The Manifesto of Mother Monster:
I love Lady Gaga so much. One, I was raised on Madonna and disco, so I love me some dance music. Two, she’s fucking insane. It’s awesome. I have no idea what I just watched or what sort of drugs went into the creation of it, but I love it.
Though I have to admit…I realized the new video was released because PZ posted about it. I’m lapsing in my haggery! How was I not alerted to this sooner?!
…Alright, time to take a research break to dance around to this song a couple more times.
If that’s new to you, have you seen this cover?
She is so crazy! I just watched the video about an hour ago, and I was like wtf gaga? but that’s why i love her!
I love her. Not just because I grew up on Madonna and dance music… but because I spent a lot of time around performance artists.I’m still not sure what the heck went on there, but it is awesome.
She really is an artist. Most people don’t see that because she does clothe herself in the garb of pop music (a genre I haven’t approved of since Men Without Hats.) But Gaga transcends her medium, particularly in her videos.
that girl is my friend’s little sister! i totally wasn’t expecting to see a link to her video here. haha.. what a small world.
i think the music video is super crazy and my mind isnt not entirely sure how/why i love it, but the song itself makes me a bit disappointed. to me, it sounds like gaga is pandering to the religious (a bit) to this song by using terms like “capitol H-I-M” along with the “born this way” theme. dont get me wrong, i think that no one should be segregated for emotions and feelings that are beyond their control, but dont say that god did it, as if that is reassuring…
I like. I know it’s not the same song but man this reminds me of Madonna – Express Yourself
I disagree. She likes attention. Plain and simple. I know people who are crazy (not legally) she’s just a poser (Lady Gaga formula: wear something odd+say something weird+publicist=Perfectly Packaged Consumer Product). Plus I’m a musician, I respect music too much to actually like Lady Gaga. I know this is an argument from authority but any time I’m around other musicians (rock, orchestral, chorus, jazz) any mention of Lady Gaga gets a collective *sigh* of disapproval. General rule of thumb is that if the majority of people unthinkingly laps up the new product, it’s probably just a corporate formula proven to be loved by the intended demographic Exhibit A: Justin Bieber/tween-teen girls.I know, I’m the horrible wet blanket raining on everyone’s parade; but I would hope that more people would realize that people like her are a product, not an artist (never written a single song on her own; much like Britney Spears). I wish real artists were in the lime light rather than these things made by “the suits”. Lady Gaga is a fad much like every boy band/heartthrob that’s been peddled to teen girls since the 60s.
It’s good to see her lyrical stutter cleared up.pah-pah-pah-poker face.ali-ali-ali-Alejandropapa-paparazzi, etc…
Don’t care :D *dance*
I would agree that if someone has never written a song then it would be difficult (not impossible) to call them an artist. However, this remarkable younglady wrote her first piano ballad at 13 and has had a significant hand in if not done herself almost everything since.I have heard that collective sigh from musicians as well. I tend to think that they feign dissaproval with her while really that sigh originates out of a deep sense of disappointment in themselves for not taking the chances and following the artistic paths that they wanted to. I think it a far more reasonable and mature response that we recognize she has several qualities and no matter what they may or may not be her work is helping people to come out of shells they have been in for a long time and growing new musicians through her intense inspiration.
loved the IPU at the beginning!
Funny story. I was out with a friend the other day, we were talking so the radio was down low. During a lull in the conversation I noticed the song on the radio and I’m all like, “Dude, turn it up, Madonna’s Express Yourself is on and I haven’t heard that in years!”We turn it up and its this song. I’ve listened to both it and Express Yourself a few times since then and I’m convinced that Born This Way is just an up tempo knock off of Express Yourself camouflaged with new lyrics. The beat, the pacing, the timing, slow it down a bit and it is too close to Express Yourself to be a coincidence.Sure, its catchy, and it has a beat, and its marginally better than just about any other Lady Gaga song I’ve heard up to this point; my sister is a fan so I am often forced to listen to Lady Gaga when I visit. Based on this I would expect this song to be better than her other songs, it’s basically a rehash of a superior Madonna song.Pete…
Talent or hack? Fake or genuine?Pointless to me. Her music and her videos just irritate the hell out of me. >_<
I fully disagree that the sighs are because of lost opportunity. These are fairly young musicians still in love with there craft.I’m not saying no good comes out of these people; I’m saying it’s just not because of them in particular. Replace her with another falsely eccentric person and you’d get the same reaction. Justin Bieber comes to mind once again; I really wish that would stop…
I know… =/. Dance away heathen, dance away.
Pop isn’t my thing, I spent last Saturday at a Flogging Molly concert which is much more my style. That said: I find Lady Gaga absolutely fascinating. Musically it doesn’t appeal to me, my music tastes are pretty wide but the vast majority of pop music since the 80s has not been on my playlists (sorry, not even Madonna though I do like Cyndi Lauper). However I find what she’s doing to be brilliant in many ways and while she has carefully constructed and orchestrated her image it’s clearly HER image. I also have to give her credit for actually writing her own music, a rarity in pop stars.
Most interesting to me was the use of Bernard Herrman’s score from (I think) the Hitchcock film North by Northwest over the opening birth sequences. Presumably she got copyright clearance! He wrote a lot of great film music for Hitchcock and others, including the score for Animal House (!). I’ve heard that his “concert” music, in particular his 2nd Symphony, are under-appreciated 20th century masterpieces but recordings seem to be nearly unobtanium.The other interesting thing is those knobby shoulders of hers. Did she have some kind of implants or just really prominent bones? She’s thin but hardly anorexic.
Gaga may indeed be a “product”, but a popular performer need not write their own songs to be an artist. The conceit that one must perform original material to be taken seriously is fairly recent (60’s). Tony Bennett, Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and innumerable jazz musicians are no less “artists” for performing and often definitively interpreting the songs of artists like Gershwin, Harburg, Berlin, Lerner & Lowe, and so on.Reaching even farther back, composers like Bach, Vivaldi, Palestrina et al up till about the mid or late 18th century had no compunctions about borrowing (“sampling”) the works of others, or recycling their own material in different forms. The whole “originality” thing just wasn’t that big a deal – musicians were seen as, and regarded themselves as, artist-journeymen.Thus endeth the music history lecture for today.
They’re prosthetics; I think it’s kind of her “thing” for this single/album. Do a google image search for the cover image, you’ll see she’s got them on her face too.
I think there’s a lot of truth to what you say, but I don’t care. I like her anyway. Lady Gaga is an entertainer, and she entertains. I haven’t been bored by one of her performances yet. I also continued buying Bob Dylan’s albums after he went electric.
Um, except that the major themes of this song include feminism and gay rights. I doubt the religious would be impressed with that.
Her songs are catchy and all, but…does she not own pants?
I think she’s fun to dance to, but I’m not impressed with “Born This Way.” The “message” is positive, sure, but musically the song is probably the blandest thing she’s come out with yet. It’s barely listenable, much less danceable.Now give me “Starstruck” or “Poker Face” and I’ll karaoke my little heart out in the car.
Awesome.Total ripoff of “Express Yourself”, but whotf cares?
Gaga’s artistry isn’t her music so much as her performances and videos. But to each their own.
I love the message, but subtle she is not.*Rides away on a unicorn under a rainbow framed in a purple heart*
I’m kind of surprised that nobody is discussing the use of some kinda racist terms in the lyrics (or did I simply miss that discussion?). I mean, really, chola? Orient?
It wasn’t North by Northwest, that music is from Vertigo. I thought that selection was really interesting too.
Or her horrible anti-women rhetoric. All that “the celibate girls at school were the cool ones” BS. And something like “my creativity is robbed from me when I have sex: stolen through my vagina…”She’s a really sad, attention grasping, desparate case.Struggle to get past all that when I hear her music. But…each to their own…
To be fair here, Jen *has* discussed Gaga’s anti-sex statements on this very blag:http://www.blaghag.com/2010/04…
Thanks!
I remember the post – and therefore I was a bit surprised by this one.
If you couldn’t enjoy the music of any artist who said something stupid you’d have nothing left to listen to.
For me, it’s actually less the song itself and more the fact that neither Jen nor PZ nor any of their commenters (or at least, at the time that I checked) had commented on the offensive portions that really surprised (and disappointed) me. I don’t expect much from pop artists –but I did expect more from bloggers who spend quite a bit of time talking about discrimination.
Well – there’s a fairly big difference between an artist who says something stupid (we’ll never find anyone we agree with 100% after all) and someone who really is quite offensive to women’s issues the way LG is. I suppose it’s where you drawe the line. I was never able to get into Madonna for similar reasons to be honest: I couldn’t get past the issues I couldn’t stand about her – and the way she too was really out there with them.Let’s put an extreme example that maybe we coukd agree on: if George Bush produced the greatest music ever, I’d struggle to enjoy it. OK – bring that back a bit, and that’s me with LG. I can’t get past the desparate attention seeking, publicity machine that she is; the fakery; the anti-women BS; the stupidity and innanity of it.I’m not trying to dictate where any one elses line should be though. This isn’t some moral test. In my example, you could love George Bush’s music and that would be just fine.
I’m kind of with you here. I saw videos of her performing original pieces that were GOOD. She had a jazz-y feel about her, and it was good stuff, I thought. I think she does have talent.I like the dance beat and would probably be fine with her if she wasn’t so absolutely fucking annoying, but I can’t get over her weird and her attention-whoring. I tried really hard to like her, I really did, but she just bothers the shit out of me too much.