BORN THIS WAY: The Post Mortem

Cover Art - Album Lady GaGa, originally uploaded by Yaghyah.

This week has seen the release of the long awaited Born This Way album by Lady GaGa. With the release of some singles prior to the set date of the album release, GaGa has given up a taste of what to expect this time round.

This post focuses on various articles from Rolling Stone & NME online on their thoughts of this new album.

NME: ‘Born This Way’ specifically references race and sexuality. Here’s a fearless equality anthem that makes someone like Katy Perry, firing cream out of her tits and banging on about fireworks, seem a little disingenuous.

In keeping with this spirit of directness, ‘Born This Way’ is proud to showcase its history. It takes its title from Carl Bean’s legendary ’70s disco anthem, for example, while the production is not without its nods to Madonna in her late-’80s Imperial phase.

Pop rarely hits the mark when it sets its trajectory to ‘significant’, but ‘Born This Way’ is a landmark Gaga release – and there are even dizzier highs to come on the album…

BELOW: GAGA - EXPOSED


ROLLING STONE: 'Born This Way' has all the electro- sleaze beats and Eurodisco chorus chants that made her the Fame
Monster. But the big surprise is the way Gaga pillages the Bon Jovi, Pat
Benatar and Eddie Money records of her childhood. In the 1980s, radio was full of tormented Catholic kids, from Madonna to Springsteen. Gaga clearly grew up on that stuff.

She doesn't just give her Springsteen homage "The Edge of Glory" a sax solo – she gets Clarence Clemons himself to play it.


All over Born This Way, she takes on the big topics dear to her heart: sex, religion, muscle cars, her hair. She sings in French, German, Spanish and whatever language wants to claim "punk-tious." She seduces men, women, deities and dead presidents.

("Put your hands on me/John F. Kennedy" – hey, it rhymes.) And in "Heavy Metal Lover," Gaga purrs the immortal pickup line "I want your whiskey mouth/All over my blond
south."

Some songs are already familiar – at this point you could hum the Tarzan-boy yodels of "Judas" in your sleep.
But the singles gain resonance on the album, where they're surrounded by similar-minded psychosexual turmoil.

"Born This Way" pulls an expert bitch- stole-my-look on Madonna's "Express
Yourself." But that isn't even the most brazen Madonna rip here: That honor goes to "Judas." And if you thought the Catholic angst of "Judas" was over-the-top, check out "Bloody Mary," where Gaga does the Stations
of the Cross to a Chic bass line.


ABOVE: Lady GaGa on Roling Stone June Cover

The new issue of Rolling Stone, on stands and in the digital archive on May 27th, includes an in-depth cover story on Lady Gaga by writer Brian
Hiatt, who was given intimate, fly-on-the wall access to the pop superstar as she played the final dates of her Monster Ball Tour and put the finishing touches on her new album Born This
Way.

"When I am not onstage I feel dead," she says. "Whether that is
healthy or not to you, or healthy or not to anyone, or a doctor, is really of no concern to me.

I don't feel alive unless I'm performing, and that's just the way I was born." In the story, Gaga reveals that she's recently derived a lot of inspiration from an unlikely source: Rocky IV. "My favorite part is when Apollo's ex-trainer says to Rocky, 'He is not a machine.

He's a man. Cut him, and once he feels his own blood, he will
fear you.' I know it sounds crazy, but I was thinking about the machine of the music industry. I started to think about how I have to make the music industry bleed to remind it that it's human, it's not a machine."

Thats it, a total round up of GAGA fest-ness that has been happening this week!!

Laterz

Sources:
NME Online
Rolling Stone Magazine