Date Posted: June 14, 2011
Print Edition: June 10, 2011
By Jennifer Colbourne (The Cascade) – Email
If it wasn’t apparent before, with her new album Born This Way, Lady Gaga is definitely well on her way to taking over the world. Gaga has always made a concerted effort to fashion herself into a pop-sensation; while some decry this as a waste of actual musical talent and ability, the fact of the matter is that Gaga, with her mega popularity, now has a voice that is literally heard by millions. Her first albums were named The Fame and The Fame Monster, for god’s sake. We know what she’s about. “Pop” music does, after all, require popularity. But just what Gaga has been accumulating all this fame for is only now becoming apparent in her latest album, Born This Way.
Born This Way, even more so than Gaga’s other albums, is the perfection of pop. Gaga has taken the sounds we loved from the seventies, eighties, and nineties and slicked it over with the shiny, expensive electronic dance-club sounds of the millennium (versus the shitty synthesizer sounds from the eighties, and the slightly less shitty synth sounds of the nineties). Take Queen, Abba, Michael Jackson, and Madonna, throw it all in a blender and voilà. This is not to imply that Gaga does not have her own unique sound, because she does – but like all great artists, she has integrated and built on the great music that has come before.
Gaga has hit all her bases with her tracks this time: she has a “European” song (“Scheiße”), a “Latin” song (“Americano”), even a “Country” song (“Yoü and I”), a track which, honest to god, sounds like Shania Twain wrote it. She also made sure to throw in a few relatable songs for all the emo-teens out there (“Hair” and “Bad Kids”). Her sound is so diverse on this album, at least one track is bound to appeal to somebody – and that’s the point. Gaga is making herself likeable to fans of other genres – although it’s doubtful “Heavy Metal Lover” is going to secure her the heavy metal fan club.
Of course, most of her album, like much of her work, is dance-club oriented, and the few songs that aren’t are remixed to be so on the extended album (or the other way around, as in the case of the song “Born This Way,” remixed to sound like a new country song). Let’s face it, you’ll hit the widest audience if you produce music that’s played in bars. Period. Lady Gaga knows how to pump out dance beats; Akon’s patronage has clearly paid off.
Yet Born This Way is much more than an insanely catchy pop album. Gaga is a lousy lyricist, although in the current pop scene, she’s still better than most. Still, a Bob Dylan she ain’t. What’s important about Lady Gaga’s lyrics is the content and, although it may keep her from being a poet, the extreme simplicity of these lyrics ensures that her message comes through loud and ringing. What is Gaga battling? Religious extremism, an issue close to Gaga’s heart, being raised Roman Catholic and attending Catholic school as a teen. It may seem an irrelevant issue here in pacific, inclusive Canada, but in the USA extremism is endemic. Particularly as a woman who identifies sexually as bi, and with many gay friends, it is she herself and those she loves who are sufferers at the hands of prejudiced, homophobic extremists.
So Gaga, like the many who have come before her, is putting her fame toward cultural change through the medium of pop. And you have to hand it to her; this is a pretty successful way to go about it. Sure, you can write a university thesis on gay rights that nobody will read except like-minded academics; or, you can spoon-feed it to the masses. And so we have the song “Born This Way”: “he made you perfect”; “God makes no mistakes”; “a different lover is not a sin.” It’s not a ground breaking message, but a needed one nonetheless. With the exception of only a couple of songs, the entire album is filled with religious criticism, “Judas” being barely the tip of the iceberg; “I won’t speak your / Jesus Christo” (“Americano”), declares Gaga. Lady Gaga has hit it right on when she says that “Jesus is the new Black” (“Black Jesus † Amen Fashion”); and, fashion being changeable, she’s out to make “tolerance” in, and extremism “out.”
