ALBUM REVIEW: Lady Gaga's Born This Way

Since the release of 2009's The Fame Monster, Lady Gaga has worked to revamp her image from reigning queen of pop to a hybrid religious-sexual cultural icon.

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ALBUM REVIEW: Lady Gaga's Born This Way

POSTED: Friday, May 27, 2011, 4:00 PM

Filed Under: Music Album Review

Since the release of 2009’s The Fame Monster, Lady Gaga has worked to revamp her image from reigning queen of pop to a hybrid religious-sexual cultural icon. And, with Billboard predicting that her latest, Born This Way, will sell 850,000 copies in the U.S. in the first week, it seems that her efforts have paid off. Although she seems not to have lost her status as royalty in the industry, the de-mainstreamification of her image, if not her music itself, seems to have satiated her adoring fans (“little monsters”) without compromising the integrity of her music as archetype of pop.

Born This Way is at once the catchiest and most avant-garde mainstream pop album of the last year and, arguably, one of the most musically-provocative of the decade. It is decidedly different from her past two EPs, and will not light up dancefloors as did her first major album, but this change is not necessarily undesirable. She is not the same Gaga she was in 2008; the role she plays for her audience has decidedly shifted, from down-and-dirty pop star to tongue-in-cheek lyricist who writes truth and sings it against well-mixed, if overused, synthesizers. At once a paean to the mainstream youth lifestyle that pop music so often endorses and a lambasting of all conformity and self-doubt, the album experiments with a panoply of sounds — ’80s synths, smooth saxophone, grungy electric guitar, pizzicato strings, glitch-hop beats — that test the boundary of what is, and is not, pop music.

The title number, whose video has attracted nearly 54 million views on Youtube, bears a (suspiciously) strong resemblance to Madonna’s “Express Yourself,” and the second single, “Judas,” explores religious themes but ultimately offers a beat which fits neatly on a pop album. Dig deeper into Born This Way and find the stranger stuff, like “Marry the Night” and “Bloody Mary.” Although not the most musically enticing songs on the album, they use religious overtones to create an almost hymnlike effect. The lyrical and musical amalgamation of sexuality and religious devotion in these numbers (using words like “crucify” and “sinner”) highlight the new image Gaga has created for herself: a messiah for the sexually active, a saint for the traditionally unloved. Hits like “Scheiße” and “Heavy Metal Lover,” on the other hand, rougher than anything you’ll find on a Britney or Beyoncé album, experiment extensively with grunge-pop fusion.

Born This Way reaffirms that, whether you love her or you hate her, you have to admit that Gaga is freaking good at what she does. She teeters over the abyss of too-bizarre-to-be-mainstream, but we accept her sometimes borderline-offensive idiosyncrasies because her music, independent from her image, is damn catchy. It will never rock dance floors across America, but it is enough to rock one’s cubicle in the very-near-silent City Paper office at 3:01 on a Wednesday afternoon. If we didn’t know before that Lady Gaga played in the same league as Madonna, we do now. This is not just another blonde pop beauty with a tiny waist. This is a serious (blonde) recording artist with legitimate musical talent and a knack for irony. And a tiny waist.

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