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Fans often express their appetite for new content from their favorite media using hyperbolic, food-related lingo. Few clamor for more like pop music lovers, and a recent release has fans conveying their hunger—or satiation—with great linguistic creativity.
Last week, Lady Gaga released her seventh studio album, Mayhem. Her fans—known as Little Monsters —swiftly took to social media to share their takes on the new music. A common phrase they used on X? Reheating nachos.
If you’re not up to date on today’s hippest slang, here’s a little primer. Reheating someone’s nachos means recreating or mimicking a particular style or pop cultural phenomenon—often in the arena of pop music. A pop singer can reheat their own nachos, meaning recreate an earlier style or era from their own catalogue. Or, a singer might reheat someone else’s nachos, which can be a positive or a negative thing depending on how successfully they pull it off.
Little Monsters have been using the phrase to describe Gaga’s new music since the release of her second single “Abracadabra” back in February, giving the term a major PR boost. Prior to the album’s release, the general sentiment was that Gaga was reheating her own nachos from previous eras of her career.
The slang became so popular that Gaga herself became aware of it, telling an interviewer “My nachos are mine, I invented them, and I’m proud of them.”
Little Monsters discuss the state of Lady Gaga’s nachos on her new album
Following the release of Mayhem, fans had even more to say about nachos. Many Little Monsters used the phrase in a positive way, as a compliment to Gaga’s music. Some noted that she reheated The Fame nachos, drawing inspiration from her first studio album.
Such fans were not content to use the term in a straightforward manner, instead mirroring the dramatic excess of their idol. Many nacho-related sentiments became hyperbolic, such as this post on X: “These nachos aren’t reheated. She went to the field to gather the corn to grind and mill and fry into the chips. She milked the cow and fermented the cheese. She grew the veggies from the ground up to lay on it!!”
One fan wrote that she cooked them in the oven “al forno style,” another suggested she added extra adobo, and a third wrote that “She hand made the tortillas BITCH.”
Others suggested that Gaga reheated the nachos of other musical artists, which in most cases was a compliment. A number of fans suggested that Gaga reheated Taylor Swift’s nachos on the track “How Bad Do You Want Me.” One noted that the song is an example of how to “tastefully reheat swiftian nachos.”
Others saw connections between the album and artists like David Bowie, Daft Punk, and Michael Jackson. As one fan put it, “She dug up Michael Jackson’s grave and made him cook up some fresh nachos on Shadow of a Man.”
Despite these hyperbolic adulations, a few dissenters didn’t agree about the quality of Gaga’s nachos, calling them “mid” or “stale.”
And then there were the fans who took issue with the concept itself. “As if those words were a compliment to her craft,” one wrote. “The notion that Gaga ‘reheated her nachos’ being completely disproven by the fact that there’s no other Gaga album that sounds like MAYHEM,” wrote another.
This trend exemplifies the phenomenon of fandom-speak and internet-speak in general—a linguistic model only those “in the know” can understand. This condition is not unique to Little Monsters, though the fandom is known for being especially expressive, dedicated and creative—hence the extravagant nacho statements.
The internet constantly churns out new ways to describe the things we love or hate, and fans love to express their opinions online in the most theatrical manner possible. For Little Monsters, Lady Gaga and nachos are a match made in heaven.
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