Nitsuh Abebe got up at five-thirty yesterday morning for the release of the new Lady Gaga anthem, Born This Way. Gaga’s first new song in over a year, it shot straight to Number 1 in 21 countries. Bound to have Pride crowds dancing from coast to coast and around the globe come summer, the single does not disappoint:
[W]e’d already seen the lyrics to “Born This Way,” and I can’t even tell you how skeptical they made me. “You’re black, white, beige, chola descent / You’re Lebanese, you’re Orient?” Gaga said she wrote this in ten minutes; rhyming “chola descent” with “Orient” is what happens when you do that. The main hook — “don’t be a drag, just be a queen” — that’s a good one, good for pop, applicable to all. But it comes after months and months of what one terrific critic has already called “The Great Gay Pander-Off of 2010”: A long run of housey dance tunes in which half the women of pop sing reassuringly about embracing and celebrating ourselves for whoever we are…
The song’s so disco that the line about people being “Orient-made” barely even registers, because it sounds like something nobody would have thought twice about saying in 1978. The vocals are so bonkers disco that I almost wish we could make them extra-bonkers by having Christina Aguilera sing them. Beyond which, this song has Gaga, an artist constantly compared to Madonna, cheerfully swiping some melodies from Madonna’s “Express Yourself” — because this is not the kind of song where that feels like a big deal, or anything much at all seems like a big deal. [More on the Madonna comparison here.]
I guess I’d forgotten that this is the thing to do when you’ve reached the top, and everyone is celebrating you and awaiting your next move: Just sort of celebrate back. “Born This Way” is loose and uncomplicated and fundamentally just fun; it uses fans’ goodwill toward Gaga to throw a party instead of an art happening. After a year of everyone up to Camille Paglia bringing all kinds of intense critical thought to everything Gaga does — what does she mean, what is she saying, what is her effect on the culture — this is smart: Come raging back with something simple, gleeful, and straightforward.
Listen: