There is a reason Gaga’s Born This Way resonated so much with her LGBT fanbase (and still held up by them as her magnum opus) and that’s in how earnest it was, it wasn’t afraid to increase the camp theatrics tenfold, it wasn’t afraid to be corny - and what better way to tell your audience to be themselves than to push against so many of the musical restrictions that top 40 pop music faces. You have the house-mariachi blend of Americano and the industrial-synthpop of Government Hooker, no major label was attempting anything like it at the time and no one has attempted it since (probably for good reason).
My favourite write up comes from Popjustice’s end of year review where he crowned it his album of the year, comparing it this picture.
The hat is far too big to even get in the door. It must be four feet wide. The situation is absurd. The personal assistant helping Gaga into the car must know that the hat is too big. Why hasn’t the personal assistant said anything? The driver is probably well aware of what is going on. He’s looking the other way. Does Gaga just expect the car to somehow get bigger, to accommodate the hat? Maybe Gaga knows the hat’s too big. Will she admit that she knows? Probably not.
As an album, ‘Born This Way’ was the sound of someone trying to force a massive hat into a tiny car. It is a sprawling, ambitious album that shouted to be heard when everyone was already listening, but no other album in 2011 tried quite this hard to be amazing and no other album succeeded in as many ways.
An artist whose next album wasn’t on course for multiplatinum success regardless of its contents would probably have felt the full force of a major label A&R man’s conservative intervention. To an artist whose future was uncertain, the man at the label would have said, ‘don’t use these pretty inexperienced producers for the bulk of the album’. They would have said, ‘do you know what, that whole gay thing for the first single isn’t quite right, perhaps it could be a bonus track in Belgium’. They would have said, ‘there is too much happening here. You have too many ideas. Take some ideas out’. But Gaga wanted to get that hat in the car and, because she seemed like the biggest popstar in the world, nobody wanted to stop her.
Thank fuck for that.
It’s not my favourite album of hers, and I understand any criticism about the songwriting but to write it off as by the numbers is a huge, huge disservice. After all, the backlash from this album for being too out there for the public is the reason she’s appears much more toned down than she did a decade ago. Seeing how low she scored on HGATR really bums me out.
