Picking a screen-grab for this was the most fun I’ve had in a while.

[Video][Website]
[6.00]

Brad Shoup: You can’t get much more dinosaur than this song. You’ve got the Mutt Lange production work (most notably his robot BGVs and that Leppard squelch), a pointless Queen quote, an (admittedly welcome) Brian May cameo, the Neil Young reference, the nod to muscle cars that screams Springsteen – hell, even the possibly-biographical Nebraska ref could be a sop to Mellencamp’s Midwest. There’s an exhortation to “put your drinks up” and the “six whole years” aside that gives the track the illusion of live performance, that great proving ground of manly rockist craft. Oh, and the whole thing sounds like steroidal Elton John circa Madman Across the Water. Did she think a less manically-ornamented ballad couldn’t hold our interest? As it stands, the pieces are stacked precariously, with too much attention paid to how perfectly recorded and loudly presented the drums are, and not enough to how gratifying a three-minute singalong coda would have been. But maybe shades of “Hey Jude” would have packed on too much dinosaur meat, even for Gaga’s tastes.
[6]

Anthony Easton: The safety of Gaga’s new album is betrayed by her avant-garde tendencies, but at least when that happened to Elton John, he had Bernie Taupin to make everything better.
[6]

Dan Weiss: Gaga’s love letter to the works of “Mutt” Lange, complete with umlaut, monster-truck chorus and the big voice we always knew she was hiding behind that spiky ol’ wannabe fembot exterior.
[9]

Jonathan Bradley: The strange spectacle of Gaga as human. It never seemed like the flyover states would figure in her set-pieces of paparazzo and bad romances, let alone offer up a leading man in the shape of a cool Nebraska guy. Stefani Germanotta huddled in the corner of a pub with Mutt Lange-shined stomp has all the modern iconicism of that moment the whole bar stops and sings along to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.” (Yes, this happens in real life). Perhaps the gender inversion of that tune’s cast is intentional — a city girl and a small town boy — but its widescreen ambition is perfectly in sync.
[8]

Alfred Soto: For once Gaga boasts a monster truck voice to match the monster truck lyric, monster truck Brian May riff, monster truck drums. Luckily she’s shrewd enough a record maker at this point to hold these elements together; despite how terrific this sounds in the car, I’m not sure what she’s signifying other than a desire to connect with the arena audience she sees in her head.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: When did Mutt Lange become a legend and not a loud, stomping punchline? I don’t care how hunka-drunka-gorgeous Nebraskan beauspiration Lüc Carl is and how much Gaga wants to writhe in his dirt-dappled cornfields; this isn’t “Marry the Night” (Born This Way‘s heart and best song), nor is it “Government Hooker” (second-best song, completely batshit.) “Yoü and I” is a vanity single, and Gaga’s about three “Bad Romance”s away from earning that.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Lady Gaga lives in such rarefied air that not only can she dizzily fantasise about a huge lump of Mutt Lange sugar with Brian May on it, she also can forget to write a decent song on top of it and get away with releasing it anyway. I liked those vocal processing effects on Shania Twain’s voice, less so on Gaga’s, and let’s face it — the ending to this? Three words for you: Four. Non. Blondes.
[3]

Ian Mathers: While I am glad that Gaga is out there in a pop cultural sense, when it comes to the song I’m most just interested in the songs as music (not as political/aesthetic statements or whatever). And this one is boring. The “six years” in the video is a nicely lived-in moment, and if this is autobiographical if it sounds then I’m glad she’s happy, but a generic sorta-country ballad is not anything that I need to hear more than once.
[5]

Michaela Drapes: Outside of the context of the endless flailing of the Born this Way track list, “Yoü and I” is actually a pretty solid single, only problem is, it’s just a pantomime of the greats. Stefani, honey, you’re not Elton John or Freddie Mercury — even if you can get Brian May to provide a killer licks on the bridge. Plus, I’ve spent enough time in Lower East Side dive bars to find the line about “making love” on the sofa at St. Jerome’s to be a real turn-off. Yuck.
[5]

Alex Ostroff: Don’t misunderstand me – I love the costumes and dance beats and utter insanity as much as the next guy – but I look forward to ten or twenty years from now, when Gaga goes full-on Elton and releases an album of classic rock balladry. “Speechless” was the first time she hit my heart and not just my ass, and “Yoü and I” takes that template and stadium-sizes it. No bells and whistles, just a voice so rarely highlighted that its power still catches me by surprise, a song that works as well live on piano as it does with a country rock backing band, and passion to spare. The backing harmonies are gloriously corny, the guitar solo is over the top, and the shout of “Put your drinks up!” should, by all rights, be completely ridiculous; “Yoü and I” wouldn’t work if she weren’t utterly committed the material. By the time we hit the unaccompanied holler of “my daddy, and Nebraska, and Jesus Christ!” I’m putty in her hands. Over the course of Born This Way, Gaga has declared, “I’m on the right track”, “I am my hair”, “I’m a bad kid”, and a hundred other roles and personalities. When she proclaims herself “born to run you down,” it’s not only a confusingly literal rejoinder to those who asked of the album cover, “So, she’s born to be a motorcycle, then?” – it’s an identity claim far more personal and honest than any of the platitudes Born This Way offers.
[10]

Jer Fairall: Gaga’s inability to recognize the difference between good bad taste and bad bad taste made Born This Way a rocky listen for me, but actually releasing this atrocity as a single reveals much more troubling levels of dysfunction. Problem is, I’m no longer sure whether the dysfunction is hers or mine. By now, I’ve heard enough people claim “Yoü and I” as one of their personal album highlights that it may not actually represent the greatest lapse in judgment thus far in her career (though that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) so much as it is just something I have a strong allergy towards. “Mutt” Lange’s cringe-worthy production work somehow manages to appropriate the very worst of 70s, 80s and 90s pop and rock, itself possibly some perverse accomplishment, but, truthfully, it is the Shania-isms that are making me itch: this song immediately returns me, with screeching horror, to the summer I spent taking admissions at a public swimming pool whose loud speaker was tuned (at a volume far too high to ever make reading a plausible distraction) to a local radio station whose playlist at that time consisted, at least in my befogged sixteen-year-old memory of it, of “Any Man of Mine” and “Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under” injected at frequent and maddening intervals.  So maybe my cause for now hating “Yoü and I” even more than I already did is empathetic; I’m imagining some kid stuck outdoors at some shit-paying job during this most sticky and miserable of summers, subjected to Lady Gaga’s pathetic (and, come to think of it, ironically non-yourself-being) attempt to suddenly be all things to all people, cruelly unleashed upon the world rather than remaining tucked away on the album where it would hurt no one unwilling, and then I’m launched back into my own present, where I spend probably too much of my time trying to be some kind of ambassador for pop, and I’m reminded of how coldly I am repaid sometimes by this wonderful, horrible thing that I love so much.
[1]

Jonathan Bogart: On Bette Midler’s debut album in 1972, she covered Tanya Tucker’s “Delta Dawn.” Just saying.
[7]