Interscope (23 May 2011)
Rating: ***
You might say Lady Gaga is pop’s con artist. Through her curious mélange of pop culture imagery, haute couture outfits and name-dropping of eyebrow-raising inspirations (Marina Abramovic, Terence Koh), Gaga managed to convince us that she was more than a mere middle-class Manhattanite constructed into a popstar. Instead she presents herself as an organic, living art installation; an enfant terrible of the music industry set to shatter preconceptions of pop. Her sophomore release, Born This Way, is an ambitious work, in which she offers all she has. It occasionally touches on brilliance, but for all her art-pop posturing, Gaga ultimately fails to push pop music forward.
Opener, ‘Marry the Night’, along with ‘Electric Chapel’ feel like a pure continuation of what we heard on The Fame Monster. They’re quality slices of dark-pop and not the mass-market self-help Gaga has recently been selling. New single ‘Edge of Glory’ borders on both cheese and brilliance. It’s a jazzy electro-opera anthem, but doesn’t feel contrived. Gaga even nods back to her early celebrations of fame with the line, ‘it isn’t hell if everybody knows my name.’
The title track remains a blatant pandering to her gay fanbase. Gaga repeatedly chants, ‘don’t be a drag, just be a queen’; a completely vapid lyric she attempts to pass off as a power-pop motto for the gay community. To say the song lacks subtlety is a severe understatement; we aren’t offered the chance to relate, but instead are beaten over the head by the garish, depthless lyrics. ‘Born this Way’ isn’t actually an anthem, it just insists that it is. Ironically both the weakest and strongest tracks on Born This Way draw obvious Madonna comparisons. The verses on standout ‘Scheiße’ (‘I’m on a mission/I rebuke my condition/If you’re a strong female/You don’t need permission’) sound as though they were directly lifted from Madonna’s Erotica album. The track opens with a multi-lingual chant as RedOne’s sledgehammering beats built to an undeniable pop chorus: ‘I wish I could dance on a single prayer/I wish I could be strong without the scheiße yeah.’
Elsewhere, ‘Government Hooker’ boasts stellar production from Fernando Garibay and DJ White Shadow. The chorus may be non-existent, but the catchy lyrical soundbites (‘put you hands on me, John F. Kennedy’) and foreign-language ad-libs (‘Iku iku’, is Japanese for ‘I’m cumming, I’m cumming’) make up for it. The production also steals the show on ‘Hair’. The track, like much of the album, is overproduced, though almost exquisitely so. RedOne offers up everything but the kitchen sink and then throws in a saxophone, just for good measure. It helps distract from trite lyrics equating freedom with one’s hair. A questionable sentiment coming from the Imelda Marcus of wigs.
‘Americano’ attempts to deal with the issue of immigration, but is rendered distasteful by the track’s odd mariachi band quality. ‘Highway Unicorn’ is akin to Journey performing at Eurovision, while sole ballad, ‘You & I’ plods along for five minutes and feels like a chore to sit through. Much of Born This Way shares this over the top quality; Gaga offers up everything, and at times it’s truly exhausting. Recently released single ‘Judas’ is infectious but undeniably derivative; the song is a less developed ‘Bad Romance’. Where the latter sounded like a progressive re-imagining of ‘Pokerface’, ‘Judas’ sounds like pop-culture pastiche.
Wearing her influences on her sleeve (Michael Jackson, Madonna, Springsteen, ABBA, et al.) we get the impression that Lady Gaga is not so much the future of pop music, but rather a summary of all that has gone before her. She seems more than content to simply layer her influences on top of one another in lieu of being truly progressive. Sadly, there’s no big pop culture moment to pick out on Born This Way, no track to elevate Gaga from popstar to pop artist. It has been promised that Gaga is on the edge of glory for a while now, but for all the ambition and glimpses of brilliance shown in Born This Way, she has yet to create a true pop masterclass.
Born This Way is now available to stream on Metro.co.uk and you can pre-order on Amazon UK
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