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Celeb News: PITCHFORK ignores "Born This Way"
Member Since: 3/10/2011
Posts: 5,354
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Quote:
Originally posted by BeamMeUp
I'm sorry but they dragged her. 
It's still an enjoyable album, once you separate it from the pretentiousness that Gaga gives it. |
This 
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Member Since: 7/30/2010
Posts: 8,190
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Originally posted by Bathomet
Did they lie?
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Nope
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Member Since: 8/15/2010
Posts: 7,211
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But for all the comparisons to Madonna, the artist Gaga apes more closely is David Bowie, who shape shifted and sound-altered his way to the kind of iconic fame that is truly rare for a musician. Bowie was a badass and a dandy and a true innovator of sound and style.
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I agree with this. She indeed has more in common with Bowie.
But disagree with the rest, the writer is basically trying to do what every other poor writer has done in the past year: discredit her by comparing her to superior peers with more years/albums under their belt. The music is not quite there yet, but no doubt the talent cannot be trifled with. And what people need to remember is the past is the past and no one is original; we are not going to get anywhere by comparing every ****ing popstar to Madonna.
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Member Since: 7/22/2010
Posts: 15,610
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Wow this is incredibly petty.
10. The Edge of Glory - Song is a Springsteen throwback. She got Springsteen's sax player. End of.
9. Government Hooker - Something making you ask, "What does that mean?" does not equal "that thing means nothing." It means you didn't think hard enough. "Put your hands on me, John F Kennedy" is a reference to Marilyn Monroe. And she's said "I'll make you scream baby / As long as you pay me" is about how pop stars are wiling to do anything as long as they get paid.
8. The cover - She's said multiple times, the cover is about being halfway between reality and fantasy and she sees herself in a moment of endless transformation. You don't like it? Fine. But it's not meaningless.
7. Wordless - Americano reeks of a lack of ideas? Seriously? It's one of the most meaningful songs on the album, CLEARLY about illegal immigration and gay marriage and marginalized minorities. I don't see how Americano is your example of a wordless song.
6. Hair - I don't like Hair, but it's really, really dumb to pretend Gaga literally meant that she is her hair. You look like more of an idiot than she did when she wrote the song.
5. Judas - This song is NOT an attempt to rile conservatives. If that's what you think it is, you missed the point. Listen to the lyrics... it's a metaphor about being tempted by evil even though you know you should be good, and about returning to someone who did you wrong. She's said herself multiple times that the song is about celebrating faith, not challenging it. If you know the Biblical story of Judas, that he was just a part of the prophecy of how Christ would die, you understand this song better. Getting offended means you have no idea what you're offended about.
4. Highway Unicorn - Well, SOMEONE clearly downloaded the leak, because the song doesn't have a number in the title. And I'm not sure what the point is here. You call it a rip-roaring, chest-clenching song that makes you want to sing along... but "after a hundred listens it's basically a Poison song" is not valid point to make. You listened to the song a hundred times, wanting to sing along every time, and that means Born This Way is pissing you off? Uh. You have issues.
3. Mixed Metaphors - Again, you seem to be confusing 'Hm, on first listen I don't know what she meant by that' with 'LOL THAT MEANS NOTHING.' "Love is the new denim or black" has meaning. Think about it. Also, first you tell her to sing words that have meaning, and yet you tell her her songs mean nothing when she comes out with a meaningful song like Americano. Uh.
2. Scheiße - Again, you CLEARLY downloaded the leak. Scheiße, dammit. And I'm also not sure what your point is here. You've established that Gaga is a proud hodgepodge of musical influences, so you're surprised when she comes out with a song that's Bowie, Rammstein, and Ace of Base influenced? Seriously? How many influences do you have to tack on to look smart before you just come up with "This song is influenced by pop culture?" Do you really try to drag a song from Femme Fatale by writing "This song sounds like Britney was writing a Ke$ha song but winds up like Katy Perry covered Rihanna." No. It's a pop song. It has influences. Deal.
1. Madonna - Wait, when did anyone call Judas a Papa-Don't-Preach knockoff? And I'm confused. Is not being Madonna a good thing, or a bad thing? Make up your damn mind.
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Member Since: 10/3/2010
Posts: 47,433
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Quote:
Originally posted by MrDeeds
And she failed  |
Judas #10
What peaked at #11 again? 
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Member Since: 8/15/2010
Posts: 7,211
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Quote:
Originally posted by Twai
Wow this is incredibly petty.
10. The Edge of Glory - Song is a Springsteen throwback. She got Springsteen's sax player. End of.
9. Government Hooker - Something making you ask, "What does that mean?" does not equal "that thing means nothing." It means you didn't think hard enough. "Put your hands on me, John F Kennedy" is a reference to Marilyn Monroe. And she's said "I'll make you scream baby / As long as you pay me" is about how pop stars are wiling to do anything as long as they get paid.
8. The cover - She's said multiple times, the cover is about being halfway between reality and fantasy and she sees herself in a moment of endless transformation. You don't like it? Fine. But it's not meaningless.
7. Wordless - Americano reeks of a lack of ideas? Seriously? It's one of the most meaningful songs on the album, CLEARLY about illegal immigration and gay marriage and marginalized minorities. I don't see how Americano is your example of a wordless song.
6. Hair - I don't like Hair, but it's really, really dumb to pretend Gaga literally meant that she is her hair. You look like more of an idiot than she did when she wrote the song.
5. Judas - This song is NOT an attempt to rile conservatives. If that's what you think it is, you missed the point. Listen to the lyrics... it's a metaphor about being tempted by evil even though you know you should be good, and about returning to someone who did you wrong. She's said herself multiple times that the song is about celebrating faith, not challenging it. If you know the Biblical story of Judas, that he was just a part of the prophecy of how Christ would die, you understand this song better. Getting offended means you have no idea what you're offended about.
4. Highway Unicorn - Well, SOMEONE clearly downloaded the leak, because the song doesn't have a number in the title. And I'm not sure what the point is here. You call it a rip-roaring, chest-clenching song that makes you want to sing along... but "after a hundred listens it's basically a Poison song" is not valid point to make. You listened to the song a hundred times, wanting to sing along every time, and that means Born This Way is pissing you off? Uh. You have issues.
3. Mixed Metaphors - Again, you seem to be confusing 'Hm, on first listen I don't know what she meant by that' with 'LOL THAT MEANS NOTHING.' "Love is the new denim or black" has meaning. Think about it. Also, first you tell her to sing words that have meaning, and yet you tell her her songs mean nothing when she comes out with a meaningful song like Americano. Uh.
2. Scheiße - Again, you CLEARLY downloaded the leak. Scheiße, dammit. And I'm also not sure what your point is here. You've established that Gaga is a proud hodgepodge of musical influences, so you're surprised when she comes out with a song that's Bowie, Rammstein, and Ace of Base influenced? Seriously? How many influences do you have to tack on to look smart before you just come up with "This song is influenced by pop culture?" Do you really try to drag a song from Femme Fatale by writing "This song sounds like Britney was writing a Ke$ha song but winds up like Katy Perry covered Rihanna." No. It's a pop song. It has influences. Deal.
1. Madonna - Wait, when did anyone call Judas a Papa-Don't-Preach knockoff? And I'm confused. Is not being Madonna a good thing, or a bad thing? Make up your damn mind.
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Member Since: 11/4/2006
Posts: 37,804
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The sax solo on "Egde of glory" is the part of the song. WTF?
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ATRL Senior Member
Member Since: 6/23/2008
Posts: 14,319
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Can't say I disagree with any of these ten points, but I think it'd be best to merge this with the rest of the BTW reviews.
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Member Since: 4/2/2011
Posts: 1,323
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Still Promotion....
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Member Since: 5/27/2010
Posts: 35,527
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As far as takedowns go it's pretty good. Obviously disagree, but whatever.
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Member Since: 11/15/2009
Posts: 16,422
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Quote:
Originally posted by chris1991
I don't think its stupid.
Its coming from an UNBIASED source. GQ isn't a magazine involved so much with pop cultural. They are coming from a different point of view. They don't Stan for any pop star or artist. Just because they don't follow pop culture media doesn't mean its stupid. Their opinion is coming from a more real consumer. One who doesn't Stan for any artist or popular music/culture.
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Unbiased? Just this one line:
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Stefanie, you ain't no Madge.
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Proves to me that this man is just a bitter ole Madonna stan 
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Member Since: 7/22/2010
Posts: 15,610
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Quote:
Originally posted by Haus of Wilke$
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That's a good thing right? 
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Member Since: 8/10/2010
Posts: 13,100
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Why is that tainted piece of **** thread merged with the review thread? 
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Member Since: 6/7/2005
Posts: 20,756
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Unfortunately it sounds like Rammstein covering Ace of Base.
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Member Since: 4/3/2011
Posts: 7,121
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Quote:
Originally posted by HausOfPoloco
Still Promotion.... |
Yes Sis. As long they still being obsessed with her and her antics and her album. It's all good.
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Member Since: 6/20/2010
Posts: 11,959
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Quote:
Added on Metacritic: 70
Fame has been demystified enough for us to know that the adage “Fake it till you make it” does not go far enough. As a culture, we watch celebrities with such scrutiny, we understand that making it isn’t even half the battle—keeping it is what separates the stars from the starlets. Lady Gaga’s fame is still teething, and her solution to this conundrum is paradoxically simplistic: make it, and then make more.
The oft-hurtled criticism that Gaga is all style and no substance is at least semantically wrongheaded, as it ignores the amount of content she perpetually churns out through music and videos and performances and performative interviews and performative speeches on Capitol Hill and Google Chrome commercials and SNL cameos and just showing up places wearing things. Whether that substance is, in fact, substantial is another thing, but the genius of her aesthetic is that it barely matters. Before you can finish contemplating the implications of her dictating a gay-rights anthem (as opposed to putting it out there and letting the people decide) with “Born This Way,” she sideswipes you with quasi-religious imagery suggesting she has some bubble gum stuck between more than a few pages of her Bible via “Judas.” If her piss-yellow hair doesn’t do it for you, give her a few minutes and she’ll come out looking like a skunk. Just when you get used to the idea of her playing her piano on a giant shoe, she’s Eltoning it up behind one that looks like a series of piled gift boxes and, oh, wait, no she’s not, she’s dancing to a furious club track with choreography that is practically signed in synch with her lyrics. As spectacles go, Lady Gaga works overtime. If ADHD culture didn’t exist, she would have induced it.
All of this makes her third album, Born This Way, a perfect expression of her process. Like Gaga herself, it is calculated to overload our systems. The most straightforward way it does this is by being louder than even the hellish volumes that today’s pop music routinely revels in; Gaga’s waveforms are not blocks, but bricks she hurls at your head. In the past, Gaga has settled on disco du jour as her defining sound, but here, there’s a conscious hybridization going on. (Call her Ms. Vitalic and slap a hair bow on her for old times’ sake.) Born’s hair-metal tendencies, for example, find Gaga taking on more abrasive textures via screeching guitars, grinding synths, and stomping drums. When these and other elements pulverize in unison, as they do during just about every chorus on the album, her sound becomes as impossible to process as her trajectory: Sometimes, it feels like the next logical progression for Gaga will be a record of white noise.
Pop sludge feels risky, and it’s always encouraging to watch a superstar dance on the edge of alienating her global audience. (“Judas” flopped mostly because it’s nearly impossible to parse out what the hell is going on.) But for as overblown as Born is clearly intended to be, it’s very difficult to love it for its nature—its gentler moments are more rewarding. None of her shock tactics hold a candle to the silence that follows the abrupt ending of the Van Halen–housey “Highway Unicorn (Road to Love).” When Gaga goes toe-to-toe with Italo-disco bass lines and not much else, like in the verses of “Bad Kids,” the vibration from the bouncing octaves feels almost soothing. A gentle string of sung oohs and hoos heroically snakes its way through the clank and hiss of highlight “Heavy Metal Lover,” giving way to Gaga intoning, “I could be your girl, girl, girl . . .” with a distracted delivery that empathizes with her listeners. There’s a flower-through-the-asphalt vibe and when prettiness makes it through the cacophony, her slingshot melodies (aimed, obviously, at the stars) feel that much more triumphant.
The we-shall-overcome sentiment is communicated most effectively by Born This Way’s egalitarian use of house beats. Assuming that Gaga understands the for-gays-by-gays origins of house music, her tacking 4/4 beats onto virtually every genre she dabbles in—power ballads, metal anthems, MOR pop, flamenco—symbolizes equality better than her sloganeering, which can sound trite (“Don’t be insecure if your heart is pure!”) and about as insightful as a Garbage Pail Kid card (“I’m a nerd: I chew gum and smoke in your face/I’m absurd”).
Also present on Born is what musicologist Charles Kronengold (as cited in Alice Echols’s tremendous disco tome Hot Stuff) calls the “arbitrariness” of disco’s instrumentation. Elements like rapping, guitar solos, and saxophones wind their way into where they shouldn’t belong; the song structures feel similarly slipshod, and her belting, clenching, bellowing, wailing, monotone, Germanic voice is all over the place. (Never let it be said that Gaga isn’t a phenomenal interpreter of her own work.) But whether that’s coincidence or a wise co-opting of genres is unclear.
In fact, Born This Way asks more questions about Gaga than it answers. Is her conflating of nature (see the title) with nurture (“I’m a bad kid like my mom and dad made me”) a statement on both elements’ inherent coexistence, or just her being inconsistent? Is a woman who once said, “I’m not a feminist. I hail men, I love men,” but is now calling herself (in Born highlight “Scheiße”) a “blond high-heeled feminist enlisting femmes for this” someone who we’re watching evolve or someone who, at any given point, doesn’t really know what she’s talking about? Is the Born album cover really a “testament to liberation through transformation,” as she recently told the Times, or is the juxtaposition of a half-Gaga, half-motorcycle beast and the words “Born This Way” a bit of visual irony? The unresolved nature of so much of Gaga’s content explosion makes Born This Way ultimately too much and not enough. In order to communicate in this time of media bombardment and retain her rock-star mystique, she probably couldn’t have it any other way.
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Member Since: 3/13/2011
Posts: 4,742
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Quote:
Originally posted by Haus of Wilke$
And what people need to remember is the past is the past and no one is original; we are not going to get anywhere by comparing every ****ing popstar to Madonna.
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Well to be nonpartisan Gaga does it to herself half the time. She's her own worst enemy when it comes to stuff like that.
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Member Since: 6/14/2010
Posts: 4,200
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0/100 is shoking 
But in movie 0/100 is normal.
Why in metacritic many many more movies has extremly negative metascore then music metascore? Anybody know?
Movies is more trash?
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Member Since: 6/20/2010
Posts: 11,959
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A SECOND review of Sputnikmusic has been added. 
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2.5/5
A hell of a lot of bile has been aimed at Born This Way already, and at Gaga herself in the build-up to its release - yet, you have to wonder whether any of the people attacking it or her so fervently were fans in the first place, or have even been listening to pop in the past few years. Crap lyrics? Her last album was hardly Tom Waits. Style over substance? Her style IS her substance and always was. Prententious? Yup, because the video for "Paparazzi" was humble and unassuming. Awful album cover? God yes, but who cares? Let's not kid ourselves - Born This Way is an album we should definitely be criticizing, but don't cloud the issue by setting up straw men to knock down. It gives you plenty of targets on its own.
The big problem Gaga has here, and the one that defines this album, is that she's started to believe her own ********. When she first appeared on the scene, her major appeal (besides her fantastic singles) was that she was a trickster, the kind of person who would poke someone with a stick just to see what would happen. Everything about her, from her fashion sense to her videos to her thinly-vieled lyrics about anal sex and date rape and lesbianism, was designed to get her as much attention as possible, but she was using that attention for her own amusement - it was never about an ego trip (or at least, it never felt that way). And we were happy to give her that attention, because she was interesting. After a decade or more of pretty, innocent, bland, inoffensive pop stars, here was an awkward-looking (though not unattractive) woman with a filthy smile and a filthy mind, wearing whatever was hanging outside the butcher's that morning. As a personality, she was closer to Alison Goldfrapp than Christina Aguilera - and brilliantly, her music was as quirky and beguiling as her public persona. If you appreciate pop music, how can you not love that?
Yet the attention she got for it turned her into a hero. Suddenly, she became the #1 poster child for every kid that had never been able to really identify with Britney - for everyone that wasn't conventially, film-star attractive, for everyone that wanted some personality with their pop, for every outsider that wished they could be as provocative and daring around the haters. When Gaga didn't know she had that kind of appeal, that was fine; it was organic, it was natural, and that means it meant something. She sure as hell knows it now though, and in her self-conscious effort to appoint herself Queen of the Losers she's crafted an album that whiffs of succumbing to your own ******** as badly as Kanye's 808s and Heartbreaks and Xenomania's Tangled Up.
The main offender is the title track, which was bafflingly chosen as the first single. Do all the gay people in the world really need a single spokesperson? Should that spokesperson be a young, white, multi-millionaire pop star? Should that spokesperson still be acting as if all gay people are outsiders in the 21st century, when most of them live normal lives surrounded by straight people that just don't give a ****? And if that spokesperson is going to write a song about being gay, should it have a beat that could barely buy into most straight people's stereotypes of gay clubs any more? These are all rhetorical questions, and if you don't know the answer to any of them, congratulations - you're Lady Gaga's target audience. "Born This Way" is beyond patronizing, it's an insult; it's Katy Perry's "Firework" taken to a horrifying extreme. The fact that it's a rip-off of Madonna's "Express Yourself" is the least offensive thing about it, but it's also indicative of how much more attention she's paying to her image and her status than her music these days. That one is the daddy of a few tracks here - "Hair", "Bad Kids", "Americano", "Black Jesus", all of them poor - where she unceremoniously appoints herself leader of the disaffected. It's jarring and saddening, as is "Government Hooker" to a lesser extent - it's a great Lady Gaga song that could have slotted into The Fame Monster's tracklisting with ease, but by sticking the word 'government' in the title for no apparent reason, she's revealing her desperate desire to have something important to say. That's not what people listen to a Lady Gaga record for, and it's not what she's good at.
It's not all bad news, of course. You suspect Lady Gaga, as intriguing as she is, is probably incapable of ever recording an album that doesn't have a few redeeming features, and Born This Way has its share. The excellent "Judas" is classic Gaga all the way, from the way it jars suddenly from its verse to its chorus to its bridge and back again, to the way it takes a simple, almost cliche idea (being attracted to somebody that's bad for you) and weaves in all sorts of unrelated strands until it becomes an epic. Arguably, she's never done that better than she does here. "Scheiße" is great fun, with its dodgy cod-German vocals, and synths that nail the sound of clubs in 2011 so squarely that you almost expect her to shout 'Riverside, mother****er' at some point. "Marry the Night" is a flat-out great pop song too, unburdened by any statement-making or grandstanding, and one with a chorus that has the same 'where did she steal that from?' thrill that "Poker Face" did. (It took me three weeks to spot the Boney M sample in "Poker Face", and I'm already racing to beat that score with "Marry the Night".) And she acquits herself surprisingly well on the wave of rock tracks she lumps at the end of the album (the Queen-sampling "You & I" is somehow a success despite sounding exactly like Shania Twain; ditto "The Edge of Glory" with Katy Perry, which copies the sound of "Firework" rather than the sentiment). The soft-rock sax that crops up on a couple of the songs is a failure, but it's a noble and well-intentioned one, and that just about makes it forgiveable.
If you've read that last paragraph and thought to yourself that it can't possibly be that bad an album with all those things going for it, you're right. Born This Way isn't a bad album by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a hugely frustrating and disappointing one, for reasons that are bigger than just Lady Gaga.
The pop landscape in 2011 is as good as it's been in a long while. Throughout the '90s in particular, the outlook was bleak - the women that were selling records by the bucketload, the likes of Whitney Houston, Spice Girls, Shania Twain, Mariah Carey, and Celine Dion, were bland and emotionless, no more than vehicles for songs that could have been performed by anybody. Things have gradually changed over the past ten years, as acts with a modicum of personality - Christina Aguilera, Sugababes - started to appear. Nowadays, it's not bland and inoffensive that sells, it's quirky, because that's what people want and that's what the big hitters are investing in. Lily Allen, Amy Winehouse, Jessie J, Kate Nash, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, La Roux, Shakira - we live in a generation where your average female pop star looks odd and acts odder. Even the likes of Girls Aloud, Katy Perry, and The Saturdays - all blessed with the kind of good looks that would have seen them famous in any era - have got far more personality and drive in their music than their '90s equivalents, like Honeyz and Atomic Kitten. Established acts are getting in on the weirdness too; could you have envisaged Beyonce releasing a track like "Beautiful Nightmare", or Britney releasing one like "Til the World Ends", when they debuted?
Lady Gaga has been a driving force behind this, and is the apex of it. The woman is a megastar that could barely look and act less like a megastar and more like a fringe curiosity, somebody so awkward and so confrontational that it's a little unbelievable that she's such a huge icon to so many - and what scares me is that if she falls, the entire idea of weird pop stars will fall with her. We'll go back to a world of wall-to-wall syrupy ballads sung by people that look like they were drawn, not born - that's the world I grew up in and I'd rather not be sent back there. And yet for us to be saved from that, Gaga, and the artists like her, need to keep the public on their side, because the tide of opinion can swiftly change when somebody is working that close to the fringes, especially with a potential army of Cyruses and Biebers waiting in the wings. Born This Way leaves a bitter taste because of that - anybody listening to this, with no prior knowledge of Lady Gaga's work, wouldn't understand what all the fuss is about. They'd hear a record that's consistent enough in sound for the most part (Gaga is very much a subscriber to the 'don't bore us, get to the chorus' philosophy of pop, except it's more a case of 'don't bore us, get to the dirty beat'), and pretty damn enjoyable in parts, but they'd also probably think of it as just another pop record. Lady Gaga shouldn't be making 'just another pop record', and the fact that she has makes her less special, less magnetic a figure.
Yes, viewed on its own merits, Born This Way is a slightly above-average, if patronizing pop album that knows its own strengths and plays to them. Yet looking at the bigger picture, it's an album that could see Gaga toppled from her throne as the queen of pop. The world will be a more boring place if that happens, yet there are moments on here that makes me think it's probably an inevitability, and that leaves a bitter taste. Hopefully it's one that won't last well into the Bieber-dominated decade ahead.
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Member Since: 7/12/2009
Posts: 13,703
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The hate. 
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