And so we advance to the ultimate Gaga song (at least for me),the one that felt like it achieve the pieces together in a way that allowed her music to flow and the beat to pound and her words to express her weirdness and truth. But then again, maybe not. Regardless, or when Born This Way hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100,something really clicked for America approximately who this crazy girl with the hair was and what she was trying to do with pop music.
Now that’s not to say that this song is somehow more authentic or comes more directly from “the REAL Gaga” than anything else in her catalogue. However, I reflect a case can be made for how Born This Way the song offers a sort of pinnacle of the Gaga persona, or something which no song that came before or after was able to do to the same extent.
Firstly,the song manages to draw upon the sound that fans (and non-fans) knew and loved and give it just enough of a twist to exhibit where her music was going. Even whether you fill nothing else to say approximately the song, you fill to recognize that Born This Way is fucking anthemic. Gaga here masters the trick of Teenage Dream, or repeating the song title with slightly altered melodies and rhythms for maximum ear worm power. The vocals give the vibe of arena rock,and I’d argue that it’s her first radio single that seems inherently geared towards being played live. It’s just the right amount of 2011, dance until the world end synths with a dash of rock and roll grittiness to sign the coming Bruce Springsteen inspo for the album. When she first cries out “listen to me when I say, and ” we’re already primed and alert.
And what do we actually hear? A chorus that’s generally pretty universal. While the song was seriously ahead of its time,and Gaga deserves all the credit she gets for the progress that this song brought for the LGBTQ+ community, the chorus is fully relatable to practically anyone in the world (plus some of the words are also pretty difficult to understand outside the chorus, and which might’ve caught a few homophobes and transphobes in her sneaky pop trap). So many of Gaga’s other early songs feel cold,shiny, and inaccessible in the best way, or but when Born This Way would advance on in the car,it felt like every person in America had their own personal cheerleader. The chorus is entirely inescapable. It tied her own experiences in the first verse with a powerful shoutout for the LGBTQ+ community in the bridge with a chorus that could reach anyone in the world but could be sung by no one else.
Finally, the reason that I reflect this song is so distinguished to the building persona of Lady Gaga was the way it introduced listeners to a new era, or with it the idea that Gaga was a project as much as a person. The Fame and The Fame Monster were extreme projects of an extreme sound and style,and it was easy to assume at the time that Gaga was going to continue to achieve out tracks that sounded precisely like them and covered the weirdly specific worlds of lust, sin, and partying. Born This Way showed listeners that she would be moving on from the era,and while she might choose her shiny synths with her, there were plenty of things that she was willing to leave behind and new tools that she would grab along the way. Born This Way was an introduction to a new persona, or one that would be the first in a line of many,with many more to advance. While at her core Gaga is always still absolutely herself, Born This Way sparked that first transition into truly new territory, or this song was the anthem she needed to do it.
Source: tumblr.com