There’s a lot of ground to cover here, yet the best caption I can come up with is still “Ladies and gentlemen, the fabulous Diana Vickers Dancers!”…
[Video][Website]
[4.71]
Iain Mew: For the past year or so, watching the “Just Dance” video has been a sure way of inducing cognitive dissonance. After the awesome, meticulous realisation of vision that was The Fame Monster and associated campaign, it’s a bizarre and unreal feeling to go back to seeing and hearing a document of GaGa not as unstoppable phenomenon but as mere ordinary pop star. “Born This Way” will not have as ordinary looking a video, and doesn’t give up a large section of its lines to some guy called Colby, but it produces a bit of the same feeling. There are more moments of buzzing excitement in its multiple layers than “Just Dance”, and it has an even more hugely constructed chorus, but for the first time in a while you can see the joins.
[6]
Edward Okulicz: Sometimes it’s hard to write about a song because the event feels bigger than the song. But what more needs to be said? That the event is bigger than the song is instructive; “Born This Way” is too gauzy and impenetrable sonically, and its tune barely more than OK. The hype would have had more pay-off if the song had been up to “Like A Prayer” standard, rather than, well, “4 Minutes”. It at least flies the flag for a style that’s much-missed to many people who think that mid-90s dance-pop had a combination of adrenaline and guilelessness that has gone missing since then. “Express Yourself” and “Ooh.. Aah.. Just A Little Bit” are perfectly good sources from which to pillage, but genius doesn’t just steal, it reshapes and improves.
[4]
Martin Skidmore: Becoming the new Madonna is a perfectly laudable ambition for any newer pop star, and Gaga has had the right level of success so far. This doesn’t make copying “Express Yourself” with a dash of “Vogue” spoken/rapped parts an inspired idea. It has a big anthemic chorus, but the closeness of the copy meant it did nothing for me.
[3]
Al Shipley: As anticlimactic as it is after all the build up, it’s still quickly rocketed up to my 2nd or 3rd favorite Gaga single, far behind you-know-what but neck and neck with “Alejandro.” As far as stolen hooks go, you could steal from much worse, and I enjoy how overstuffed and bombastic it is.
[7]
Chuck Eddy: Well-intentioned, but heavyhanded. Obviously. I never liked “Express Yourself” much in the first place, unless we’re talking Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band. This still has a palpable dancefloor stomp to it, though — and that it’s kind of generic might well be on purpose; Gaga’s clearly paying tribute to a style of music here as much as a gender preference. Also think the “Vogue”-ripoff rap might be my favorite part of the song, and the Lebanese/Orient stuff the most interesting words — kinda like how you can’t tell whether she’s being provocative there, or just plain clueless.
[6]
Rebecca Toennessen: I so wanted this to be THE BIG single after a (not that long) wait, but it isn’t. I’m really not too fussed over the “is Gaga ripping off Madonna” debate, because tho Madge is a clear influence, name any artist/band without comparable influences. Alas, I just love her to bits in a near irrational way and am super psyched for the album.
[7]
David Moore: Since I don’t want to indulge this track’s craven need to be considered in the context of how its presumed audiences might use it (remember, what she literally said was express yourself, not empower yourself — that’s just tacky!), I’ll say instead that it doesn’t pass my “double lameness” test. (1) Is the song itself lame? (2) Would the extras in a movie in which this song appeared cheer and dance in overcompensating desperation to convince me it was not, in fact, so very lame? The first one is disappointing, the second one is a little offensive.
[4]
Jer Fairall: My problem isn’t with her insistence on continuing The Great Gay Pander-Off of 2010 with somehow even less subtlety, or even her cribbing from circa-1989 Madonna (there are worse sources, and certainly worse Madonna phases, to steal from), but rather how “Born This Way” seems to represent Gaga’s move from writing actual songs to constructing bloated Productions of the sort that became the post-millenial boy band/Britney standard as learned from Michael (and Janet — I hear almost as much “Rhythm Nation” pomposity in here as I do “Express Yourself” ebullience) Jackson, forgetting that a large part of her initial appeal was just how better-than-that she was. That she comes this close to selling this nonsense anyway might be as great a testament to her genius as a pop craftsman as “Telephone” or “Bad Romance” are in their actual awesomeness, but this already feels like the shark jump.
[5]
Kat Stevens: As part of my new(ish) job I have to touch up jpegs in Photoshop, adjusting for bad lighting and occasionally airbrushing things to make them more factually interesting, pixel by pixel. After a long day staring at the monitor a little too closely, it’s easy to end up tweaking and smudging the edges and colours too much, and you zoom back out and realise the whole thing looks awful. I wonder how long the producers and mixers spent retouching and fiddling this uber-maximal track, layering and overdubbing and filtering. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had huffed on it then rubbed it to a shine with their shirt sleeve. There’s so much there to pick apart: I love the wobbly cello on the intro, the metallic gargle of a robot throwing up when there’s no liquid left down there, the mooing bass that pops up every now and again, the More Cowbell and the Kitchen Sink. Alas these relatively subtle elements are shoved aside as Gaga herself barges onto the stage, trampled under the “Express Yourself” chords and the gargle join-the-dots square foghorn melody. It’s a bloody mess, and I wish someone had zoomed out to 100% and looked at the full picture.
[6]
Zach Lyon: Maybe this wouldn’t be such a disaster if she didn’t leak the lyrics before the track — it’s not like lyrics were ever her main selling point anyway. It would also help if they weren’t uniformly terrible, infantile and kind of racist. It’s a shame, because beneath everything is some production that could be potentially game-changing in its pure weirdness. It’s a different sort of maximalism than Luke/Max/Blanco ’10, some hybrid of way too many interesting-sounding ideas all car-crashing together in this frantic confusion over how one is supposed to actually produce an Event Song.
[3]
John Seroff: Gaga’s fifteen minutes continue to stretch interminably on with a late-era-Madonna pastiche that suggests she’s pretty sure Pink’s got the right idea. “No matter black, white or beige”? Thumping, dumb and dull.
[3]
Josh Love: Aside from “Bad Romance” and a couple of other tunes, I’ve so far found Lady Gaga’s celebrity more interesting than her music. But even her least inspired stuff has tended to have at least some kind of listening utility. “Born This Way,” meanwhile, doesn’t feel like a song at all. It’s a statement, a rallying cry, an anthem, and its sincerity and efficacy as a political act has already been weighed intelligently by others. But as a song…well, I’d feel a lot more charitable towards “Born This Way” if Gaga had released it as a one-off single, as opposed to making it the title track and ostensible centerpiece of her new album. Because musically this thing’s an absolute cipher, and it makes me worry that the rest of the record is going to be full of similar efforts that replace songcraft with artlessly broad gestures and stadium-sized sentiments.
[3]
Anthony Easton: Gay icons from the beginning of time were chosen by the community, and those icons spoke to the communities in a kind of nudge nudge wink wink code. It became a place where paratextual understanding of sexual desire was more important than textual desire. This changed in the 70s, where the emergence of genuine queer narratives, and a suspicion of where the money came from meant that the paratext was slid away for genuine textual interventions. Madonna did this sort of brilliant and sort of offensive thing where she explicitly connected the paratextual encoding to the explicit textual emergence, and claimed herself as the last great gay diva. This occurred especially in “Vogue”, and “Justify my Love”. When Beth Ditto then uses the aesthetic of this era of Madonna, as a lesbian of size, she further deconstructs the problems of class, race and sexuality that Madonna bulldozed over in an ambitious race to get to the top (though Ditto is still white, and her backup dancers are still black, so there is a bit of reinforcing racial privilege that goads). Gaga, no matter how much she thinks of herself as an outsider, and no matter how well appreciated her return to the bestial when it comes to sexuality is, steals the hooks from Madonna and the “blonde ambition” but is much more ragged around the edges — and this being ragged around the edges is not an aesthetic choice. She continues to claim strangeness, when she becomes a simualacra of others people’s hard work. The egg thing at the Grammys is pure Matthew Barney, but Barney reinforces masculine physicality, and grand heroic narratives. This text does neither of those things — so why is she quoting Barney, is it on purpose? The politics are suspect, the lyrics are reactionary (“Born this way” — from a woman who claims to be a master of the self-fashioning, plus the whole oriental thing), the aesthetic is not only cribbed but cribbed clumsily, and I keep hoping kids these days were as smart as kids who recognized that no matter how genius “Vogue” was, there were so many problems with a white girl cribbing so much of Paris is Burning.
[0]
Katherine St Asaph: To understand “Born This Way,” you must first understand what it is not: a Lady Gaga song. Flash back to the moment before the Grammys, before Esperanza Spalding became a Best New Artist and Quesadilla, before Arcade Fire became a cultural flashpoint and before America had any idea they’d care about either. No, their minds were on Gaga and the promise of Gaga Reborn, emerging from silence (“Alejandro” was half a year ago, which is a lifetime on the radio) to collect her Fame Monster plaudits, smash her just-leaked single to #1 and shove the pop conversation forward, again. If not that, they wanted to know what she’d dress up as. A boat? A goat? A Grammy? A granny? And then she came in an egg. Not dressed as an egg, as everyone said and got wrong — inside an egg. Hiding. Even the cameras, trained to follow the brightest stars, gave her a cursory five minutes then turned to gawk at Nicki Minaj’s leopard getup and Katy Perry’s angel wings. Gaga’s performance was much the same; her yolk hat, which if it weren’t for that egg entrance would look like just any yellow hat, was the only noteworthy staging, and the inclusion of the Toccata and Fugue was the only noteworthy part of the performance. If you wanted spectacle, Cee-Lo brought Muppetloads; if you wanted musicality, Bruno Mars, the Mumfords and so many others equaled or outdid her. Then Gaga left. And stayed gone: winning little on screen and appearing only in clips, she effectively erased herself from the Grammys script. This same self-negation was apparent on the studio version, her Fame-era sound brand (say what you want about RedOne, but he crafted a specific sound) and Monster-era experimentation subsumed into Madonna-isms and her image turned into that of a generic wind-machined blonde. Considering that Lady Gaga’s image was the single most exciting thing about 2010 pop, not to mention the thing that legitimized her as an Artist and not another electro-trash poseur, this is quite the sacrifice. There’s a reason, of course; “Born This Way” is a message song. That’s why it exists. That’s all. And yes, that message is clumsy — leaving aside “chola” and “orient,” which is a shit-ton to leave aside, the lyrics get dumber with each listen. Why would you give teens a subway kid to identify with when half your fanbase has never set foot in a subway because their towns don’t have any? Isn’t telling picked-on kids not to be a drag kind of insulting? And then you get to questions of motive. Isn’t Lady Gaga exploiting her gay fans by stealing the statements of the marginalized (not to mention those of Madonna) to sell back to them and get filthy rich? And why chola? Why Orient? All of these are legitimate criticisms, but they miss the fact that “Born This Way” is a huge risk for Gaga. It’s just begging for backlash, and she’s getting tons — possibly enough to affect sales. Born This Way won’t tank, but there’s now a nonzero chance it’ll falter and go down in history as a pandering sell-out, either a low point or the beginning of the end. But the risk is deliberate. This isn’t a song by Lady Gaga song; it’s now by the people. Don’t believe me? Go on Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook, those Web halls where the kids hang out. They’re posting lyrics, but more than that, they’re embroidering bits of “Born This Way” into their worldviews. Their lives, at least for seconds, depend on it. They depend on the way it so easily loops and reloops itself into infinite replayability. They depend on that moment when it bursts onto the radio in the Bible Belt and affirms being gay, straight, bi, transgendered — every letter in LGBT! On the radio! Uncensored! Most of all, they depend on its existence and, consequently their affirmation. Nobody outside the Haus knows what Born This Way will sound like. For all we know, Gaga will come out dressed as Cthulhu and sounding like Buckethead. But it doesn’t matter. For one glorious moment, Gaga stepped aside and let her song do what it was born for, perfectly.
[10]
Alfred Soto: As I wrote (in part) elsewhere: “Look, if the pedantry of “Born This Way” keeps a gay boy from jumping off a bridge, fantastic; but she endorses a featureless universalism, not gay liberation. By reducing its audience to directors of LGBT programs in high schools and colleges, it diminishes the power of its “message,” a natural development since the song, from its bloodless thump to its collage of transnational ciphers (“black, white, beige, chola descent”), incarnates the kind of “diversity” that doesn’t honor differences so much as reduce them to signifiers of empowerment. Why else would GaGa include the lyric “We are all born superstars”? Gay kids don’t want to be “superstars” — they want to date and love in a world that respects the abyss between them and their straight brethren.”
[4]
Alex Ostroff: I had hoped that once all the hype died down, I would be able to come to “Born This Way” with fresh ears and discover an undeniable pop song. Unfortunately, there just isn’t one here. Lyrical clunkers like “subway kid rejoice your truth” and “don’t be a drag / just be a queen” are nothing new for GaGa, but normally she’s too busy deploying hooks for me to notice. Plus, earnest spoken word intros and repeated whispers of “same DNA” aren’t a good look for the woman who brought us the self-consciously hilarious “Roma Romama GaGa Ooh La La.” For all its obnoxiousness, “Born This Way” does what it should; it’s a pounding dance track and a proper event record, and it sounds like it – HUGE and FULL with a thousand tiny production details. When GaGa marries her new sonic tools to a great song or two, we’re in for a treat.
[6]
