…Oh dear.
Well, here it is. Believe it or not, I’ve been genuinely looking forward to hearing this, and while I didn’t camp out all night like I did for Britney’s “3,” I rushed to the computer when I woke up an hour ago. I’ve listened a few times now, and, well, it’s sort of exactly what I thought it would be.
It’s alright. And that’s not to be read as “Alex said it was okay, so it must be actually be awesome!” — I’ve always considered myself a fan of Gaga’s music, including many album tracks like “Boys Boys Boys” and “Starstruck” (both of which are better than “Born This Way”). But right: it’s not quite the “anthem of our generation,” and not quite befitting a lead single of the “album of the decade.” Some of Gaga’s stans are out in full force already, declaring that the song is fantastic on its own merits and shouldn’t be judged solely on whether it “meets the hype,” since, well, nothing could do that.
Well, no, I suppose that nothing could, and that would be a perfectly valid point if Lady Gaga weren’t her own one-woman hype machine. It wasn’t Rolling Stone that called this song the anthem for our generation, after all — it was her. It wasn’t Entertainment Weekly that called her next album the defining work of a generation — that was her, too. It wasn’t The New York Times that declared her one of the best songwriters in the industry — that, once again, was Lady Gaga herself.
She has yet to show that she can even write a song without peeking over at Madonna and Ace of Base’s notes. There’s no shame in covering a song, but you really shouldn’t change the title and lyrics and declare that the whole thing came from your pen. The conventional wisdom is completely right, this time: thirty seconds into the song, my jaw literally dropped: “Oh my God! It’s Madonna!” The song is “Express Yourself” on steroids, with all of the quality lyrics replaced by bromides from motivational posters.
Let’s try to review the track on its own merits, though, if that’s even possible.
Fernando Garibay’s production accomplishes exactly what Lady Gaga intended: while the dance beats don’t quite qualify as “sledgehammering” — the chorus to “Bad Romance” felt more sledgehammering to me; this track feels more, well — I won’t use the word “glacial” as PopJustice’s stan review did — but more, I’ll say, by-the-book. The production is as gay as the lyrics, but more to the point: they aren’t distracting, and they allow the lyrics and melody to emerge as the focal points of the song, which one can imagine is what she wanted. That’s dangerous new territory for her, though, as her fame has largely grown out of RedOne’s dance beats — not her lyrics, which have, to this point, been chants about boys, clubbing, sex, and booze. She rose to fame as someone who releases catchy party music. This song is a massive gamble, and the production does nothing to mitigate that fact.
The lyrics are a little awkward when matched with the melody, and parts of the second chorus and bridge feel like they were duct-taped and nailed into the rhythm, as if there were some sort of danger that they’d keep popping back out. “They just won’t fit!” someone yells, and Gaga replies: “Oh, we’ll make them fit, alright!” (Prime example: “Bullied or teased” does not flow well at all.) The second verse is even odder and feels like a stream-of-consciousness ramble, with no one phrase having any logical connection to the next. Lyrics like “whether you love him or capital H.I.M.” are weird in all the wrong ways: I suppose she means “whether you’re gay or religious,” but it’s awfully contrived. Surely one of the greatest songwriters in the industry could have come up with phrasing that was a bit better than that.
Who allowed her to release this? Which record company executives gave this song the green-light? Is this some grand conspiracy by the Haus of Record Executives to create a backlash, humble her, and make her easier to work with? Because, in releasing this blatant ripoff of a song, it’s clear that she thinks that she’s an invincible goddess who can create a smash simply by her namesake. But it’s exactly as self-indulgent, contrived, generic, and ego-tripping as I had been anticipating for weeks. This is it? This is what she’s been dying to let us hear? This is — her worst single to date.
The world finally awakened to Kanye West’s narcissism when he rushed the stage to steal the mic from Taylor Swift. The world should now finally awaken to the fact that Lady Gaga has been blatantly thieving from her superiors and is in desperate need of being taken down a few notches.
Mark my words: sometime in March, we receive word that “Born This Way” was just a “buzz single” and that a RedOne track about approaching boys in a club will be released as the album’s main single. Call it a hunch.
2.5/5
lady gaga is a fraud. 