This Week On Billboard: Lady Gaga - Born This Way

This Week On Billboard is where I unabashedly critique the current no. 1 hit on Billboard.com, the major yardstick for what's "hot" in music today. In order to simplify the review for those who don't want to read the whole article, each song is given a "!" rating, in which the finest grabs five of them. It's been gone for a while, now it's back after a 22-month hiatus.

A review of this week's number one single right after you rejoice and love yourself today





This week on Billboard, we have reached a milestone! Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” is the 1000th number one single in Billboard Hot 100 history. It’s been a long and winding road, starting way back in 1958 with Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool” ((t5!) score: !!!!). I’ve been planning to write a blog post that will give a rating and a small review to every number one ever, but it seems a tad too ambitious and I really doubt that I can pull it off anyway. Aside from that, “Born This Way” also became the fastest-selling song in iTunes history. Of course, none of my friends or acquaintances that take music extra seriously has ever downloaded a track on iTunes, so take that achievement as you will.

The reason why this is selling like hotcakes is because it’s such a colossal anthem, especially to the gay community. Positive messages about homosexuality is scattered throughout the song’s lyrics: the song opens with the spoken word “it doesn’t matter if you love him, or the capital H-I-M (*)”; then she recalls a conversation with her mama when she was young, singing “’there’s nothing wrong with loving who you are,’ she said, ‘cause He made you perfect, babe.’”; and then she hammers in the point, chanting repeatedly “don’t be a drag, just be a queen.” Elton John himself has said that this will replace Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” as the unofficial anthem of all homosexuals. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with an unapologetic gay anthem (it’s wonderful, in fact), but the overtness of this is a little disconcerting. The problem with this being so blatant is that there will be homophobic/unprogressive people out there that will listen to this song, hear its pro-gay messages, and will (at best) say that “Born This Way” is not for them. Obviously, Lady Gaga’s intent of the song is to allow all kinds of teenagers to use gay issues as a powerful metaphor for whatever outsider angst they are personally going through, but we can’t really trust the defective intellect of today’s teenagers to realize that. In actuality, the phrase “born this way” is enough to get the point across—it’s still discernable that the message is about liberation and being proud to be yourself, but it’s also vague enough that it’s compliant to any type of apprehension that people experience.

(*) I have no idea what “Capital H-I-M” means. Either Lady Gaga meant “Him”, which means that she’s referring to the overly religious, anti-gay protestors “who love Him” and yet, question the fact that “He makes no mistakes”; or she meant “H.I.M.”, as in the Health Information Management; or she meant “HIM”, as in the Finnish Goth-Rock band. If you know, let me know.

Just look at Madonna, who is someone who has this inexplicit gay anthem thing down to a science; her entire Erotica-era output is more or less a self-help book for people coping with their outcast kind of life. And I’m sure Lady Gaga is aware of that, because “Born This Way” conspicuously sounds like “Express Yourself”, yet she still forgot to mimic Madonna’s songwriting approach. It’s true that you can’t invalidate a song for sounding like another song, especially since there are millions of songs out there and I’m certain that every melodic combination and chord progression has been released on record already. It’s not proof of an artist's “unoriginality”. However, it is a bit distracting. I know I already used this analogy once, but it’s like how I probably wouldn’t enjoy Taylor Kitsch in anything else because I’ll always see him as Friday Night Lights’ Tim Riggins. Moreover, “Born This Way” is now the third Lady Gaga single that has similarities to other popular songs, and it’s a little troubling. “Alejandro” shamelessly rips Ace Of Base’s “Don’t Turn Around”, and the synth lines of the promotional single “Dance In The Dark” and Depeche Mode’s “Strangelove” are very much alike. Also, you can also hear bits of TLC’s “Waterfalls” and David Guetta’s “When Love Takes Over” in “Born This Way”.

“Born This Way” is catchy and very danceable, but that’s about it. It relies too much on its massiveness, and it sounds very safe—at least compared to “Bad Romance”, “Poker Face”, and “Telephone”, which are all very complex sonically. This being the first single off of her forthcoming second studio album, Born This Way, it feels like this is basically a warm-up of what’s to come. Granted, “Born This Way” isn’t as strong as “Just Dance”, a song that was a very impressive lead-in to The Fame singles that were released afterwards; still though, I’m expecting the third and fourth single from her next album to be terrific as usual.



(t5!) score: !!!