Thursday, April 28th, 2011

Lady Gaga – Judas

Now definitely our most-reviewed artist evah…



[Video][Website]
[5.69]

Kat Stevens: Is there a word in German for when the difficult second album is actually the difficult second album and a half? Something that sums up the feeling of disappointment after an artist has shown so much promise of long-term success (the 1.5 albums creating an illusion of consistency), but also taking into account the leniency one allows for an artist to make (and learn from) sophomore mistakes as they mature. How about ‘Mugler’? “Yeah mate, I thought Bad Romance was alright but the chorus on this one is a bit Mugler, innit?
[7]

Martin Skidmore: If you loved “Bad Romance”, you’ll like this one, since it sounds a lot like it. I didn’t and don’t: the thumping Red One beats rather bore me, and I continue to dislike her nasal vocals. It has a bombastic catchiness that means it’ll be another global smash, but she always irritates me.
[3]

David Katz: “Born This Way” felt like a placeholder, a garlanded victory lap to remind everyone of her musical existence, giving away nothing more. “Judas”, then, does as expected from a follow-up: blows up her club and glam-rock predilections to heights befitting the fanfare of brand new material. But it’s a big shame these promising elements fit so crudely. It lurches from an ’06-bloghouse-vintage dance breakdown into a chorus that is pretty enough, but feels rather meek amongst its gaudy surroundings. Hoping for much, much better from the LP material, even if she can’t top “Speechless”.
[6]

Al Shipley: Campily croaked verses and airy Europop choruses are two of my least favorite default Gaga modes, so I actually like this more than I should have any right to expect.
[5]

Doug Robertson: Even without the assistance of Weird Al, it’s very easy for an artist like Lady Gaga to descend into the realms of parody, and already she’s beginning to sound like someone who needs to use their own back catalogue for inspiration. It might have been the differences that originally attracted the world towards Gaga’s embrace, but these similarities are going to repel equally strongly.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Gaga’s confident enough now to blast through a weak chorus, but while I find the wordless chanting almost as compelling as Britney’s recent attempts at same, I’ve heard the thick Euro-friendly block of backing track from her too often. And I wish like hell she’d found the musical correlative for the Madonna-cum-Oscar Wilde kick of “Jesus is my virtue/Judas is the demon I cling to.”
[6]

Michaelangelo Matos: She’s trying too hard. The showbizzy melange of styles, a hook (“I’m in love with Judas”) that seems to punch the clock in its attempt to whip up a little instant controversy, the passel of outfits she decides this one will best benefit from: at this point it’s starting to lose its luster. Remember, Madonna’s records kept getting better during her ascent.
[5]

Iain Mew: This is more like it! The recycled elements are of minor consequence next to the way the beat clangs with awesome industrial force like nothing else she’s done, the best thing about it. Then there’s the sweet and addictive hi-NRG chorus and the way that that and the heavier elements are not so much stitched into a song as crammed violently together into the same four minute space. The effect is actually to make both of them sound all the more strange and exciting and the straight-faced nonsense delivered over the top works perfectly in that context.
[9]

Chuck Eddy: I like her so much more when she is ripping off Boney M than we she’s ripping off Madonna! Well actually, I haven’t figured out which Boney M song this rips off, but I’m pretty sure it rips off either them or someone very much like them. Or at least parts of it do. Kind of slides downhill when it gets less Euro-weird, though — including the part that reminds me of “Like A Prayer,” come to think of it. When your more conventional parts bring to mind “Like A Prayer,” you’re probably doing okay. Even if your shtick’s wearing out and your theology is a mess.
[7]

Asher Steinberg: At heart, Lady Gaga’s always been a not very bright kid who took a few too many Madonna Studies courses in college and decided she’d become a performance artist. For a while, this was partially masked by her ability to write a decent pop song, but now she seems bent on eschewing any commercial standards of craft in favor of full-bore, Madonna-biting “art,” and the result is fragmented dreck like this. Gaga alternates from “Bad Romance”-esque chanting, to pointless and horrible Jamaican-face, to a respectable imitation of Tiffany album filler (the only good thing in the song), to some spoken word nonsense about Mary Magdalene, to more “Bad Romance”-esque chanting, all without any coherence, purpose, or meaning. She has nothing to say about religion; the only reason this song is called “Judas” and not “Jared” is to gin up some meaningless controversy. It’s like she listened to “Like a Prayer” and drew the conclusion that drawing parallels between religion and sex is “interesting” per se, even when such parallels run no deeper than giving fictitious significant others biblical characters’ names. And I don’t think she has anything to say about relationships or attraction either. There’s a definite thesis here — I’m in love with the wrong guy — but nothing else, no feeling or insight or detail, which will happen when you subsume what you’re actually trying to say into a ridiculous concept.
[1]

Katherine St Asaph: So let me get this straight. First she’s kinda falling for Judas, then he betrays her three times so he’s Peter, then he’s some tongue-in-brain eldritch thing? And first she’s Mary Magdalene washing his feet, then maybe Lloyd Webberish Jesus, then her character from the “Telephone” video bantering with Honey B, then a fame hooker/prostitute/wench; the ’90s processing on her voice in the choruses makes her Madonna, but what if she’s the Madonna? Theologians don’t even agree on how precisely the Trinity is three in one; this is the stuff of endless schisms. That is, if the “Bad Romance”-with-more-Richter beat doesn’t crack things first.
[7]

Jer Fairall: Back in the day, Prince and Madonna straddled tensions between the carnal and the spiritual in their music in such a way that pop has pretty much thoroughly abandoned since, having either consciously made its choice of one side over the other or having since become so grounded in the secular to have rendered said tensions irrelevant. Credit Gaga, then, for at least engaging in the conversation at the heart of pop since the birth of rock and roll, particularly coming, as it does, after an astonishingly safe event single calculated to offend absolutely no one. But pop music is more than just text (and even if it weren’t, “Judas” would still be a pretty awkward one, cursed, as is increasingly becoming the case, with Gaga’s occasional lyrical fumbles), and as a composition “Judas” is energetic but derivative, full of “Bad Romance” lurches and “GA-GA”s, and further proof that she only knows how to write exactly one kind of chorus melody. I’m intrigued, disappointed and torn all at once.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: This is also a song.
[6]

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