1) Marry the Night; 2) Born This Way; 3) Government Hooker; 4) Judas; 5) Americano; 6) Hair; 7) Scheiße; 8) Bloody Mary; 9) Bad Kids; 10) Highway Unicorn (Road to Love); 11) Heavy Metal Lover; 12) Electric Chapel; 13) Yoü and I; 14) The Edge of Glory; Bonus track: 15) Born This Way (Jost & Naaf Remix)
Over the top, larger than life, sprawling - iconic.
Key tracks: "Scheiße", "Heavy Metal Lover", "The Edge of Glory"
The success of The Fame Monster gave Lady Gaga the artistic freedom to follow it up however she best wanted, and the stylistic break-out of that album had left people eagerly anticipating what her next move would be. These days it's difficult to convey accurately just how different and fresh The Fame Monster's theatrically explosive and wildly flaying maneuvres sounded in the 2010 pop scene if you weren't there to experience it, and back then The Fame Monster was still technically considered just a deluxe edition bonus disc for The Fame until its runaway success more or less turned it into a runaway era of its own. Yet, I don't think anyone was ready for just how Gaga chose to follow it up; even now, Born This Way is spectacularly one of the strangest albums to occupy mainstream space with such dominance.
The sound of Born This Way itself is a direct follow-up from the high intensity dance pop of The Fame Monster: Redone remains as the main producer and Gaga's second-in-command, with DJ White Shadow making his debut Gaga collaborations in-between. The ideas and aesthetics though - including that unbelievable/bly terrible cover image - are directly indebted to 80s hard rock. Gaga is an old-school heavy metal lover through and through and Born This Way is through and through a hair metal record, with big guitar riffs, crashing drums and a stench of whiskey cutting through the hyper-produced electronic sheen, old-fashion stadium rock theatrics reinterpreted in Gaga’s own language. Born This Way is also everything Gaga made her music out to be, super-sized up and overindulged in. It doubles down on all the eccentricities and quirks that lent The Fame Monster its strength, attempting to bring Gaga's music to the same level of unpredictability and out-thereness that her increasingly bizarre fashion displays had started to reach.
That clash of titanic concepts is what makes Born This Way so overwhelming and uniquely thrilling. The album is at its best when its pushing down the throttle pedal in a neon glow adrenaline haze and throwing together ideas that would take supreme confidence to pull off - which she does. "Judas" stomps through with an erratic pace like an elephant in a china shop that's having a bad trip, "Americano" is a rave-rock-flamenco hybrid that proudly ignores the fact that it shouldn't work, "Bloody Mary" resurrects pop's eternal fascination with a soft reggae lilt and makes it sound hair-raisingly ominous, "Scheiße" finds Gaga speaking nonsense-German over cavernous eurodance synths and a beat so big it hits right in the spine, the unhinged "Government Hooker" goes through moods and tones like it's switching radio channels from one extreme to another. These are songs that happen when no one says "no" to even the most ridiculous idea and everyone fully believes in the power of their underlying force - i.e. Gaga and her charisma that persuades any naysayer, even when she sounds like a woman possessed flicking through incoherent accents and vocal shifts as she sings through most songs in brand new manners and ways from anything before. These are songs that in lesser hands someone would have toned down but that didn't happen, and it's all for the better. They are excessive and manic, and while flamboyant they're almost dark with the bombast used to drown over any demons of self-doubt creeping in through every crack they can. Gaga always sounds like she's at the forefront of a great battle in each song, determined to come out victorious.
Sadly that energy doesn't quite reach the album's title track, even though it's inarguably the most famous song from the entire era. It's easy to view it through a modern viewpoint now and judge it as slightly tone deaf - the "chola and orient descent" didn't sound right in 2011 either - but it's a song that means well, came at the right time when LGBT+ was starting to break into the mainstream more visibly than ever and eventually it deservedly became the anthem of pride and underdog unity that Gaga desired it to be from day one, the (ultimately superfluous) "Express Yourself" controversy nonwithstanding. But despite naming the album, "Born This Way" has always been at odds with the rest of the record. In a album coloured in shades of seedy nightlife and desperation to break free from it, "Born This Way" is all rainbow lights and thin disco beats, with none of the edge or surprise that the rest of the album revels in. It never fit the album comfortably and almost exists outside it as its own entity, and despite being one of Gaga's biggest hits and nailing down her status as the heartfelt ally she sincerely wants to be, its appearance right at the start is almost jarring and in all ways - production, melody, really even the lyrics despite the message - it's throwing weaker punches than most other songs on the album. You can contrast it directly with "The Edge of Glory", another song that's covered in more neon lights than club spotlights and plays its hand brighter than the rest of the record, but also keeping truer to the album's heart. Its nods to the 80s are in line with the rest of the album (including a saxophone solo from Springsteen's right hand man Clarence Clemons) and it retains the emotion and will of what preceded it - it's the one last tearful goodbye to Gaga's grandfather and she sings it with all her abandon as the synths grow taller and louder, scraping skies as the album's ultimate pop anthem. As the closer it's the dawnbreak after the album's seedy nightlife crawl - the hopeful start to a brand new day.
Though its more peculiar moments are what ultimately define Born This Way, as "The Edge of Glory" (and "Born This Way") shows the album is content to simply be a pop record at times as well. Sometimes perhaps a little too earnestly - the theatre kid camp of "Hair" comes to mind - but by and far even at her more controlled Gaga works magic here. The grand epic kickstart of "Marry the Night" which sets the album off with a firework display, revs up from naught to hundred after its beguilingly quiet organ intro and makes the case for the album's strengths immediately. It's exhilirating, life-affirming and triumphant - so basically everything you want a larger than life pop anthem to be. "Bad Kids" goes from stuttering synth stabs and grungy guitars to saccharine bubblegum pirouettes in an instant, and "Heavy Metal Lover" might just be one of Gaga's most essential songs, tucked away unassumingly in the depths of the back half but boasting some of the album's best hooks and production: ironically not leaning towards its titular style despite the rest of the album giving the space for it, its ethereal and crystalline synth-disco sound and that instantly striking half-wordless chorus are among the most powerful moments of pure pop bliss in Gaga's discography.
What mars Born This Way somewhat is that it is ever so slightly overlong, and this is even the case with the standard issue without the (rather common) deluxe edition's bonus tracks weaved into the tracklist - although my Euro-version copy does come additionally equipped with a perfectly adequate remix of "Born This Way" that you forget the moment you stop listening to it. Some of the chaff is easier to identify, namely "Highway Unicorn" and "Electric Chapel" which largely serve to build the album's internal mythos and aesthetic rather than act as independent agents of their own. That isn't strictly speaking a bad thing and not something I would always criticise, but they sound like songs designed for live stage interludes and their hooks and vigour aren't a match for the rest of the record; not to mention "Highway Unicorn" is where the album's loudness war PTSD rears its head the most obviously as its synths and drums reach clipping heights so much it's distracting. And with distractions in mind, when the album does depart from its general ethos it really, really sticks out - "Born This Way" including, but also "Hair" that's all bright highlights and hi-NRG stomping covered in the kind of cheese that's bound to split opinions, and I'm not sure it has a place here. But this was an imperial period for Gaga and even "Hair" starts to charm when its intensity just doesn't let up and it blows off in all cylinders so charismatically you forget what qualms you had with it.
"Yoü and I" is the other main breakaway: it's where Gaga finally nails the classic rock piano ballad that she's been trying to pull off on both her previous albums, and would practically come across as a cosplay pastiche if she wasn't so convincing and giving her all with it, but what's it doing here? Besides maybe peeling off some of those theatrical layers and giving Gaga a brief moment of unarmed humanity as she so honestly both seizes in a kind of music she so obviously loves and reaches out for her man without any smoke and mirrors - "six whole years!", she adlibs with such spur-of-the-moment you can absolutely hear her giggle. Her eventual break-up from the man who inspired it of course now makes the song even more bittersweet, and arguably and very cruelly adds to its power. So even "Yoü and I" works and by the time Gaga's unleashing the final bombastic choruses you've fully bought into it, which both underlines just how much of an imperial period this was for Gaga and just how confusing the album can sometimes be.
It's not an album for everyone. The production is over the top, the lyrics can go from incoherent to cheesy to actually kind of brilliant in a moment's flash ("Love is like a brick / you can build a house or sink a dead body" is probably my favourite Gaga lyric but it also occupies the same song as "if offenced, wear an ear condom next time"), it's self-awarely high on its own pretension and absurdity - and let's face it, Gaga spent so many years spiralling off this that you could consider this the beginning of the end and see it for its warning signs and not for its strengths. Born This Way practically invites you to raise an opinion out of it with it sheer outrageousness, right down from that cover. It is an overreaching mess - but it's also a blast and a one-of-a-kind pop phenomenon. Gaga was a character larger than anything - that was her goal from day one - and with Born This Way she rose to that self-mantled throne. It's a passion project that has everything thrown into it because it had Gaga's worst enemy against it - her own expectations - and it needed to rise into the occasion. It did, with its big verses, bigger choruses, production that still sounds stylish even when it aims for a throwback vibe, the endlessly quotable lines in both content and delivery and, in a nutshell, Gaga's best set of songs. I'm a sucker for an album that dreams big and then grabs hold of that dream, and Born This Way ticks that box so well. If it were more leaner and meaner it might be genuinely legendary, but its shambling kitchen sink attitude is its own kind of iconic and it still stands out as one of the very best pop records of the 2010s.
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