We know now that when Lady Gaga first bounded onto the international stage in 2008, Stefani Germanotta already believed herself to be the most powerful woman on earth. Her off the wall image, grotesque dance pop and headline-making shock tactics appeared like something from another planet, but because she fought so fiercely to defend it all, we couldn’t help but give it a chance.
I don’t need to tell you what happened next. 23 million albums, 69 million singles, five Grammys, one meat dress and an untalliable number of fans (AKA her little monsters) sum it up pretty well.
When things finally did click, we hardly expected it to come at the paws of a 10-year-old girl. Gaga’s status as a pop game-changer was finally cemented when she tweeted a link to a YouTube clip of a minuscule Canadian named Maria Aragon singing ‘Born This Way’ at a ginormous keyboard, a video which has now been viewed 33 million times. The sight of this particularly little monster singing lines like “No matter gay, straight, or bi/Lesbian, transgendered life/I’m on the right track baby/I was born to survive” with all the ferocity and conviction of a 25-year superstar was the oddest and most humbling Gaga moment yet.
There’s just no ignoring the message that thrusts forward on Ms. Germanotta’s second album. Lyrics like “I scream ‘Mom and Dad’, Why can’t I be who I wanna be?” (‘Hair’) and “I’m a bitch/I’m a loser baby I should quit” (‘Bad Kids’) are tailor-made to cater to the insecure and hormone-ridden. Combined with a few indiscernible religious motifs (see ‘Judas’ and ‘Bloody Mary’) and one triumphant piano-driven lovesong (‘You And I’), the twin themes of freedom and self-expression are the backbone of the record. If The Fame was prompting ‘Let’s Dance’, Born This Way is demanding “Love the person that you are”, and saying it with all the might of a rabid ring announcer.
Gaga’s unapologetic 14-tracker simmers with gothic strings, spooky opera vocals, ‘70s cheese guitar (thanks, Brian May!), sultry sax (thanks, Clarence Clemons!) and lyrics in French, German and French, all of which become unfortunately smothered in pulsating RedOne-brand dance wallops. There are a few immediate write-offs; the forgettable ‘Highway Unicorn (Road To Love)’, plodding synth travesty ‘Heavy Metal Lover’ and something horrid called ‘Electric Chapel’ that pretty much speaks for itself.
On the other hand, parts of ‘Edge Of Glory’ are immensely satisfying and will be instrumental in your automobile and cable television purchases over the next 12 months. Elsewhere, ‘Americano’ marries ‘That’s Amore’ and ‘Mambo Italiano’ on a Eurodisco dancefloor, ‘Scheiße’ is deliciously dirty and for all its shameless inanity, ‘Government Hooker’ is an instantly lovable floorfiller.
As expected, Born This Way is Madonna all over. Songs like ‘Bad Kids’ tread the fine line between homage and theft and Gaga even calls out a ‘black Jesus’ in one of the song titles on the special edition.
Ironically, the unapologetic freakdom that won Gaga the respect of millions, is the very thing that makes Born This Way so exhausting. The album throbs along with as much power as its message, but sadly, Gaga and the people around her have been unable to edit the chaos in her increasingly brilliant brain. She didn’t do herself any favours by promising fans at a show in Poland that her second LP was “the greatest album of the decade”. But then, Gaga is simply too big to fail - at the time of writing, it is undeniably the biggest album of the year, boasting the highest first week sales of 2011 so far.
Whether Lady Gaga is a heartless, fame-hungry pop caricature or a hyper-sexualised Mother Teresa who just wants to bring a morsel of frivolous joy into people’s lives, what’s important now is that she is, beyond all doubt, bringing that morsel of frivolous joy into people’s lives. Accusations that Lady Gaga equals Madonna 2.0 are easily justified, but if she wasn’t doing what she’s doing, and doing it with such consistent snarling intensity, little Maria Aragon would probably have to resort to “Sex in the air/I don’t care/I love the smell of it”. Her punchbag pop may range from the essential to the disposable, but Gaga’s cultural impact is priceless.