Guardian.co.uk – It’s one of the most tweeted, blogged and hyped pop singles in recent memory. The title was announced more than six months ago, with the lyrics leaked piecemeal by the lady herself. Elton John has claimed it’s “the new gay anthem”, Justin Bieber and James Blunt tried to predict what it would sound like, while others have criticised the racial terminology in the lyrics. It was due to premiere on US radio at 6am EST, but has since been shoved online by Perez Hilton.
So what does it sound like? Well, a lot like Madonna’s Express Yourself, so much so that those two words are currently trending on Twitter. There’s also some spoken-word bits a la the Material Girl (as no one calls her any more), but it doesn’t sound copycat, more a knowing nod and a cute wink.
Born This Way is a thumping, almost disco anthem that stomps along until the chorus crashes in with the weight of a discarded meat dress. Lyrically, it’s all love yourself whoever you are and “don’t be a drag, just be a queen”. Within the ridiculously camp musical context, the lyrics sound a lot less heavy-handed than it would suggest. One suspects it will probably shift a few copies.
Rolling Stone - “Don’t be a drag/Just be a queen,” Lady Gaga chants in this instant-classic club anthem, over the Eurodisco beats of producers Fernando Garibay and DJ White Shadow. She shouts to the gays, lesbians, bis, disabled, and monsters of all races, with the hilariously dippy line: “You’re black, white, beige, chola descent/You’re Lebanese, you’re Orient!” Despite the obvious tip of the cap to Madonna’s “Express Yourself” (which was just Madge’s knock-off of the Staple Singers’ “Respect Yourself”), it’s steeped in decades of gay disco tradition — it sounds a lot like Patrick Hernandez’s 1978 classic “Born To Be Alive.” “Born This Way” sums up all the complex Gaga mythos, all her politics and Catholic angst and smeared lipstick, in one brilliant pop blast.
Akon – “I think ‘Born This Way’ is the kind of record that if you are really paying attention you will get the full depth of Gaga as a songwriter. Sometimes the creative image hides the element of her lyrical content,” “That’s why she wanted to give people a better idea of what she was saying outside of her image when she dropped those lyrics.”
The track has a clear message: Everyone should be treated equally no matter who they are or what they believe in. “Gaga says a lot of stuff in her records,” Akon added. “But I know these parents and critics are not really listening to her lyrics. I know that for a fact. She’s singing about a lot of adult subject matter. She’s not just making dance records. Unfortunately, people pay more attention to what she is wearing.”
LA Times - In pop, liberation is often the linchpin in a marketing plan. Whether or not personal conviction compels an artist to tell stories that inspire listeners to strive toward greater compassion toward themselves and others, pop stars and their producers know that fan loyalty is most predictably earned by generating good times: A sad song usually gets its hooks into listeners one at a time, but with a party song, you can acquire the jumbo pack. The savviest crowd pleasers perfectly balance danceable music that sheds inhibitions like so many jackets thrown off on a dance floor with bearably pious lyrics that make getting down feel like a form of moral uplift.
Ladies and queens, Gaga gives you “Born This Way.”
Notable not only because it’s the first single from her upcoming album of the same title, but also as a statement of purpose for the monster-diva at this phase in her career, “Born This Way” is a freak anthem (one of the basic formations in Gaga’s double playbook of dance music and classic rock) that directly connects to the most powerful trend in current liberation movements — which doesn’t necessarily point toward the joyful subversion of norms that Gaga seems to otherwise champion.
“This belief in a predetermined sexual orientation is most visible in the emerging conservatism in the gay rights movement,” the communications professor Robert Alan Brookey has written, noting that “assimilationists attempt to show that homosexuals can embrace the same values they are supposed to threaten.” Instead of embracing pacifism, gays and lesbians fight to participate in the military; the dream of building new, polymorphous versions of sex and family gives way to the fight to have a matching-tux or white-gown wedding.
Gaga’s new song serves as the perfect expression of this bold mainstreaming of cultural outlaws. “Don’t be a drag, just be a queen!” she chants in her fierce voice, pointing her fans away from the incendiary trickery of the flamboyant transvestite and toward a more feel-good form of individual celebration.
She imitates Madonna’s deadpan rap from “Vogue,” but where Madge’s song celebrated the way Harlem drag artists (and stars like herself) made posing into a defensive warrior stance, Gaga offers a clever update on the Benneton ad concept of marketable variety — “You’re black, white, beige, chola descent, you’re Lebanese, you’re orient,” she intones, her clever if odd list ending on a pun that invokes both “Orientalism” and “orientation.” When Madonna recorded “Vogue” and “Express Yourself,” which “Born This Way” also recalls, intense arguments about what shape liberation should take dominated liberal circles. Gaga’s moment is different: “Born This Way” never hints that outsiders should remake the world in their image, instead invoking God and mommy to suggest that society’s frameworks need not change, only open their doors a little wider.
This is the same glass ceiling smasher’s dream of liberation promoted on “Glee” and through projects such as the It Gets Better Project; it’s pragmatic and focused on personal epiphanies rather than sweeping social change. Gaga’s clear embrace of this stance reinforces her status as the ideal rock star for a world struggling to center itself — for all her flash and grotesquery, she means to be a steadying force, not a revolutionary.
Yet “Born This Way” does unsettle things through one reliable route: its production. Whether its sound comes too close to one or another Madonna song seems beside the point; what current pop hit doesn’t go green by recycling something familiar? More intriguing is the unstable sonic base created by Gaga and her co-producers, Fernando Garibay and DJ White Shadow.
Though nowhere near as compelling as the work Gaga has done with RedOne, “Born This Way” throws a lot into its four minutes: a clacking hint of dubstep, the thump of Hi-NRG disco, a breakdown that borrows from the Latin dance floor that Garibay has previously visited with Enrique Iglesias. Mainstreaming diversity may be Gaga’s favorite political cause, but it’s something that music effortlessly accomplishes — at least in the good old utopian space of the sweaty club.
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