Lady Gaga debuts 'Born This Way'
Hyped for weeks, with cover art and then lyrics revealed as if they were sacred objects, the new Lady Gaga single, “Born this Way,” debuted Friday on her Web site.
It’s a big blast of disco fever – thumping drums, rattling percussion, an army of synthesizers, a huge wave-your-glow-sticks chorus -- in the mold of self-empowerment anthems such as Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” and Madonna’s “Express Yourself.” In fact, it sounds so much like the 1989 Madonna classic that it will only fuel the convictions of those who feel that Gaga is just a 21st Century knockoff of the Material Girl, herself a canny appropriator of past genre- and gender-bending artists.
Gaga’s be-yourself lyrics amplify a message that underlines many of her songs and videos, but never as explicitly as this. It’s her life story recast as a pep talk from her mother: “ ‘There’s nothin’ wrong with lovin who you are’/ she said, ‘Cause he made you perfect, babe.’ ”
Her celebration of otherness echoes Michael Jackson’s 1991 single “Black or White,” and takes it several provocative steps further to explicitly encompass the gay community: “A different lover is not a sin” and “Don’t be a drag, just be a queen.”
One of Gaga’s charms is that she is not the typical diva – she goes out of her way to accent her differences, her lack of conventional beauty, her refusal to conform to mainstream notions of sexiness or femininity. “Born This Way” puts that stance in strong, sometimes hamfisted language. Nothing like delivering a message and then banging your audience over the head with it, right down to the hand-clapping gospel-tinged outro. But it’s a message not heard often enough in pop music, and it’s a bold move for one of the top-selling artists of the last couple years to be delivering it.
Lady Gaga’s next album, also called “Born This Way,” is due in May.
greg@gregkot.com