January 26, 2012
#9: Lady Gaga - Born This Way (Deluxe Edition) It took me a long time to find a way into this album. My issues with it began long before it had been released, and were rooted in the exhaustive promotional campaign that led up to the release date of the title track and first single. Lyric snatches, 45-second clips on youtube, random goings-on at European fashion shows, and on and on. Hell, I don’t have to tell you—if you’re reading this, you lived through it. It was enough to wear out a diehard fan, and I should know, because I was a diehard fan, and it totally wore me out. The worst part was that the song itself, once it arrived, was a big letdown. I could hear why some people said it was a ripoff of Madonna’s “Express Yourself,” but that wasn’t what bothered me. What got to me was the way that Gaga’s demented musical personality was completely absent from the song. This didn’t sound like the work of the woman who’d won my heart by playing a bizarre piano solo while covered in fake blood live on MTV—it was thoroughly sanitized, as if it had been designed to perfectly appeal to some hypothetical middle American mainstream with completely average tastes. Even a terrible song would have been more interesting; this was just kind of bland. It wasn’t until months later that I started to realize that in “Born This Way,” Lady Gaga had written a song intended to infiltrate the mainstream—it was the ultimate musical sugar pill, designed to appeal to kids and their parents. And it was written in that way in order to get lyrics like “No matter gay, straight, or bi; lesbian, transgender life—I’m on the right track, baby, I was born to survive” into heavy rotation on the pop radio stations of middle America. Lady Gaga has long been supportive and protective of her fans in a manner that goes above and beyond the call of duty for your average million-selling pop star, and I’d long had a half-formed theory kicking around the back of my mind about that. The “Born This Way” thing crystallized that theory for me, and it goes as follows: Lady Gaga is the sort of insecure drama-club kid who took to ostentatious displays of non-conformity as a way to reclaim her self-confidence. Whether it’s completely worked for her is open to question (especially in light of how many times I’ve seen her cry during interviews), but it’s definitely made her famous, and at a relatively young age (she was 23 when “Pokerface” hit #1), young enough to mean that those horrible high school memories are still pretty fresh in her mind. And now that she’s famous, she’s turned her career into a quixotic quest to save all the tweens and teenagers who are just like she was at that age, suffering through the same sort of outcast misery she went through. I can’t prove this, but I think that “Born This Way” was created as a conscious attempt to reach out to everyone in her predominantly youthful audience who might feel ostracized, and to unite them all under a banner of universal tolerance and loving themselves and each other for who they are. Pretty tall order for a pop song, right? As a result, we end up with a song that’s lyrically and musically calculated to get over with a maximum amount of people; the unfortunate corollary is that “Born This Way” is reduced in quality by all the visible seams, from the on-the-nose Madonna pastiche of the music to the catchphrase-packed lyrics—which sometimes trip over themselves a bit, as when Lady Gaga uses the word “orient” to mean “Asian” because it fits with the rhyme scheme. As much thought as obviously went into this song, it’s clear that that decision could have used a little more processing time. But the title track is not the entire album, which I eventually figured out after several months of trepidation. I only finally decided to give the whole thing a listen once the third single, “Edge Of Glory,” was released. “Judas” had been a bit better than the title track, in my estimation, and clearly Gaga was back to her usual subject matter by writing a song that deliberately inverted typical Christian iconography, and having the temerity to do so in a single released during Holy Week. But still, “Judas” is less than grade-A material by Gaga’s standards, and “Edge Of Glory” was the first song from this album that convinced me that she was still capable of producing songs as good as “Paparazzi” and “Dance In The Dark.” It has a yearning feel that is often identified with the 80s era output of a few different musicians—U2, Bruce Springsteen, etc. This makes it appropriate that Clarence Clemons contributes a sax solo to this song. The sax solo isn’t what makes it great, though; Gaga’s powerful vocal delivery on the verses, which is often contrasted against a subtle, moody backing track, pushes the whole song to a series of triumphant choruses. As the final song on the album, this makes the perfect high note with which to go out. Things come in equally powerfully in “Marry The Night,” which has a churchy-sounding introductory verse that leads right into a driving, upbeat pop tune that musically splits the difference between disco and new wave. There are a whole bunch of other classic tunes here, too, and considering how slight the title track and “Judas” are when compared to the lion’s share of material here, it seems a real shame that they were the first two singles. Of course, not all of the truly great tracks here could be singles. “Scheisse,” a song that your 12-year-old cousin could probably tell you is titled after the German word for “shit,” is a pounding industrial tune with fake-German lyrics that are almost silly, until the chorus, which is in real English, undermines them with serious sentiments like “When you’re a strong female, you don’t need permission” and “I wish I could be strong without this scheisse.” These lyrics, plus the bridge, on which she says, “Love is objectified by what men say is right,” remind me in some ways of the lyrics Ian MacKaye wrote for Fugazi’s song “Suggestion,” in which he imagined himself a woman. “Why can’t I walk down the street free of suggestion?” he sang. “Is my body my only trait in the eyes of men?” I know the punk purists might hate me for saying this, but I think Lady Gaga’s asking some of those same questions, in her own unorthodox way, on “Scheisse”—and unlike Ian MacKaye, she’s speaking from actual firsthand experience!  Then there’s “Hair,” a song that I loved the very first time I heard it, but have had to think about for a lot longer before I really felt like I understood it. Its narration from the point of view of a teenaged girl who is fighting with her parents about how she does her hair, which she sees as a metaphor for her individuality, is clearly role-playing. It may be her own younger self that Gaga is bringing to life here, or a character she’s invented out of whole cloth. Regardless, it’s a very plausible characterization—one in which I recognize my own teenaged self. In their struggles to become fully-formed adults with individual identities, teenagers often take principled stands on issues that seem less than substantial to people only a few years older than them; haircuts and clothes are common examples. It’s easy for a listener to hear lines like “If I’m hot shot, Mom will cut my hair at night, and in the morning I’m shorn of my identity” as laughably meaningless teenage melodrama. And yet, Lady Gaga completely inhabits this mindset, at no point showing anything less than total respect for the character whose viewpoint she’s singing from, delivering lines like “Sometimes I want some raccoons or red highlights just because I want my friends to think I’m dynamite” without an ounce of implied scorn. But later in the song, she contrasts the line “I just want to be free, I just want to be me,” with the next line: “And I want lots of friends who invite me to their parties.” There’s something kind of stunning about the coupling throughout this song of shallow, immature statements with open, sincere statements of universal concerns. The juxtaposition amounts to a remarkable and accurate insight into the human condition, and also produces what was my single favorite lyric of 2011: “I just want to be myself and I want you to love me for who I am.” Who hasn’t felt that? The fact that this line begins a chorus that deals mostly with the idea that the song’s narrator only feels free as long as she’s able to style her hair however outlandishly she wishes doesn’t take away from its impact in the least. If anything, it adds to the song’s depth—because this is who we all are, in the end. Those of us whose adolescence is long in the rearview might wish to claim that we’ve shed 100% of the hangups about appearance and fitting in that we had as teenagers, but deep down we know that’s bullshit. By writing “Hair” in the way she wrote it, Gaga has created a song that can both be an anthem for shallow teenage rebellions that aren’t actually that important but can feel like they are when you’re living through those difficult years, and can also serve as a reminder to older listeners that we’re not so different from the silly teeange kids with ridiculous haircuts and overdone eye makeup that we sometimes see at the mall. There are a lot of other great songs on here, but I think I was spoiled a bit by The Fame Monster, which was an eight-song, 34-minute slice of perverse pop perfection. There’s no way I could cut Born This Way down to eight songs—in fact, the three bonus tracks on the 17-song deluxe edition include two of my favorite tracks from the album, and I even think the Country Roads version of “Born This Way,” from the remix disc, merits inclusion as part of the album proper. Having said that, though, it’s definitely a bit too long, and a 13-song version that deleted “Judas,” “Americano,” “Bloody Mary,” “Fashion Of His Love,” and replaced the title track with the Country Roads version would probably have scored better with me. Of course, the fact that I can’t even figure out which of the 13 remaining songs I’d delete to get it down to a more fitting 12-song length just proves that I might be nitpicking too much—even at 17 (or 18) songs long, this album is pretty great. I spent most of my life a rockist, the sort of person who tended to evaluate musicians strictly on an album level, and couldn’t handle giving someone credit for two or three songs that I loved, no matter how great they were, if the rest of the album consisted of mediocre filler. Over the last few years, I’ve opened my mind a lot more to chart pop, and I’ve come to accept the fact that, with an artist like Rihanna, Kanye West, or Kelly Clarkson, I might love a couple of their singles but not be all that excited about their albums. Lady Gaga’s somewhat unusual ability to produce mainstream electronic pop albums that sustain a high level of quality for the vast majority of their duration, even at bloated lengths, puts her a cut above a lot of other pop musicians who do at least occasionally produce songs I love. That said, if she could cut back on the bloat a little bit, I’d be even happier.

#9: Lady Gaga - Born This Way (Deluxe Edition)

It took me a long time to find a way into this album. My issues with it began long before it had been released, and were rooted in the exhaustive promotional campaign that led up to the release date of the title track and first single. Lyric snatches, 45-second clips on youtube, random goings-on at European fashion shows, and on and on. Hell, I don’t have to tell you—if you’re reading this, you lived through it. It was enough to wear out a diehard fan, and I should know, because I was a diehard fan, and it totally wore me out. The worst part was that the song itself, once it arrived, was a big letdown. I could hear why some people said it was a ripoff of Madonna’s “Express Yourself,” but that wasn’t what bothered me. What got to me was the way that Gaga’s demented musical personality was completely absent from the song. This didn’t sound like the work of the woman who’d won my heart by playing a bizarre piano solo while covered in fake blood live on MTV—it was thoroughly sanitized, as if it had been designed to perfectly appeal to some hypothetical middle American mainstream with completely average tastes. Even a terrible song would have been more interesting; this was just kind of bland.

It wasn’t until months later that I started to realize that in “Born This Way,” Lady Gaga had written a song intended to infiltrate the mainstream—it was the ultimate musical sugar pill, designed to appeal to kids and their parents. And it was written in that way in order to get lyrics like “No matter gay, straight, or bi; lesbian, transgender life—I’m on the right track, baby, I was born to survive” into heavy rotation on the pop radio stations of middle America. Lady Gaga has long been supportive and protective of her fans in a manner that goes above and beyond the call of duty for your average million-selling pop star, and I’d long had a half-formed theory kicking around the back of my mind about that. The “Born This Way” thing crystallized that theory for me, and it goes as follows: Lady Gaga is the sort of insecure drama-club kid who took to ostentatious displays of non-conformity as a way to reclaim her self-confidence. Whether it’s completely worked for her is open to question (especially in light of how many times I’ve seen her cry during interviews), but it’s definitely made her famous, and at a relatively young age (she was 23 when “Pokerface” hit #1), young enough to mean that those horrible high school memories are still pretty fresh in her mind. And now that she’s famous, she’s turned her career into a quixotic quest to save all the tweens and teenagers who are just like she was at that age, suffering through the same sort of outcast misery she went through.

I can’t prove this, but I think that “Born This Way” was created as a conscious attempt to reach out to everyone in her predominantly youthful audience who might feel ostracized, and to unite them all under a banner of universal tolerance and loving themselves and each other for who they are. Pretty tall order for a pop song, right? As a result, we end up with a song that’s lyrically and musically calculated to get over with a maximum amount of people; the unfortunate corollary is that “Born This Way” is reduced in quality by all the visible seams, from the on-the-nose Madonna pastiche of the music to the catchphrase-packed lyrics—which sometimes trip over themselves a bit, as when Lady Gaga uses the word “orient” to mean “Asian” because it fits with the rhyme scheme. As much thought as obviously went into this song, it’s clear that that decision could have used a little more processing time.

But the title track is not the entire album, which I eventually figured out after several months of trepidation. I only finally decided to give the whole thing a listen once the third single, “Edge Of Glory,” was released. “Judas” had been a bit better than the title track, in my estimation, and clearly Gaga was back to her usual subject matter by writing a song that deliberately inverted typical Christian iconography, and having the temerity to do so in a single released during Holy Week. But still, “Judas” is less than grade-A material by Gaga’s standards, and “Edge Of Glory” was the first song from this album that convinced me that she was still capable of producing songs as good as “Paparazzi” and “Dance In The Dark.” It has a yearning feel that is often identified with the 80s era output of a few different musicians—U2, Bruce Springsteen, etc. This makes it appropriate that Clarence Clemons contributes a sax solo to this song. The sax solo isn’t what makes it great, though; Gaga’s powerful vocal delivery on the verses, which is often contrasted against a subtle, moody backing track, pushes the whole song to a series of triumphant choruses. As the final song on the album, this makes the perfect high note with which to go out.

Things come in equally powerfully in “Marry The Night,” which has a churchy-sounding introductory verse that leads right into a driving, upbeat pop tune that musically splits the difference between disco and new wave. There are a whole bunch of other classic tunes here, too, and considering how slight the title track and “Judas” are when compared to the lion’s share of material here, it seems a real shame that they were the first two singles. Of course, not all of the truly great tracks here could be singles. “Scheisse,” a song that your 12-year-old cousin could probably tell you is titled after the German word for “shit,” is a pounding industrial tune with fake-German lyrics that are almost silly, until the chorus, which is in real English, undermines them with serious sentiments like “When you’re a strong female, you don’t need permission” and “I wish I could be strong without this scheisse.” These lyrics, plus the bridge, on which she says, “Love is objectified by what men say is right,” remind me in some ways of the lyrics Ian MacKaye wrote for Fugazi’s song “Suggestion,” in which he imagined himself a woman. “Why can’t I walk down the street free of suggestion?” he sang. “Is my body my only trait in the eyes of men?” I know the punk purists might hate me for saying this, but I think Lady Gaga’s asking some of those same questions, in her own unorthodox way, on “Scheisse”—and unlike Ian MacKaye, she’s speaking from actual firsthand experience! 

Then there’s “Hair,” a song that I loved the very first time I heard it, but have had to think about for a lot longer before I really felt like I understood it. Its narration from the point of view of a teenaged girl who is fighting with her parents about how she does her hair, which she sees as a metaphor for her individuality, is clearly role-playing. It may be her own younger self that Gaga is bringing to life here, or a character she’s invented out of whole cloth. Regardless, it’s a very plausible characterization—one in which I recognize my own teenaged self. In their struggles to become fully-formed adults with individual identities, teenagers often take principled stands on issues that seem less than substantial to people only a few years older than them; haircuts and clothes are common examples. It’s easy for a listener to hear lines like “If I’m hot shot, Mom will cut my hair at night, and in the morning I’m shorn of my identity” as laughably meaningless teenage melodrama.

And yet, Lady Gaga completely inhabits this mindset, at no point showing anything less than total respect for the character whose viewpoint she’s singing from, delivering lines like “Sometimes I want some raccoons or red highlights just because I want my friends to think I’m dynamite” without an ounce of implied scorn. But later in the song, she contrasts the line “I just want to be free, I just want to be me,” with the next line: “And I want lots of friends who invite me to their parties.” There’s something kind of stunning about the coupling throughout this song of shallow, immature statements with open, sincere statements of universal concerns. The juxtaposition amounts to a remarkable and accurate insight into the human condition, and also produces what was my single favorite lyric of 2011: “I just want to be myself and I want you to love me for who I am.” Who hasn’t felt that?

The fact that this line begins a chorus that deals mostly with the idea that the song’s narrator only feels free as long as she’s able to style her hair however outlandishly she wishes doesn’t take away from its impact in the least. If anything, it adds to the song’s depth—because this is who we all are, in the end. Those of us whose adolescence is long in the rearview might wish to claim that we’ve shed 100% of the hangups about appearance and fitting in that we had as teenagers, but deep down we know that’s bullshit. By writing “Hair” in the way she wrote it, Gaga has created a song that can both be an anthem for shallow teenage rebellions that aren’t actually that important but can feel like they are when you’re living through those difficult years, and can also serve as a reminder to older listeners that we’re not so different from the silly teeange kids with ridiculous haircuts and overdone eye makeup that we sometimes see at the mall.

There are a lot of other great songs on here, but I think I was spoiled a bit by The Fame Monster, which was an eight-song, 34-minute slice of perverse pop perfection. There’s no way I could cut Born This Way down to eight songs—in fact, the three bonus tracks on the 17-song deluxe edition include two of my favorite tracks from the album, and I even think the Country Roads version of “Born This Way,” from the remix disc, merits inclusion as part of the album proper. Having said that, though, it’s definitely a bit too long, and a 13-song version that deleted “Judas,” “Americano,” “Bloody Mary,” “Fashion Of His Love,” and replaced the title track with the Country Roads version would probably have scored better with me.

Of course, the fact that I can’t even figure out which of the 13 remaining songs I’d delete to get it down to a more fitting 12-song length just proves that I might be nitpicking too much—even at 17 (or 18) songs long, this album is pretty great. I spent most of my life a rockist, the sort of person who tended to evaluate musicians strictly on an album level, and couldn’t handle giving someone credit for two or three songs that I loved, no matter how great they were, if the rest of the album consisted of mediocre filler. Over the last few years, I’ve opened my mind a lot more to chart pop, and I’ve come to accept the fact that, with an artist like Rihanna, Kanye West, or Kelly Clarkson, I might love a couple of their singles but not be all that excited about their albums. Lady Gaga’s somewhat unusual ability to produce mainstream electronic pop albums that sustain a high level of quality for the vast majority of their duration, even at bloated lengths, puts her a cut above a lot of other pop musicians who do at least occasionally produce songs I love. That said, if she could cut back on the bloat a little bit, I’d be even happier.

8:09pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z-FUayFQZ9xA
(Notes: 9)
  
Filed under: Top 20 of 2011 
  1. andrewtsks posted this