Lady Gaga
'Born This Way'
(Universal)



'Born This Way', the new #1 single, is Lady Gaga's third Australian number one single, after 'Poker Face' and 'Just Dance' (she's also had three singles that got to #2 – 'Paparazzi', 'Bad Romance', and 'Alejandro'). Last week's #1, 'S&M' by Rihanna, which was #1 for two weeks, is now at #2. 'Born This Way' was written by Lady Gaga, and was co-produced by Gaga, Fernando Garibay and DJ White Shadow. Garibay is actually an A&R guy for Interscope Records, whose biggest production credit is 'Stars Are Blind' by Paris Hilton, while DJ White Shadow is a mixtape artist who Gaga seems to have plucked out of relative obscurity. All signs here, then, point to this song being pretty much Gaga's show. She wrote and co-produced the song, and it sounds like it – it doesn't quite have the studied slickness or the songwriter-by-committee blandness of songs by professional songwriters and producers like Dr Luke.

In a lot of ways, 'Just Dance', Lady Gaga's debut single, was ground zero for chart pop as we now know it. The song not only went sextuple platinum but was the fourth biggest-selling single of the 2000s, according to ARIA. And it's fair to say that 'Just Dance', and Lady Gaga in general, have been very influential in the fickle novelty-driven world of pop. Before Lady Gaga, the dominant paradigm in chart pop seemed to be Timbaland/Neptunes-style sparse R&B with skittering syncopated beats (think 'Hot In Herre' by Nelly, 'I'm a Slave 4 U' by Britney Spears, or 'Sexyback' by Justin Timberlake). After 'Just Dance', there has been a definite move back to unashamed teen-pop with more straightforward disco beats – think Ke$ha's 'Tik Tok' or Rihanna's 'S&M'.

It's not coincidence that a producer like Max Martin, who wrote 'Baby One More Time' for Britney Spears, and several Backstreet Boys tunes, has enjoyed a career resurgence in the last few years. And Jason Derulo's 'In My Head' is the most blatant 'Just Dance' ripoff I've heard, and it got to #1 as a result. People who buy pop singles just can't get enough of the sound of this stuff right now.

And I think it's true that, to be able to influence the course of pop takes not only luck, but a canny mind, well-versed in music history and pop culture. It's probably fair to say that most smart people well versed in pop culture – pop nerds - rarely strut around confidently whilst half-naked, singing what are basically mind-numbing nursery-rhyme disco tunes. But Lady Gaga wasn't always the confident disco diva. She grew up a chubby, bookish kid, and was evidently picked on (like most kids, really). At college, she wrote a long honours thesis on the pop art of Damien Hirst (most famous for his jewel-encrusted skull) and Spencer Tunick (most famous for convincing thousands of people to strip off in public places, like the foregrounds of the Sydney Opera House). This is likely where her interest in avant-garde performance art derives from – for example, as Anwyn Crawford's article in Frieze demonstrates, there's a long history of people wearing meat in avant-garde performance art. Famously, Lady Gaga entered a talent quest while at college, singing original tunes while she played piano; in the YouTube footage below she sounds miles away from her current sound, sounding somewhere in between Norah Jones and Fiona Apple.



After some drug experimentation, she reinvented herself as the Lady Gaga we know today, but her music as Lady Gaga still sounds like she's assimilated a fair chunk of pop culture history – there's a song on The Fame Monster called 'Speechless' which is more or less a Queen pastiche, 'Bad Romance' references several Alfred Hitchcock movies, there's a lot of Quentin Tarantino about the video clip to 'Telephone', and I'd swear her egginess as the Grammys was inspired in part by Spinal Tap. This kind of casual knowledge of and use of pop culture leads cultural studies types to tend to see a fellow traveller, which is probably why there has been so much bandwidth used to analyse the meaning of her success. 

At the same time, most of Lady Gaga's fans are unlikely to care about Damien Hirst and Alfred Hitchcock, or even Queen and Madonna. What is getting them, I think, is partly the catchy songs, but mostly Gaga's studied freakishness. To someone with an eye on art history, Lady Gaga coming to the Grammys in an egg might be a reference to a particular performance artist, but I think to most of her fans, Lady Gaga in an egg is Lady Gaga being entertainingly freaky. She seems to have made a particular effort to try to appeal to oddball kids, the kind who don't really fit in at school because they're too weird, because they look strange, act eccentrically, or don't have the same interests. For example, she tweets enthusiastically about her fans being 'little monsters'. In the 1990s, when I was a teenager, such teens tended to gravitate towards gothy stuff like Marilyn Manson, and the equivalent kids of a few years later probably gravitated towards emo. Some of them now obviously gravitate towards Lady Gaga. There are more of these kind of people in her fanbase than in the fanbase of most pop starlets, I suppose; I remember a friend who worked at the Sydney Entertainment Centre for a while commenting on Facebook that Lady Gaga's fans were the weirdest looking people (and I suspect Lady Gaga would take that as a compliment).

Perhaps the thing most interesting about 'Born This Way' is that it is the first Lady Gaga single to explicitly acknowledge this kind of oddball fan. Before 'Born This Way', Lady Gaga's lyrics and music were not at one with her image. In songs like 'Bad Romance' or 'Just Dance', there was little in the lyrics which showed that she identified as a weirdo. It's not incredibly obvious from the music in 'Poker Face' that Lady Gaga is the kind of person who would arrive at the Grammys in an egg. 'Born This Way', on the other hand, is explicitly a celebration of Gaga's “little monsters”, explicitly about being proud to be yourself, however weird you might be. The song is full to the brim with self-esteem boosting lyrics like “Whether life's disabilities left you outcast, bullied, or teased/ rejoice and love yourself today/ 'Cause baby you were born this way”. 

Some wags have commented on the irony of a song like 'Born This Way' that celebrates outcasts debuting at #1 in dozens of countries around the world – instead of outcasts, they say, don't they look a lot more like the mainstream? But it's worth remembering that 'Born This Way' has sold a little over 30,000 copies in its first week in Australia. The Australian Bureau of Statistics currently estimates the Australian population to be around 22.5 million. This means that a massive 0.13% of the population bought 'Born This Way' last week. It's entirely possible that a decent amount of this 0.13% - presumably Lady Gaga's biggest fans, the ones who'll actually pay money for a song without knowing it very well - are actually outcasts! It's fair to say that even chart pop these days is more or less a niche rather than the mainstream, because 0.13% of people don't quite make up a mainstream. 

The other thing about 'Born This Way' is that you can more or less take it to be a celebration of weirdos, or you could more specifically take it to be a celebration of LGBT people. In the song, Lady Gaga helpfully but slightly confusingly explains that “no matter gay, straight, or bi, lesbian, transgendered life, I'm on the right track baby”. As an interesting article in the Guardian by music writer Jon Savage explained, there is a long history of songs that are a celebration of the gay lifestyle. In fact, a disco hit by Valentino called “I Was Born This Way”, released on Motown in 1975, was possibly the very first song explicitly written as a celebration of the gay community. And I suspect the similarity between the title of that song and the one I'm writing about here is not coincidental. 


Valentino 'I Was Born This Way'

After all, the idea that gay people are born that way is a pretty common theme in public discussions about gay rights. For example, Stephen Fry was famously quoted as saying, “I suppose [my homosexuality] all began when I came out of the womb. I looked back up at my mother and said, 'That's the last time I'm coming out one of those.'" And it's a powerful argument; it's pretty cruel, after all, to tell people that they're being immoral and are going to hell for desiring things that they seem to be genetically programmed to desire. Mind you, Jesse Bering, a gay psychologist, has argued forcefully in Scientific American that homosexuality is probably a mixture of nature and nurture, that parenting probably has something to do with it too. So it's probably likely that 'Born This Way' is not strictly scientifically accurate. Then again, Lady Gaga is not writing a scientific paper, but is instead attempting to convince bullied, beaten-up kids that they should be proud of who they are. And it's probably still a necessary message; after all, here in Australia, marriage celebrants are legally obligated to point out that marriage is between a man and a woman, and we still have an elected member of the federal parliament, Bob Katter, who seriously claims to have no gay people living in his electorate.

'Born This Way' clearly works as a dancefloor filler, it has the requisite thumping 'four-to-the-floor' disco beats, and the synth stabs and electronic gurgles that permeate the song sound pretty convincing in this context. The song has an ambitious ADHD kind of arrangement - it rarely goes 20 seconds without introducing something new or abruptly changing tack. As a song, however – a collection of melodies and lyrics – I'm less convinced. This kind of hyperactive arrangement needs a pretty solid base to work off, and I'm not sure 'Born This Way' is the strongest song.

To my mind, it has two major faults. Firstly, the lyrics far too often sound like they've been awkwardly shoehorned into the melody – the stresses and emphases in the words don't match up with the stresses and emphases in the melody. You can hear this most prominently in lines like “I'm beautiful in my way” in the chorus, for example – the way Gaga sings “beautiFUL” where most English speakers would say “BEAUTiful” makes the line sound a bit awkward and ungainly, which is not what you want when you're earnestly singing about beauty.

Secondly, the chorus is a bit underwhelming. A great pop song almost always has a great pop chorus, and Lady Gaga's discography is full of them, in songs like 'Bad Romance' or 'Poker Face'. The chorus in pop is usually meant to soar away from the rest of song – it should sound different to the verse, it should be catchier than the verse, and it should feel like it's a climax. In 'Born This Way', however, the chorus feels fairly static – it's too similar to the verse, it's not that much catchier than the verse, and it doesn't feel like a climax the way that it should. In fact, there's a harmony vocal that Gaga sings against the chorus melody later on in the song which sounds to me like it would have been a better chorus melody, with more jumps and excitement about it. Between the awkward lyrics and the underwhelming chorus, I wouldn't be surprised if 'Born This Way' quietly slides down the charts once the novelty of a new Lady Gaga single has worn off.

About now, you're probably expecting me to dig into Lady Gaga for ripping off Madonna's 'Express Yourself' (link), which is the main thing about the song that most people seem to have noticed.


Madonna 'Express Yourself'

But I say meh to that. The verse melody certainly takes influence from 'Express Yourself' (without being quite close enough for Madonna to be able to sue), but pop music is pretty all about cannibalising parts out of other songs and repurposing them. And it always has been about this, whether you realise it or not. 'Express Yourself' itself pretty shamelessly rips off the excellent 'Respect Yourself', a Stax side by the Staple Singers from 1971. 'Respect Yourself' was probably inspired by some forgotten gospel song too. So I'm generally happy for Lady Gaga to take a bow for taking some frozen music that she might cherish, and making it seem in vogue – it's as valid a way to express yourself as any other. And it's not like 'Express Yourself' is the only song that 'Born This Way' seems influenced by. The intro to the song is very reminiscent of the intro to Prince's 'Let's Go Crazy'; parts of the verse melody sound as much 'Raspberry Beret' as 'Express Yourself' to me, and the spoken word section is transparently a tribute to the spoken word middle section in Madonna's 'Vogue'.

In fact, instead of condemning the song, these musical tributes enliven it – it's a lot more interesting than 'Dirty Talk' by Wynter Gordon, for example, and if that song had influences beyond the general sound of pop at the moment, they weren't particularly audible. In general, 'Born This Way' has its faults, but it has exactly the right tone of celebration and exactly the right sound and momentum to be the soundtrack to the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras for years to come. And it's kind of cool that a #1 single features big words like 'transgendered' and witty Wildean lines like "Don't be a drag, just be a queen".

Tim Byron