of a devoted fanbase engaging comprehensively with a new record. One chart week at number 85 does not capture the song's significance within Gaga's catalog or within the context of the album; it documents a specific commercial moment for a track that carries considerably more artistic weight than the number suggests.
Gaga's Theatrical Tradition and Its Roots
Gaga has been explicit over her career about her debt to artists like David Bowie, who used character, costume, and reinvention as artistic tools rather than marketing strategies. Zombieboy fits squarely within that lineage. The song engages with the history of outsider aesthetics, with body modification as expression, with the idea that the extreme presentation of self is a form of communication that conventional beauty norms cannot accommodate. For Gaga's audience, that message has never been merely fashion; it has been survival discourse.
An Act of Artistic Devotion
Whatever Mayhem's final critical assessment turns out to be, Zombieboy stands as an act of genuine artistic devotion: a pop star using her platform to memorialize someone she admired, in a sonic and visual language that honors how that person lived. The over 6 million YouTube views the track has gathered suggest an audience that has connected with both the tribute and the art. Press play and hear Gaga at her most committed: no compromises, all feeling, the outsiders welcome.
“Zombieboy” — Lady Gaga's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning Behind Zombieboy by Lady Gaga
A Portrait of Radical Selfhood
Zombieboy is a tribute to a specific kind of courage: the courage to live in your own skin on your own terms, regardless of what that costs in social currency. Rick Genest, the Canadian model and artist for whom the song is named, covered the majority of his body in tattoos depicting skeletal and cadaverous imagery, transforming himself into a living artwork that challenged every conventional standard of beauty and acceptability. Lady Gaga, who has always positioned herself as an advocate for outsiders and self-defined individuals, found in Genest a kindred spirit whose loss clearly affected her creative life.
The Politics of the Extreme Body
Gaga's work has consistently engaged with questions about what bodies are allowed to look like, how much self-modification society tolerates, and where the line between artistic expression and social transgression gets drawn. Zombieboy pushes those questions to their logical extreme: an artist who tattooed himself to look like a skeleton was not decorating himself; he was making a philosophical statement about mortality, about the performance of selfhood, about the distance between the living body and what it will eventually become. The song honors that statement rather than softening it.
Grief and Celebration Combined
The emotional register of the song holds mourning and celebration in tension without forcing either to dominate. Gaga has never been an artist who grieved quietly, and Zombieboy is not a quiet song. The tribute works because it refuses to reduce Genest to his death; it insists on the fullness of what he was while alive: the performances, the visual art, the radical self-presentation that made him one of the most distinctive figures in early-2010s cultural life. This is how Gaga has always operated at her best, using pop music to insist on the importance of people the mainstream might overlook.
The Community of Outsiders
For the Little Monsters who have made up Gaga's core fanbase since the beginning, Zombieboy resonates as a statement about belonging. Gaga's audience has always included people who felt excluded from conventional beauty standards, from mainstream social norms, from the dominant scripts about how to be in the world. A song that celebrates the most extreme form of self-definition speaks directly to that audience's deepest beliefs about identity and the right to exist on your own terms. This is what pop music can do at its most generous: make the outlier feel central.
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