(Polydor)
According to DJ White Shadow, one of its producers, the third Lady Gaga album sounds like "a golden spaceship touching down on a rainbow runway in a field of fresh mint." It is an album of sensory overload, but he may have been riffing slightly. In truth, Born This Way smells much more of hair products, poppers and exhaust fumes than anything so meadowy as mint.
The spaceship thing, especially, is misleading. Gaga may have given birth to an alien race in the eye-catching video for "Born This Way", but its parent album is recognisably terrestrial, dividing its affections between two landmasses ? the Americas and Europe. Born This Way runs big, timeless American themes ? freedom, self-actualisation, the romance of the road, the Boss, even Neil Young ? through the pointy prism of decadent European dance music. It effects Cher's transition from AOR diva to dance queen in reverse.
Consequently, track one, "Marry the Night", is a blowsy carpe diem affair which draws on hi-NRG club-pop for its modus operandi. "Government Hooker" features the memorable line "Put your hands on me/ John F Kennedy" before delivering a fairly confused account of relations between the individual and the state, whipped along by truncheon-slapping acrylic sounds. It's rather fun.
The refreshing and confounding thing about Gaga is that she doesn't sweat these kinds of contradictions. Featuring Clarence Clemons ? the saxophonist out of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band ? on a disco-pop album? Why not? The prostheses extending her bone structure, which recall both Marilyn Manson and, again, Cher? Baby, she was born this way. The cover of the album, however, is an homage to heavy metal imagery that's far more pose than promise. There's a song called "Heavy Metal Lover" here, but if it had a genre, you might call it "Vocoder'n'Moroder" rather than rock'n'roll. (It is, though, one of the album's unexpectedly sweet moments.)
Since Stefani Germanotta's ambitious art prank went global in 2008, one of the many accusations levelled at her is that her music privileges style over substance; that the Grammies egg, and the flesh couture and all the daft acts of millinery are more culturally noteworthy than the fairly standard dance-pop tunes. She talks the talk, incessantly: her creative team, Haus of Gaga, is charged with keeping Gaga in continual image flux. From the beginning, she has sought to ally herself with the creative misfits, when her tunes ? overtly commercial, and, until "Bad Romance" and "Telephone", pretty conventional ? were the stuff that their bullies could dance to without feeling a pang of guilt.
Now that she is sat atop a lofty pop-cultural stalagmite, however, Gaga has endeavoured to Say Something Important, a campaign begun with the album's first single, "Born This Way". It might have felt too big and too obvious a disco statement, but there are heartlands out there where the track undoubtedly hit home.
The freedom to be oneself, and to transcend the ordinariness of one's surroundings, is a classic trope of club music, pop and rock'n'roll. That prerogative is hammered home here at gale force on "The Edge of Glory", a song pitched somewhere so bombastic and hysterical that one is forced to genuflect.
The downside, though, is that Gaga's urge to liberate everyone from all yokes sometimes merely produces songs about doing things to your hair to spite your parents. Hair has long been a metaphor for all sorts of things ? religious affiliation, subcultural membership, a woman's state of mind ? but "Hair" ? soft-rock ballad on top, Eurodisco sides, great digital zigzag two-thirds of the way in ? doesn't really add to the coiffure canon. "Bad Kids", meanwhile, is the kind of rebel theme tune that gives rebel theme tunes a bad name, outlining various brattish behaviours before promising the naughty a sanctuary in Mama Monster's bosom.
Enthrallingly, though, the album never lets up, as her producers chuck entire studios at her fulsome vocals. Many songs here are crafted from radically different tunes all stitched together for an attention-deficit generation: a song may start with an intro from one genre, segue into a verse from another, switchback into a surprise pre-chorus, follow that with a fist-pump major-chord chorus, before inserting a hard-edged clubby middle eight. Amid all the maximalism and the references to "an American riding a dream", there are three out-and-out fascinating songs. One is the fierce recent single "Judas", in which one lover's betrayal is amped up to Judaeo-Christian levels.
Another is "Shei�e", rapped in a dominatrix's made-up German that is as comedy-Teutonic as techno gets. Finally, and in radical contrast, there's "Yo� and I". "Yo� And I" is an umlaut-toting digital country power ballad which contains two Springsteen references ? "born to run" and Nebraska ? as well as a lover playing Gaga Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" on her birthday. It is Gaga's unlikely heartland moment ? a bid, perhaps, to locate herself as an all-American balladeer as well as an art-disco avatar with tent pegs under her skin.
Naomi Watts Leonor Varela Joanne Montanez Michelle Obama Kerry Suseck
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