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Celeb News: PITCHFORK ignores "Born This Way"
Member Since: 9/26/2009
Posts: 2,146
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The sum of all the BTW scores is 1633. Divided by the number of reviews I get:
68,416/100
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Member Since: 6/20/2010
Posts: 15,376
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Metascore down to 71, PopMatters' review has been added. 
Quote:
Bored This Way
Let’s all start by taking a deep breath and facing the honest truth: Lady Gaga has yet to make a great album.
When Ms. Germanotta released her still-fantastic-to-this-day single “Just Dance” back in in April of 2008, few knew what to make of this strangely-dressed, eccentric young singer-songwriter who just so happened to have a diva-ready voice and one hell of an ear for a pop hook. “Just Dance” was the very definition of a slow burning single—it didn’t hit #1 until nine months after its release. Once the floodgates were open, however, an absolute avalanche of great dance singles came pouring out: “Poker Face”, “Paparazzi”, “Bad Romance”, and “Telephone” being chief among them (you’re welcome, Glee).
While her ridiculous outfits certainly garnered much media attention, her eccentric visual style tended distract us from the fact that she was a truly great songwriter, and—more importantly—a heck of showman. Each new single and video wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill record industry release: it was an out-and-out event. Most of us remember waiting around our TV sets for the worldwide premiere of Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video back in the day—critics and fans already giddy with anticipation—and true to his word, “Black or White” turned out to be a perfectly-executed pop song and a wildly entertaining video (even if everyone was a bit confused by the panther/crotch grabbing part) that would up becoming a true pop culture event that was shared by millions. Although Lady Gaga will never reach that same level of ubiquity, she sure as hell tried, pumping up her videos with ridiculous big-budget imagery during a time when labels are slashing video budgets left and right. Of course the video for “Telephone” would be close to eight minutes long: it was a Technicolor mini-movie filled with dance sequences, murder montages, and glasses made out of lit cigarettes. Anyone can look ridiculous on camera, but to do it and write pop songs so iconic that rock bands begin ironically covering it less than a month after they’re released? That’s a rarity.
Yet when you actually think about The Fame or The Fame Monster, you think only about those pop culture highlights. You tend to forget about the vapid single “Eh, Eh (What More Can I Say)”, the disposable “Starstruck” (featuring another hilarious attempt at rapping by Flo Rida), the frighteningly unoriginal masturbation ode “So Happy I Could Die”, the surprisingly toothless “Poker Face” rewrite “Monster”, and the pedestrian “Money Honey”. Sure, Gaga can write some great singles, but she has yet to write a great full-length album. So even with all the pre-release drama that Born This Way had to suffer through—the inexplicable “Weird Al” Yankovic incident, the controversial “Judas” video shoot, the numerous Madonna plagiarism accusations, Amazon’s one-day $0.99 deal crashing their servers the day of the album’s release—it’s obvious that Born This Way should be not only be the biggest album of the year, but also Gaga’s defining statement as an artist, right?
As it turns out, Born This Way is actually her weakest album to date.
In comparing Gaga 2011 to her 2008 self, one thing becomes immediately clear: the one we’re looking at right now takes herself far more seriously. While sure, it would’ve been hard for her election-year version to predict that she would soon become a role model for social outcasts the world over, she’s taken her new role as generational quasi-spokeswoman very seriously; so instead of writing fun, well-crafted dance-pop songs like before, she’s now turned into an “artist”, filling each track with social commentary, endless religious symbolism, and personal confessions, all set to a danceable beat. There’s noting wrong with a good empowerment anthem, but when “empowerment anthems” count for one third of the songs on your new disc, it’s no surprise that the resulting album sounds painfully repetitive.
Although Gaga’s cast of musical collaborators is continually rotating (RedOne once again produces a majority of her tracks, although the discovery of Chicago-based DJ White Shadow proves to be most welcome), her aesthetic is basically the same: up-tempo club tracks that pair modern Eurodisco sounds with her myriad group of influences, resulting in tunes that harkens back to classic ‘70s disco (“Born This Way”), ‘80s girl-pop (“Bad Kids”), and even country (the astonishing “You & I”). Yet in being everything to everyone, Gaga’s “new directions” are only surface level. Despite its fancy string-pluck opening, “Bloody Mary” is a remarkably average club track (save its liquid bass line), playing its religious angle very heavily but without much payoff, an accusation that can similarly be applied to the flaccid thumper “Judas”, wherein a brutal bass synth seems to be at war with its unabashed pop chorus, neither side really winning in the end.
The rest of Born This Way continues in this fashion, with tracks starting out with an interesting twist on her familiar tropes before ultimately riding the same tired and true formula through to the end (or, worse, just doing something “dramatic” just for the hell of it, driven by no real sense of purpose). Just listen: opener “Marry the Night” very much wants to be top-notch Justice knockoff, but by adding a bridge of upbeat platitudes and an utterly pointless instrumental section after the 3:30 mark, she ultimately winds up weakening the power of her “let’s take the night” rallying cry. Her ode to European one night stands (“Americano”), conversely, falls into the fatal pop song pit trap of failing to make the chorus and verses sound different enough from each other to make any real impact, leaving it feeling very, very one-note, despite the flurry of acoustic guitars that weave in and out of it.
After that, the album’s foibles become more and more noticeable: there are tracks that are more producer’s showcase than actual song (“Heavy Metal Lover”), songs that have flat-out forgettable choruses (“Fashion of His Love”, “The Queen”), and yet another empowerment anthem with ridiculous lyrics (as in “We can be strong / We can be strong / Follow that unicorn / On the road to love”). Yes, “Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)” is a very confused lowlight on this album, showcasing the most unfocused set of lyrics we’ve yet heard from Mother Monster, its kitsch value completely drowned out by her own disinterested verses. When you begin adding all of these problems up, however, what you begin to realize is that none of these “problem songs” are necessarily bad—they’re just really boring. After unleashing a line like “I want to take a ride on your disco stick” to an unsuspecting public, it’s no surprise that other attempts at being provocative—including declaring that “Jesus is the new black” at one point—wind up falling short of the mark. Gaga is trying to unleash a sea of high-end ideas to the public en masse, but after hearing four or five songs in a row that are set at the exact same tempo while retracing lyrical themes that we’ve heard before, one can be forgiven for wanting to go back to a time when she was singing about losing her phone in a club and wanting your ugly (or some guy named Alejandro).
Yet when Gaga really sits down and really focuses on her craft—when she adds that perfect mix of upfront personality and guilty-pleasure pop eurohpira—she is capable of creating absolutely transcendent songs, and she’s done it before. Fortunately for us, there are more than a few moments like that on Born This Way, and those highlights frequently outrank her best work. “Government Hooker” is arguably the darkest track she’s penned since “Teeth”, and it sounds like a deliciously unholy fusion between Britney Spears’ “Gimme More” and New Order’s “Blue Monday”. Lyrically, it deals less with politics and more about sexual dominance, but her turns of phrase—which can be easily glossed over when dancing to it—are fantastic, ranging from the psychologically interesting (“I’m gonna drink my tears and cry / ‘cos I know you love me baby”) to the best gender-bending chorus since the Killers’ “Somebody Told Me”:
I can be good (unless you want to be man)
I can be sex (unless you want to hold hands)
I can be anything
I can be everything
I can be mom (unless you want to be dad)
When Gaga isn’t getting her Bonnie Tyler on (during the rock-solid “The Edge of Glory”), she proves unafraid to talk about her past this time around, and while at times she spends way too much time mentioning about how she was born on Broadway (baby), she winds up tackling rather large issues like one’s search for personal identity in the way they wear their hair (the aptly-titled “Hair”, which, tragically, is not a response to India.Arie’s “I Am Not My Hair”) or how you can still be a good person even if you were a brat growing up (the album highlight “Bad Kids”, which marries cut-n-paste rock guitar licks with the most effervescent ‘80s-indebted chorus she’s yet penned). It’s during these songs that the metaphors don’t run that deep: her lyrics are more matter-of-fact, and therefore, quite meaningful. Yes, she mentions causing her parents’ divorce right there in “Bad Kids”, but does in such a way that it’s not looked on as a bad thing: it was part of her own journey of maturity. One always has to be delicate when balancing the playful with the pathos (unless you’re Robyn of course), but with these two songs, Gaga manages to pull it off with ease.
Anyone who follows Gaga knows that she really has a knack for keeping more than a few surprises in her pocket (remember when you saw that album cover for the first time?), and while she surprised several observers with her straight-faced Queen homage “Speechless” on The Fame Monster, she pulls out all the stops on the stunning “You & I”, an honest-to-goodness country song based on the drum beat for Queen’s “We Will Rock You”. Yes, this sounds like a total trainwreck on paper, but in execution it proves to be one of the most entertaining detours Gaga has yet taken. It is no mere pop song with slide-guitars in it, no; if you took out the keyboards, she’d have a genuine country radio hit on her hands, replete with a huge singalong chorus and some delightfully backwoods lyrics (“It’s been two years since I let you go / I couldn’t listen to a joke or a rock & roll / Muscle cars drove a truck right through my heart”). It’s risks like these that make Lady Gaga so endearing to fans and critics alike, and after wading through the muddled mess that Born This Way is, you can’t help but wish she’d take a few more of ‘em.
At the end of the day, Born This Way is one mighty confused pop album, fusing some daring songwriting with some remarkably repetitive themes and beats, a dichotomy that pulls the album to a pretty even keel when all is said and done. Although no one will deny its popularity, one can certainly wonder what its impact will be several years down the line. Will the Miss Gaga still be redefining the pop paradigm for other divas to follow several years down the road? Most definitely. Is Born This Way the album that’s going to do it? Probably not. Yet will we still be waiting with eager ears to hear how she grows as a performer and songwriter from here? Oh, you can bet your lobster hat on it ...
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Member Since: 7/12/2009
Posts: 15,281
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Quote:
Originally posted by AyuM
The sum of all the BTW scores is 1633. Divided by the number of reviews I get:
68,416/100
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They let some count more than others?
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Member Since: 6/20/2010
Posts: 15,376
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NOW Magazine's review has been added, but its Metascore remains 71.
Quote:
Score: 80
With her second full-length, Lady Gaga establishes herself as pop’s most ambitious songwriter, dispensing with the tired innuendo and formulaic filler that marred her 2008 debut, The Fame, to recast herself as an empowering force for her legions of “little monsters.”
Opener Marry The Night’s driving melody, multiple bridges, choruses and dance breakdowns immediately let us know we’re in for a balls-to-the-wall fusion of wailing 80s power balladry and European club music.
Collaborators like producer Robert “Mutt” Lange, E Street’s Clarence Clemons and Queen’s Brian May drop in to fill out the hard-edged dance beats with ostentatious instrumental flourishes that rival her wailing vocals. Closing track The Edge Of Glory essentially turns into a duet with Clemons’s saxophone. That’s the kind of album this is. It’s an engrossingly visceral and adventurous production that beats you into submission with its sheer audacity.
You have to admire the way Gaga fearlessly throws herself into, say, a disco mariachi arrangement on Americano, but she should be careful: her frequently righteous tone and overindulgence in clunky Catholic metaphors threaten to mire her memorable melodies in schlocky self-help proselytizing.
Top track: Marry The Night
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Member Since: 11/23/2008
Posts: 2,779
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2 Sputshits 
METACRITiC SUCKS!
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Member Since: 3/13/2011
Posts: 4,742
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Here is a review from the Irish Independent/Sunday Independent. Don't think it counts for the critic.
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Born this way and nothing to say
Sunday May 29 2011
LADY Gaga last week released her second album to a predictably hysterical explosion of hype. But despite the great expectations and her seemingly unshakeable dominance of contemporary popular culture, the music community seemed to be decidedly underwhelmed.
One doubts Gaga pays much heed to critics, who, with their detached judgment, are the antithesis to the slavish, intense mutual devotion she cultivates with her "little monsters", her fans.
Yet here is a woman who has the world's attention. Last month, she knocked Oprah Winfrey off the top spot on the Forbes Celebrity Power list. Not just that, but the basis of this influence is her reputation as a cultural and artistic innovator.
A lack of innovation, however, seems to be one of the key criticisms levelled against the new album.
"If Gaga had spent as much time pushing musical boundaries as she has social ones," complained the LA Times, "Born This Way would have been a lot more successful."
The journalist is being kind. Social boundaries? Really? Gaga's 'self-acceptance, embracing differences' schtick is hardly groundbreaking.
But as she tirelessly resuscitates the same tired themes in album number two, one is prompted to wonder whether, rather than breaking the mould, Gaga really is just all about the clothes.
Far be it for me to overlook the eloquence of any woman's wardrobe, but beyond the rags, does Gaga have anything to say? With her sartorial campaign of shock and awe, Gaga has certainly proved that she knows how to captivate an audience. The meat dress, the lobster fascinator, the hat made from hair, the bubble-wrap gown, the strange horn shapes she seemed to have implanted under her skin -- with every new look Gaga demonstrates an awareness of how to parlay clothing into headlines, in a way that makes Elizabeth Hurley and the safety-pin dress look like rank amateurism.
But shouldn't we expect a bit more from the woman hailed as the defining pop artist of our generation than an exuberant skill for fancy dress and a string of catchy, yet over-produced, tunes?
In interview after interview, Gaga aims for enigmatic but ends up coming off as vacant. Recently, MTV promised an interview of unprecedented intimacy with the star. But viewers tuning in were treated to lengthy descriptions of the days she spent with her Italian family making tomato sauce.
Amongst the most revealing morsels she offered was the following assessment of her character: "I'm quite traditional, really, contrary to what people might think."
Last year, she sat down on the couch with Alexa Chung for MTV and droned endlessly about the many ways people could purchase her new material to the point that an embarrassed and clearly edgy Alexa, pushing for personality but getting simply a pitch, joked that, "This is like QVC."
Lest we forget, with Gaga, despite her declarations of love for her followers and high talk about her "art", frank commercialism is never too far from the surface. "Lady Gaga understands viral marketing better than anyone on the pop scene today," one media expert has said. "She is directing every frame of her music and her life, imagining how clips will appear on YouTube and what people will tweet after she appears on the VMAs." Merchandising and corporate link ups with brands such as MAC cosmetics are the pillars of this one-woman industry.
The more we get to know what exists behind the glasses, the hats and the gowns, the more it seems that all that showy fashion conceals an anodyne personality, and a woman who accessorises in lieu of making a comment.
Her rather trite credo of self-acceptance, while admirable, is not much more developed as an idea than when Christina Aguilera sang 'Beautiful' in 2004.
"Everything that we do," Gaga told an interviewer last year, "we want it to be powerful, soulful, and we want it to tell a real story about pop culture and society."
Sadly, the story she is spinning is a vapid one. It speaks of a culture that has confused outlandish dressing with originality, that mistakes commercialism for art. Lady Gaga's music might be catchy, but it lacks real meaning and it lacks heart. Beyond that, everything else about her is simply a monumental case of the emperor's new clothes.
Read more: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/...#ixzz1Nja3BVaA
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Member Since: 6/18/2010
Posts: 2,010
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pitchfork 
cmon...
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Member Since: 9/26/2009
Posts: 2,146
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Quote:
Originally posted by botnus
pitchfork
cmon... |
I'm really curious about their review. I don't know what to expect...
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Member Since: 3/13/2011
Posts: 4,742
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Down to 71 on the critic. I don't think they uploaded any new reviews though.
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Member Since: 6/20/2010
Posts: 15,376
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Quote:
Originally posted by Monroe
Down to 71 on the critic. I don't think they uploaded any new reviews though.
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It has been 71 for a few days now, nothing changed.
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Member Since: 3/13/2011
Posts: 4,742
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Quote:
Originally posted by MonstahNL
It has been 71 for a few days now, nothing changed. |
Oh I remember it being at 72. Sorry for the old post then.
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Member Since: 6/20/2010
Posts: 15,376
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Drowned in Sound's review has been added. Metascore remains 71.
Quote:
7/10
“In societies where modern conditions of productions prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation. The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be re-established. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation... The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” - Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle
“Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.” - Guy Debord
[Insert meat dress mention.]
[Say something about the spark-breathing bra.]
[Factoid: Her debut single ‘Just Dance’ has so far sold 7.7million copies.]
[Include a prologue phrase revolving around: “meteoric zeitgeist-riding rise.”]
[Somethingsomethingsomething...a caveat about how every band can learn from how Gaga has created her own universe. How every song communicates a clear, succinct, mini-manifesto message.]
[Blahdiblahblahblah somethingsomething something irrelevant, mentioning bands you should listen to instead of Gaga like Planningtorock, How to Dress Well, St Vincent, Metric, Matthew Dear...]
[Close opening paragraph with a very subtle Madonna related dig to elaborate on later.]
“I’m not that cool, and you hate me.” - Lady Gaga, ‘Bad Kid’
When I was 12, the kid I sat next to in double science shoved his headphones on my ears. Flakes of dead skin trickled down my collar and come to think of it, I can still sorta feel his greasy earwax. He looked at me with giddy eyes, his mouth slightly ajar. He pressed play and these juddering ice picks of tinny noise skittered around my lobes. Many minutes went by, punctuated by gruff shout outs and day-glo crowd roars occasionally erupting atop the high-bpm ruckus. I sat there, gazing out the window at sandwich bags in the breeze whilst this hyper-colour sound scratched at my Cochlea. He took the ‘phones off and said, somewhat expectantly, “how bangin’ is that bruv?” I fobbed him off with a wide-eyed “yeah-yeah” and from that moment on I became, somewhat consciously, an outsider by not falling in line and sneaking out to go to all the under-18 raves. Yet, here I find myself, listening to Born This Way for the twenty-fourth time, wondering why I’ve never been to Berlin and held my arms aloft in some sweaty basement full of buff blokes, trannies and girls you’d never take home to your granny.
I mention this, not to waste your or my time or as some preemptive narrative for a sucker-punch conclusion a few hundred words from now but to justify why, when I went to 'The Monster Ball', I arrived all cynical but within a few raved-up pop-songs I totally lost my ‘shit’. Amid the awe, a pang of regret bum-rushed me. I felt hollow about missing out on memories of waking up covered in sweat and smudged face-paint and bile at 4pm on a comedown. I couldn't stop thinking about all those sunrise-hating nights of my parallel life, spent on Mediterranean islands and in Detroit warehouses, which I’d forgone for watching bands in the rain.... O' yes my brothers, for one night only, I was a Little Monster, and there I was, shaking my head from side-to-side, my 'paws' up in the air but simultaneously suffering from this existential crisis. Wriggling and writhing along to the beat but as adrift from it all as my Nine Inch Nails t-shirt - which I’d bought the last time I was at the Millennium Dome/The O2. This fact is neither here nor there, I just like to mention Trent Reznor at every opportunity.
Oh sure, on the surface it was your usual extravagant enormodome ‘pop’ ‘show’ of hotdog-scented glitz. It was guilty-pleasure fun, yes, yes, yes... It featured all the glamour that lots of lights, lingerie and walkways and crazily overpriced beer can possibly muster. But there was something else happening, far beyond the hype tripe. Seeing past the grizzly old man upon my shoulder, screaming to me that this was ‘in-****en-authentic’, my mind waltzed around ideas that 'The Monster Ball' was something post-everything. Like, post-everything I’d read or pithily predicted or presumed a Gaga arena show should or would be. I was utterly absorbed and lost, admiring the pantomime, sucking it all in with a BDG (big dumb grin) and wondering how, somehow, her ‘show’ (which is essentially like one of those Morrissey fan letters but in Gaga’s case, a living shrine to Prince) could work as well on a cameraphone video posted up on YouTube as it does reduced down to something digestible in a TV studio or re-enacted on stage during school assembly. It was the pomp and simplicity of the performance, like two conceptual tectonic plates grinding against each other, which had me whizzing off into some dark recess of my mind where a ‘Take On Me’ hand was frantically scribbling utter nonsense notes (worse than this) whilst some arsehole showed old movies of my childhood where I was listening to a Helter Skelter cassette at the back of double science...
[Insert: Somethingsomethingsomething... something about regurgitation, regression and pop eating itself]
Preconceptions are a bitch. My voyage to Gaga-land left me wrong-footed, mostly because it was something closer to Hulk Hogan than the Vivienne Westwood theme park ride I'd anticipated - isn’t that, befuddlingly, how no-brow Gaga is? Her brilliance isn’t so much her music but how she fuses her ideas-above-her-station (ambitions of high art) with a consumable, carefully constructed surreality-encroching-on-reality that her ultra-altered-üßer-ego inhabits. What I loved about her arena show (which was about 100 times bigger, brasher and more polished than that odd Radio 1 Big Weekend 'thing' recently) and The Fame Monster, is how Gaga is unattainably alien one minute and the very next second, within a turn of her heels, you can imagine her very human heart beating, almost as if she’s been grounded by an imagined X Factor finale montage playing in our collective consciousness, made up of YouTube clips, school photos and any other dirt the gutter press have dredged up since her rise.
Anyhoo, Born This Way essentially finds Gaga doing more of the same but with a few new production tricks. Whilst the new record features less crypticism, ellipses and vague pronouns there’s still enough ambiguity to allow Gaga to automagically be many different things to a million disparate peoples. But, intriguingly, she’s started humanising herself (it’s possibly a double bluff to flesh out the character of the Gaga Avatar) with lyrics that mention her mum (‘Hair’) and we find her confessing things like “I wish I could be strong without somebody there,” before, quite possibly referencing The Beastie Boys ‘Fight For Your Right’. In fact, the whole album is littered with homages, subtle references and just as likely, utterly unrelated things that have subconsciously drifted into the glittery mix. This tributary flow of influences is part of what makes Gaga the star she is, and the fact she manages to construct this grand historical context for herself is part of her charm. Born This Way finds her setting up her stall alongside monarchs and martyrs like Queen Elizabeth (‘Bloody Mary’), John F Kennedy (‘Government Hooker’, which I have a crackpot hunch is a song about Monica Lewinsky), Jesus (‘Black Jesus + Amen Fashion’) and Judas (of course). Then again, perhaps this is just a mixture of positioning in a marketing sense or the lyrical equivalent of an interests section on Facebook.
It’s within the did-she didn’t-she inferences that I started to truly fall under Born This Way’s spell. Take, ‘Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)’ which has an Mr Oizo rumble to its bassline and transitions rather than with with key changes but like Sonic the Hedgehog entering a bonus level, yet it still sounds exactly like an undeniable super-hit. Like, a bajillion YouTube views and a mantelpiece of pointless pointy awards are awaiting its arrival. Probably. Maybe. It could possibly just be the greatest Eurovision (KLANG!) song never entered and is the only track on the album that mentions rainbows, ponys and unicorns. Which kind of highlights quite how - despite the silly outfits and titillating soundbites - strangely straight this record is. That's not to say it's conservative by any means but there's none of the mind****ery that her outfits suggest and it certainly doesn't sound blimmin' bonkers like Ween or Battles or Sparks. What this definitely maybe is, is Gaga veering away from the guttural "ga-gah"s (were they really some sort of pixelated third person shout out to herself?) and the novelty euro-trash "rah-ma"s and "ooh-lala"s, and instead this is a record of both subtle and dramatic shifts in atmosphere, texture and genre.
On this album, Gaga’s evolved the Party Monster pose (if you’ve not seen that Macaulay Culkin flick, see it!). ‘Government Hooker’ for instance opens operatically, not unlike Diva Plavalaguna from Fifth Element before she opines “I’m gonna drink my tears tonight” before the song sort of shunts into Controversy-era Prince (KLANG!). Then there’s the barmy ‘Alejandro’-zooming-over-the cuckoo’s-nest ‘Americano’ with its Borat-as-done-by-Baz-Lurhmann, Gogol Bordello plate-smashing romp, as well as that snarled “ow-wuh” before the Germani-i-i-i-iii-i-ic stomp of ‘Scheiße’.
There’s ‘Hair’, which could be a HI-NRG Kiss cover until the lyrics reveal themselves as being exactly like something yanked from the closing scenes to an Alicia Silverstone chick-flick. ‘Black Jesus + Amen Fashion’ is a bit Top Shop goth with its Marilyn Manson beats rumbling within a dance-era No Doubt tune which sounds pretty much like what Grace Jones would have have done if she was generated by the Ed Banger blog-haus algorithm. But then again, 'Black Jesus' falls a bit flat because it’s essentially a hollow ode to Fashion Week. Meanwhile, the Elton John line-dancing with Ugly Kid Joe ‘Yoü and I’ - which features Brian ‘off of the Olympics’ May - is bafflingly adroit bar-rock, almost cynically scrambled together for the sake of American radio. In fact, Born This Way really is not all good and suffers from filler tracks like ‘The Queen’, as well as the overblown ‘Fashion of His Love’ (possibly just a Cyndi Lauper-ish re-work of Whitney’s ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’) and the oddly plodding ‘Bloody Mary’ (the opening strings had me switching the record off to blast Panic at the Disco’s A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out). Seventeen tracks plus six bonus tracks on the special edition feels especially bloated but then she’s over-reaching from beneath the disclaimer that she's doing it all for her Little Monsters - which sort of makes it worse, as she could have given quite a few of these tracks away to sate and excite them, and created a killer album. However, it's pretty hard to be cynical when you think that her debut single was only released in April ‘08 and she’s subsequently toured the world a few times, and managed to record (with a little help from some killer producers) and release 40+ tracks and remain prolific amid the hubbub of it all, but at the same time, like Ryan Adams, and people publishing their everything thought online, perhaps it’s best to leave some stuff on the cutting room floor?
“I want your whisky mouth, all over my blonde south” - ‘Heavy Metal Lover’
But when Born This Way peaks, it kicks like a diamond studded mule and it’s far far FAR better than even the snobbiest nob would anticipate. The song-of-the-album ‘Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)’ is followed by ‘Heavy Metal Lover’ which drifts somewhere between a Cut Copy floor-filler and Uffie fronting Girls Aloud, on a record produced by SebastiAn. Similarly, ‘Electric Chapel’ soars into Eighties ambi-dance territory but is a touch less Fisherspooner-via-The-Cardigans-’My-Favourite-Game’ and a little more Cassius with a splash of Matt Bellamy’s underwater guitar wibbling over one of Muse’s patented horse-march basslines. In fact, with this killer threesome of tracks, something undeniably special (or at least unexpected) is occurring and if you mess around with your stereo settings just enough and screw your ears up just right it isn’t particularly unlike the sprawling mid-section of Crystal Castles’ second album, all purple-bruised and oily-puddle rainbows (can someone please get Factory Floor or How to Dress Well to do a remix? Thanks). Then there’s the infectious opener ‘Marry the Night’, the brilliant Madonna ****-o-like title track, and the incredible closer ‘Edge of Glory’ (“Tonight, yeah! Baby!”)
It’s a breathless adventure, that leaves even seasoned space-pop travelers a little weary at times but then it’s H.E.R. with a capital G.A.G.A. and she’s always going to be as exciting as she is wearing. Born This Way suffers from many of the same ailments as the Monster Ball - it wasn’t so much the slightly desperate girl-power-gone-awry half-nakedness, nor the slightly cheesy backdrop of Evil Dead meets Little Shop of Horrors special FX but it was Gaga herself, speaking in that schoolgirl drawl of hers between songs, sharing her pantomime narrative about why she wanted to put on th’ monstah bawl so that her little monsters had somewhere to go and be themselves. Gaga's mid-song shouts of “let your freak flag fly” felt a little flat looking around at an average arena crowd in their Urban Outfitter t-shirts and H&M dresses - apart from Boy George, obviously, and a few fans dressed as Gaga clones. Yet, for all the slightly try-hard banter undermining my imagined image of her and her Little Monsters, The Monster Ball left me smiling and distant from the troubles of the world, for a while. As the show settled and the mirror ball dresses were packed away, The Monster Ball didn’t convince me of her dispossessed credentials, and nor does Born This Way . If she’s a really true outsider, unwilling to compromise for the sake of popularity, then it doesn't really show and sort of isn't the point - although I'm still not sure if I admire her audacity or love the celebration of inauthenticity. Cynically, with all her willingness to bang on and on about being on the outside, I can’t help but think she’s read Sherry Turkle’s incredible Alone Together (or at least watched her TED talk on Youtube), where she explains that technology makes us all feel alone, and desperate to belong to something because technology makes us feel especially isolated. And, unlike Madonna who seemed to just ingest cool genres, it seems from the very concept of this album and woven into her manifesto, that Gaga gets far more about the modern world than she's letting on. Or maybe it explains her success. Chicken and eggs, innit.
If you you thought this was 'tl;dr' (too long, didn't read), then maybe I've indulgently done a Gaga. If you skimmed all the above and just want a succinct conclusion it's thus: Gaga is a mixed message, she gets the notion of media spectacle but also knows the intriguing power of silence. I'd wager, like Malcolm McLaren, she's probably read a lot of Dubord, and yet, if you'd like to you too can construct whatever Gaga you like, and that's the point. And yeah, I rather like the album. (It’d be a nine on ten if this was the tracklisting).
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Member Since: 11/15/2009
Posts: 16,903
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I wonder why Pitchfork didn't review the album.
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Member Since: 11/15/2009
Posts: 16,903
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Also, it annoys me when reviewers include the bonus tracks in the review. It's quite obvious that the original edition is the one that should be reviewed, because bonus tracks are bonus tracks for a reason 
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Member Since: 6/20/2010
Posts: 15,376
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Los Angeles Times' review has been added. Metascore remains 71.
Quote:
Score: 70/100
Lady Gaga is the perfect vessel for a broad message of unity, defiant self-respect and personal liberty, themes that the pop star returns to over and over again on “Born This Way,” her new album that comes out Monday. The artist born Stefani Germanotta is writing music for the People of the World, so her message needs to be clear as she stands perched upon the massive, gaudily ornate platform she and her collaborators have constructed for this moment.
But the inclusiveness Gaga believes so strongly in apparently doesn’t extend to music fans interested in sonic open space, unfiltered vocals and surprising rhythms, bridges and hooks. She’s speaking to everyone, it seems, except fans of artistic innovation. Say what you want about Lady Gaga, but nuance is not one of her strong points, nor is musical adventure. She’s unsubtle in her message, unsubtle in her dress, and, most important, unsubtle aesthetically.
“Born This Way” is Gaga’s second proper full length work (excluding her eight-song EP of 2009, “The Fame Monster”). Two years in the making, the album’s 14 songs can be divided into two categories: the dance floor bangers and the bedroom breathers. The former, of which there are a dozen, tend to merge into one mass of pounding after a few songs, drawing as they do from the worst tendencies of the last decade of dance music — the Tiesto/Benny Benassi/Armin van Buuren school of post-trance relentlessness in which every peak is telegraphed from a mile away and which every valley is ruined by the impending arrival of another obnoxious return to a sledgehammer beat.
There are interesting moments. The bridge on “Judas,” when Gaga steps back and allows producer RedOne to wave his freak-flag with bleep-and-burp digital effects and futuristic washes for a too-quick breakdown, is wild and inventive. But then the 132 beats-per-minute pound comes in, and dynamism is once again merged by synthesizer bursts, cheesy saxophone riffs, guitar solos, or, at times, even Gaga’s voice into one muddy mess in the middle of the track.
Some parts sound like dumbed down Daft Punk, and those that don’t could have been swiped from a Basement Jaxx track from 1999. The main difference though, is that most of “Born This Way” is not funky. Whereas a dance group like the Scissor Sisters or Hercules and Love Affair makes loud-and-proud anthems that manage to stretch both musically and thematically, Gaga preaches messages of nonconformity while relying on a producer, Fernando Garibay, whose credits include tracks for Paris Hilton, Ashlee Simpson, the Corrs, and Snoop and will.i.am (“The Donque Song”).
Above this music Gaga addresses freedom in its many forms. She celebrates her follicles in “Hair” —- “I am my hair. I am free as my hair” — and, in “Americano” sexual and cultural openness, a song about meeting an immigrant woman in East L.A. and falling in love. The track is sweet and sharply composed, but the Latin flairs are so stereotypical — the flamenco guitar strum and the mariachi horns (at least what you can hear of them) that it borders on self-parody.
There are exceptions: “Government Hooker” is, in fact, funky, and draws its sound from a palette that references Kraftwerk, post-disco and weird Casio-tone circuit-bending. The last two minutes of “The Queen,” a bonus track on the deluxe edition, slows it down, employs a new beat pattern, ditches the hard bass-kick and travels to a more nuanced place.
And the best song on the album, the Robert “Mutt” Lange-produced “Yoü and I,” is a gorgeous love song that stands a good chance of being an “American Idol” staple for years to come. “Muscle cars drove a truck right though my heart,” she sings, and even if the image is awkward if broken down to its parts — is a Trans-Am sitting in the driver’s seat of an eighteen-wheeler? — it’s a good line, one of a handful on “Born This Way.”
But after such an extensive rollout, a few clever lines and a choice hook, drum fill, vocal run isn’t nearly enough. If Gaga had only spent as much time on pushing musical boundaries as she has social ones, “Born This Way” would have been a lot more successful.
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Member Since: 6/20/2010
Posts: 15,376
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No Ripcord has reviewed the album and it has been added on Metacritic. Its metascore is now down to 70. 
Quote:
You’ve no idea how much I wanted this album to be great. Really, really great. So great that all the naysayers, the people who dismiss pop and those who think “proper” music is made with “proper” instruments would sit up, take notice and say, “Wow! You know what? I was wrong.” An album that, just for once, matched the enormous hype and celebrity that went with it. Born This Way is, sadly, not that album.
You probably already knew this album had been released seeing as Lady Gaga has undertaken one of the biggest promotional campaigns in recent history. Apparently putting her name to any booming brand she could, in the run up to the release, Lady Gaga aligned herself with Google Chrome, Starbucks and Farmville. That’s not to mention her prolific Twitter use for further marketing. Lady Gaga is about as 2011 as a pop star can get, but if you’re suspicious that all this external activity may impinge upon the quality of the songs, then your fears have been realised.
Born This Way isn’t a bad album by any means, it’s just that Gaga is so conscious of the image and message she projects that the music is no longer her top priority. You might think that someone with a persona such as hers has never been about the music, and that theory certainly carries some weight. However, it’s worth remembering that her debut, The Fame, and subsequent bolt-on EP, The Fame Monster, contained some genuinely fantastic songs. Pokerface, Telephone and Paparazzi are some of the best examples of pop music from the last decade, and Bad Romance may well be one of the greatest songs of all time, so it’s disheartening to see there’s nothing here that quite hits those heights.
The first thing that hits you about Born This Way is the over-zealous production. It’s as if Gaga is so mindful about being usurped from her position as Queen of Pop, that she turns everything up to 11 so she can’t be ignored. There’s a sledgehammer drum beat that seems to run through the entire record and some of the synths and effects are about as subtle as being punched in the face. Often, this style of production is there to mask a lack of tunes, but on Born This Way, the tunes are mostly there, and the “look-at-me” exuberance tends to get in the way.
What’s also disappointing to see, is how Gaga has descended into well-worn pop clichés of controversy. Whereas she was genuinely exciting a couple of years back, it now seems she’s been revising from the Madonna book of “How to Irritate the Christian Right.” She sings of being “a government hooker” and “still in love with Judas;” she has songs called Bloody Mary and Scheiβe – it’s like she’s doing nothing new and just trying to goad people into a reaction.
However, she didn’t get to the top of the pop tree without having a tune or two up her sleeve. Born This Way is an album of great moments rather than great songs, but what moments they are. The oscillating bassline of Judas is so huge it measures on the Richter scale while the post-chorus of finest track, Hair, is absolute throwaway bubblegum, and all the better for it.
Bizarrely for an album that’s so up-to-date, the style is fairly retro. Born This Way is a mixture of dance, hi-NRG club tracks and 80s power ballads. The worst offender here is Yoü and I, where even the presence of an umlaut can’t disguise the fact it’s an ugly, Queen-like track with a verse melody horribly reminiscent of Nickelback’s Rockstar.
So, is Born This Way sufficient for Gaga to retain her crown? Probably, but only just. It lacks the overall quality of Robyn’s Body Talk or the stand-out singles of Rihanna’s Loud, yet it’s still packed with hooks, killer choruses and unexpected twists. She’s taken her eye off the ball somewhat but is likely to get away with it; album #3 could be the one that truly tells us whether Gaga is here to stay.
7 June, 2011 - 07:58 — Joe Rivers
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Member Since: 4/25/2011
Posts: 7,482
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Quote:
Originally posted by MonstahNL
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To be honst... I actually liked that review. Nothing hateful or bitchy. She admires her.
I guess her opinion reflects what many other fans think about BTW.
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Member Since: 11/15/2009
Posts: 16,903
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I still think it's very bizarre that Pitchfork didn't review the album. I wonder if that's their way of saying they didn't like it? They didn't review The Fame Monster until two months after its release, but that was because they were busy doing their "Best of the Decade" lists when TFM came out and didn't have time to post regular reviews. I know several of their journalists heard the album (based on their Twitter accounts) so I don't know why they wouldn't review it. It's arguably one of the most talked-about albums of the year, in both mainstream and indie cultures. I don't care if they give it a bad review, but I would still like to hear their thoughts on it 
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Member Since: 3/3/2011
Posts: 23,567
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I don't think it has much to do with not liking the album. A lot of the time, Pitchfork won't even whisper any words about albums that are hugely mainstream, because they believe they are above them. I suspect they don't want to be affiliated with the most popular artist in the world right now, especially after they declared that she was the only real popstar around. It must be horrifying for their indie followers. 
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Member Since: 6/1/2010
Posts: 65,177
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At first, Metacritic had a 70 for Los Angeles Times... now it's a 50. But the 50 sounds about right given the context of the album review.
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