Member Since: 9/4/2008
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DAZED: "BTW was a misunderstood masterpiece"
A look back at Lady Gaga’s misunderstood masterpiece
Quote:
It’s been five years since the release of Born This Way, an album that marked the point in Gaga’s career that she stopped studying her fame and used it to further her own message.
Five years ago, Lady Gaga released her second album Born This Way, one of the highest-selling albums in musical history. The album’s success shouldn’t be surprising considering that, at that point, Gaga was in the middle of an imperial reign over pop music.
Born This Way is today remembered by critics to be a misstep in Gaga’s career, and the start of a downward descent that she’s still yet to fully recover from. Yet listening back half a decade later, it’s clear that the album is Lady Gaga’s most ambitious musical project to date, as well as a poignant reminder of the media’s power to create and subsequently break down an artist’s reputation.
The campaign kicked off with industrial techno banger “Born This Way”, a powerful self-acceptance anthem that caused a stir with its deliberately literal lyrics. Nowadays, in a world where Hari Nef walks the runway at Gucci and Laverne Cox remains a beacon of hope for trans women of colour worldwide, the inclusion of the word ‘transgender’ in a pop song may not seem so controversial. Things were, however, different in 2011.
Lyrically, Born This Way’s themes range from government corruption and gay marriage to to “Heavy Metal Lover”s brilliantly filthy opener “I want your whisky mouth all over my blonde south”. Elsewhere, the anthemic chorus of “Hair” is underpinned by a metaphor that likens creative freedom to a good weave, whereas “Scheiße” contrasts off-kilter feminist lyrics with a spoken-word German bridge that literally translates as nonsense.
Sonically, the album begins with church bells and soon descends into experimentation with glam rock, heavy metal, honky-tonk country and mariachi-tinged techno. It seemed that the artist formerly branded superficial and disingenuous was on a one-woman mission to smear her soul onto a metallic canvas; the results proved that Gaga could be sleazy, unhinged, and downright brilliant when she set out to be.
Five years later, Born This Way still represents the point in Gaga’s career when she deliberately stopped studying her own fame and tried to use it to further her own message. It was the moment that she stopped being branded an artificial pop behemoth and started to become the searingly honest, sometimes over-emotional human being that we now know well. For someone that had studied the art of fame, it seemed that, after exploring its dark side on The Fame Monster, she was no longer interested.
What’s fascinating is that Born This Way has aged remarkably well. The songs still sound as fresh as they did when it came out, and despite the lack of any obvious pop juggernauts, the album still stands as the best in her back catalogue.
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http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/ar...od-masterpiece
More praise for this phenomenal record 
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