The Singles Jukebox

And now, something we really should have covered months ago…

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[5.33]

Alfred Soto: A textbook example of good intentions dissolving into overwrought narcissism, this song composed for The Hunting Ground offers solidarity to victims of sexual assault without empathy, not with Gaga balling her fist and forcing listeners to focus on me me me. The string arrangement is in mothballs, her vocal as contorted as a bread twist. 
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Thomas Inskeep: Cynics will hate, but I find this ballad incredibly moving, some of the finest work of Diane Warren’s career. Gaga gives this her best Madonna-in-Evita vocal, which frankly, the song requires. As a survivor of sexual assault, I appreciate immensely Warren and Gaga giving voice to a subject that many don’t want to — or can’t — talk about. 
[8]

Micha Cavaseno: For someone like Gaga, who’s spent a whole career making the sensational and exaggerated her playground, “Til It Happens to You” stands like… well, the way we’re used to Gaga standing out. The song is a traditional rock ballad, not unlike previous efforts such as “Speechless,” with none of the dance-pop trappings she’s relied upon to disguise her cabaret pop for so long. It’s been a pretty seamless transition; her brief dalliance with Tony Bennett on his duets LP before the Gaga album we dare not speak was swiftly enhanced into a proper album’s worth of material to remind us that Gaga wasn’t just a flash-in-the-pan pop magpie, but a Serious Artist of Legitimate Musicianship. She once worked to inhabit a world of club-ready merriment, but now she echoes the yearning for the dreary monochromatic world of real artistry that Adele, the Lumineers, and many others have turned into a somber, conservative zone. “Til It Happens to You,” with the bold talk in the lyrics, is a reclamation not simply for the women she writes for, but also an intensely aggressive move for Gaga to regain the respect she’d misplaced in her heedless and expectant maneuvers. And as noble as the intention and good she might do here is, the act of redemption from her act of pop contrition makes this an extra level of depressing in an already grim return.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: After Born This Way, a singular and underrated album, and Artpop, a trend-chasing and properly rated album, we have this: a mix of elements — throaty, unyielding contralto, musical-theater structure, Diane Warren — that might have been how one signaled authenticity and maturity in 1995, but not today. Adele doesn’t sound like this, nor are there any handspun singer-songwriter trappings. Nor does it have much truck with her former pop peers’ “unconventional” tangents, being unconcerned with youth, or alt production, or coolness. (This is perhaps why the music press has paid it almost no attention; perhaps Gaga bet a little too much too soon on her admittedly devoted fanbase?) The only possible explanation is sincerity.
[6]

Cassy Gress: I’m so torn about this. I watched Lady Gaga’s Grammys Bowie tribute, and the Gaga who is singing this sounds like that Gaga, the theatrical stomping and shaking and stuttering one, completely in thrall to putting on a show, adding some strange roundness into her vowels that wasn’t there not long ago.  But there are other Gagas I might have preferred to sing this — like maybe “Highway Unicorn” Gaga, who had some of this same rawness in her voice but didn’t sound so chest-thumpy, or even “Speechless” Gaga. Those cellos are very movie soundtrack, and that combines with Gaga’s vocal to make this rather melodramatic. It’s almost more distraction than enhancement. I have a lot of feelings about Gaga, most of which have been intensified by her career decisions in the last couple years, and the melodrama of this is pushing on those feelings real hard, and I’m dragging my head above water and gasping “but wait, is the song any good??” I think maybe not.
[5]

Brad Shoup: I know Warren really wanted that Oscar, and it would’ve been quite the victory: a frank song delivered frankly, with Gaga gruffly claiming territory from the oppressive orchestra.
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Jonathan Bogart: Part of me wishes the pop charts were still loose and breathable enough to accommodate a “November Rain” rewritten to be about sexual assault with everything strange or interesting about it methodically subtracted, aside perhaps from Gaga’s stone-faced singing — at points she seems to be channeling Marlene Dietrich in her stentorian lack of affect. Then again, I looked up some of the remixes that have pushed it to #1 Dance, and I’m grateful for our narrow escape.
[4]

Jibril Yassin: There’s a brief moment where the song begins to seemingly climax only to cut out, then comes back in even stronger and louder than before, a tsunami wave of emotion. Lady Gaga has excelled at infusing just enough emotional bombast into these somber ballads in the past, and in that sense this is nothing new. But those strings come in, pulling for the right amount of yearning, and then you stop caring.
[8]

Lauren Gilbert: Valid points, boring song.
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