Is There Anyone Who Doesn't Know That I ADORE Lady Gaga?
Her new album is totally amazing. I adore it. I like every track (although some better than others of course). I find her simply amazing and inspiring and spiritual and hot and wild and crazy and wonderful.
I quite simply do not understand the haters. I mean I understand not liking an artist. There are lots of musicians I do not like, musicians that are insanely popular. But why HATE her? This makes no sense to me. None. I can only assume they are jealous. Gaga has MADE herself and tells us that anyone can do it, we can all do it. If we believe.
Or as I like to say, “leap and the net will appear!”
And that is really what does it for me with Gaga. If it was just some fun dance songs, I would be so crazy about her. There are a lot of wonderful artists out there, and a lot of wonderful artists doing wonderful dance songs.
But Stefani Germanotta manifested herself into Lady Gaga. She LIVED life as if she were already famous and the Universe let her have it.
AND she passes her message on to everyone. Over and over in her concerts and through her lyrics she gives the message to express yourself and never listen to anyone say you aren’t pretty enough, or thin enough, or talented enough, or straight enough. She says over and over, “Don’t hide yourself in regret, just love yourself and you’re set- Whether you're broke or evergreen, you're black, white, beige, chola descent.” Whether you’re Lebanese, or “orient. Whether life's disabilities left you outcast, bullied or teased. Rejoice and love yourself today 'cause baby, you were born this way. No matter gay, straight or bi, lesbian, transgendered life,” you’re “on the right track, baby, [you’re] born to survive.
That’s a powerful message. And she is using her power to spread that message and I think that is incredible,
I found this wonderful article that really says it all...
Even Offstage, Lady Gaga’s Ready for the Stage
By Jon Pareles
Published: May 18, 2011
New York Times
EVEN for a rehearsal, Lady Gaga dresses up. She was preparing to headline the annual gala for the Robin Hood Foundation, a gathering of 4,000 of New York City’s richest people to benefit antipoverty programs, in a ballroom at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on May 9.
Her lipstick was a perfect cupid’s bow, and her eyes, big as headlights, were elaborately lined and lashed. Her fingernails were blood red with little golden studs. She wore a short, angular jacket that barely reached her thighs, olive-green tights and shiny, elaborately laced knee-high boots with towering high heels. It wasn’t the outsize, shoulder-padded outfits she’d be wearing later as she performed, but it was a long way from the warm-up clothes of the dancers around her. By the end of rehearsal, the tights would be ripped from dancing and a fingernail would be gone, knocked off as she pounded a Latin vamp on the piano.
It was less than two weeks after the final show of the Monster Ball, her arena extravaganza that toured the world for two years and ended April 27 in Cleveland. “I laid in the center of the stage, and I bawled my eyes out when the curtain went closed,” Lady Gaga said backstage after a rehearsal. “It’s emotional for me as a performer. How many nights have I left my heart on that 8-by-8-foot square on the floor?”
But she wasn’t giving herself any decompression time. Her show at the gala - to be followed by a guest spot as a mentor on “American Idol,” performances in London and endless rounds of media appearances - led to the release of her new album, “Born This Way,” arriving Tuesday. The album is as catchy and euphorically overblown as the music that made her a sensation. It also adds an additional dimension to her songs: her cherished relationship with a mass audience - fans who call themselves Little Monsters and dress up with gender-bending zeal - to whom she is a goddess, a big sister, a mouthpiece, a counselor and a cheerleader. “I can be the queen you need me to be,” she sings.
“Born This Way” follows through on Lady Gaga’s multimillion-selling album, “The Fame,” released in 2008, which has sold more than four million copies in the United States alone, and the million-selling EP “The Fame Monster,” released in 2009. Together, they generated seven Top 10 singles and stoked ever larger concert audiences. Lady Gaga, 25, who was born Stefani Germanotta and was still playing small clubs as late as 2007, has become the flashiest and most ubiquitous pop star of the 21st century so far. “I’m a show without an intermission,” she said.
She refreshes her image at Internet speed. David Bowie developed a new guise for each album, Madonna for each single; Lady Gaga seems to have one for every news cycle. The cavalcade of outfits churned out by her Haus of Gaga, to be strutted before ever-attentive cameras, splashes across magazine covers, television, YouTube and social media; there’s always a new Gaga look to praise, mock and, above all, repost. Yet onstage, amid all the artifice of costumes, wigs and dance steps, Lady Gaga keeps one important thing natural: she doesn’t lip-sync. Behind the fashion plate is a diligent music wonk.
Whether she’s wearing vinyl, silk, leather, hair or raw beef - that was the “meat dress” she wore to the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, which will be on exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - she draws attention to her brash, insistent songs, with their stuttering choruses (“pa-pa-pa-pa-paparazzi”) and booming dance beats. The title track of “Born This Way,” released in February, reached No. 1 and remains in the Top 20 alongside its slightly less commercial sequel, “Judas.”
Unlike much of her competition in the pop charts, Lady Gaga is, by all accounts, a self-guided creation. While she collaborates with producers, designers and directors, her pop-culture juggernaut is not devised by committees or consultants. “No matter what it is, she is giving the direction,” said Paul Blair a k a DJ White Shadow, a co-producer of “Born This Way” and other songs on the album. “She is 100 percent in charge of 100 percent of everything. Which is insane.”
Backstage, Lady Gaga sent a Tweet with one of her many thank-yous to fans - she has 10 million Twitter followers - and pored over a laptop display of potential costume designs before eventually sitting down for an interview. She’s not shy. In her three years of celebrity, she has simultaneously proclaimed that “every moment of my life is a performance piece” and shrugged off any mystique. She is still, she said, “an Italian New Yorker at heart, and I just want to make music and do this forever because I love it.”
She’s used to parsing questions about art and artifice. “It’s always very strange when people say, ‘Is this the real you?,’ or ‘Is this really who you are? Is this an act?,’ ” she said. “ ‘Born This Way’ is sort of the answer to all of the questions I’ve been asked for the last three years. This is who I am.” In “Marry the Night,” the first song on the album, churchy organ chords and a dance beat surge as she sings “I’m a warrior queen/Live passionately tonight.”
Lady Gaga stretched out a leg to show the unicorn she had tattooed on her left thigh in September. “The unicorn for me is a mythical creature and magic, and I believe this album in a lot of ways attempts to annihilate the idea that magic is not real. I believe magic is real. I believe fantasy is real. I live halfway between reality and fantasy all the time.”
Her pace is relentless. “No one works like this girl,” said Jimmy Iovine, the chairman of Interscope Geffen A&M Records, her label. “This is the first artist I’ve ever asked to stop. You really beg her to stop, and she doesn’t stop. She just goes.”
Most hitmakers separate touring and recording; Lady Gaga multitasks. She made “Born This Way” while on the road, recording songs after belting for more than two hours onstage for the Monster Ball.
Studio Bus, as it’s credited on the album, was an extra tour bus holding a recording studio; her engineer, Dave Russell, and two producers, Mr. Blair and Fernando Garibay, traveled with her for a year. “Basically after the shows, I would go on the bus, and I would work all night,” she explained. “Then we would pull the buses over, and then I would get back on my bus and go to sleep on my bed, and then we would just keep driving.
“They would argue with me, and say, ‘Gaga, we can’t do your vocals right now,’ with the sound of the bus and the reverberation.” Swearing, she would say, “turn the mike on and let’s do this.” She continued, “I get so inspired and ready to go, and I’m not the kind of person that can hold in my creativity; I always have to just do it right away.”
Lady Gaga wasn’t exactly an overnight sensation, and her early rejection still smarts. “There were a lot of people that didn’t believe in me,” she said. Before “The Fame” was released, she had been signed and dropped by Def Jam Records and had worked as a songwriter for Britney Spears and Pussycat Dolls while honing her stage persona - glam-rock merged with dance-music beats and burlesque flamboyance - at Downtown clubs in Manhattan.
“The Fame” ignored mid-decade trends, using an unsubtle beat, four-on-the-floor - an update of the disco thump - rather than the funk syncopations of hip-hop and R&B. Her lyrics twisted the straightforward come-ons and affirmations of most dance music; they held humor, sleaze, defiance and thoughts about ambition and celebrity. “Something that carries through all my songwriting is this undertone of grit and darkness and melancholy,” she said. “The bitterness is hidden inside of these really soaring, joyful melodies.”
When Lady Gaga started making videos, she was literally off beat; her choreographer, Laurieann Gibson, explained that she moves on the 1 and 3, not the usual 2 and 4, a quirk that’s now a trademark. Early on, Lady Gaga said, “People would really try to push me around, because the sentiment was always: ‘She can’t possibly be for real. This must be fake, this must be artificial.’ And always kind of bossing me around and treating me like some kind of pop tart little Twinkie that just rolled in and has a record deal.”
The four-on-the-floor beat had long driven hits in Europe, but American radio stations resisted it. Mr. Iovine said it took six months of promotion to get Lady Gaga’s first single, “Just Dance,” on the air; it went on to No. 1. “The masses will accept something new,” Mr. Iovine said. “It’s the people in between who will fight you.” Lady Gaga has been in the pop charts ever since, her Little Monsters multiplying.
“The music takes on a completely different life once it enters the universe,” she said. “The fans and myself begin to dictate the sentiment around the song, and how it’s going to look and how it’s going to feel and where it’s going to be. It’s wonderful. It’s never finished. Pop culture is my religion, so to say pop culture is your religion you’d better believe your work is never finished, and that art is something that transcends, and it transforms.”
The music on “Born This Way” is inseparable from its arena-tour backdrop; Lady Gaga sings to, about and for the fans. “I can’t imagine writing not on the road, in a way,” she said. “Because of the thrill of the show and their energy. I got so many ideas looking out into the crowd, like: ‘I know what you want to hear. I know what you need.’ ” In songs like “Bad Kids” and “Hair” she preaches self-realization, community and empowerment; in another, with a scatological title, she calls herself a “blond high-heeled feminist.”
By design, she said, her new songs are “even bigger and more grand and more epic and theatrical.” “Born This Way” is an album of bangers; every song, give or take an introduction, picks up and roars. “It’s like getting hit with a truck,” Lady Gaga said. “I think the album’s very intimate. It’s just intimate in my kind of way. I’m an intense female. If I was intimate with a man, I might be shouting at him.”
She draws on club beats like trance and techno but never settles for the repetitiveness of much dance music; it’s a funhouse of an album, with sonic jolts and gimmicks that she spent months on.
The album has abundant echoes of the 1980s: not just Madonna, Lady Gaga’s obvious predecessor in many things, but also the heft and piano pounding of ’80s heartland rock. Clarence Clemons of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band plays saxophone on two songs, and for the rafter-raising power ballad “You and I,” Lady Gaga turned to Mutt Lange, who produced thickly layered tracks for Def Leppard in the 1980s. (Mr. Lange, in turn, brought in Brian May, the guitarist in Queen, the band whose song “Radio Ga Ga” gave her a name.) *
“I told him that I wanted him to work me into the ground for my vocals,” Lady Gaga said. While she was on the road, he asked her to record a rough lead vocal for the song. “I had about 30 cigarettes and a couple of glasses of Jameson and just put on a click track and sang my face off, thinking we’d redo the vocals,” she said. She never had to; Mr. Lange loved what she sent.
“I think it’s wonderful to be confident about what you create,” she said. “I think you have to be. I say that with the humbleness of the fans being so wonderful, but with the integrity and sureness of my abilities as a musician.”
But it’s not the kind of confidence that lets her relax or even slow down. “Every day, in the mirror, on the stage, in interviews, to go to sleep, to finish that chorus, I’m always in the boxing ring,” she said. “But I have a one-two punch: ambition and drive.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/arts/music/lady-gaga-has-a-new-album-born-this-way.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
* Mr. Lange, in turn, brought in Brian May, the guitarist in Queen, the band whose song “Radio Ga Ga” gave her a name.
I cannot even tell you what this meant to me! OMG! I loved Queen so much and got to see them in concert twice. Freddy was a god to me and Brian is simply brilliant. And to find out he is on the album and worked with Gaga? How f*cking awesome is that?
Lady Gaga
By Rob Sheffield
May 20, 2011
It's one thing to sing about a motorcycle, and it's another to sing about a unicorn. But when you put your motorcycle song and your unicorn song in the same song? And call it "Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)"? Now that's a pop visionary. Lady Gaga knew it was time to crank up the crazy, and she didn't hold back: Born This Way is her Eighties arena-rock move, going for maximum goth Catholic bombast. The whole album thumps like the soundtrack to a lost Eddie and the Cruisers sequel, one where Eddie gets crucified by Roman soldiers, while Gaga stands under the cross weeping and sending dirty texts to the DJ.
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.
What makes Born This Way so disarmingly great is how warm and humane Gaga sounds. There isn't a subtle moment on the album, but even at its nuttiest, the music is full of wide-awake emotional details. The friendliest cut is "Yoü & I," her love song to a "cool Nebraska guy." She has been playing it live for a while, but who knew she would let Mutt Lange put "We Will Rock You" drums all over it? Or bring in Queen's Brian May to play guitar?
All that excess just amps up the emotion in the song, especially when Gaga wails, "There's only three men that I'm-a serve my whole life/It's my daddy and Nebraska and Jesus Christ." Gaga loves overheated cosmic statements for the same reason she loves dance pop and metal guitars - because she hears them as echoes of her twisted rock & roll heart. That's the achievement of Born This Way: The more excessive Gaga gets, the more honest she sounds.
(four out of five stars)
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/exclusive-how-e-street-band-saxophonist-clarence-clemons-ended-up-on-lady-gagas-new-album-20110218
Lady Gaga: Born This Way - review
by Kitty Empire
According to DJ White Shadow, one of its producers, the third Lady Gaga album sounds like "a golden spaceship touching down on a rainbow runway in a field of fresh mint." It is an album of sensory overload, but he may have been riffing slightly. In truth, Born This Way smells much more of hair products, poppers and exhaust fumes than anything so meadowy as mint.
The spaceship thing, especially, is misleading. Gaga may have given birth to an alien race in the eye-catching video for "Born This Way", but its parent album is recognisably terrestrial, dividing its affections between two landmasses - the Americas and Europe. Born This Way runs big, timeless American themes - freedom, self-actualisation, the romance of the road, the Boss, even Neil Young - through the pointy prism of decadent European dance music. It effects Cher's transition from AOR diva to dance queen in reverse.
Consequently, track one, "Marry the Night", is a blowsy carpe diem affair which draws on hi-NRG club-pop for its modus operandi. "Government Hooker" features the memorable line "Put your hands on me/ John F Kennedy" before delivering a fairly confused account of relations between the individual and the state, whipped along by truncheon-slapping acrylic sounds. It's rather fun.
The refreshing and confounding thing about Gaga is that she doesn't sweat these kinds of contradictions. Featuring Clarence Clemons - the saxophonist out of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band - on a disco-pop album? Why not? The prostheses extending her bone structure, which recall both Marilyn Manson and, again, Cher? Baby, she was born this way. The cover of the album, however, is an homage to heavy metal imagery that's far more pose than promise. There's a song called "Heavy Metal Lover" here, but if it had a genre, you might call it "Vocoder'n'Moroder" rather than rock'n'roll. (It is, though, one of the album's unexpectedly sweet moments.)
Since Stefani Germanotta's ambitious art prank went global in 2008, one of the many accusations levelled at her is that her music privileges style over substance; that the Grammies egg, and the flesh couture and all the daft acts of millinery are more culturally noteworthy than the fairly standard dance-pop tunes. She talks the talk, incessantly: her creative team, Haus of Gaga, is charged with keeping Gaga in continual image flux. From the beginning, she has sought to ally herself with the creative misfits, when her tunes - overtly commercial, and, until "Bad Romance" and "Telephone", pretty conventional - were the stuff that their bullies could dance to without feeling a pang of guilt.
Now that she is sat atop a lofty pop-cultural stalagmite, however, Gaga has endeavoured to Say Something Important, a campaign begun with the album's first single, "Born This Way". It might have felt too big and too obvious a disco statement, but there are heartlands out there where the track undoubtedly hit home.
The freedom to be oneself, and to transcend the ordinariness of one's surroundings, is a classic trope of club music, pop and rock'n'roll. That prerogative is hammered home here at gale force on "The Edge of Glory", a song pitched somewhere so bombastic and hysterical that one is forced to genuflect.
The downside, though, is that Gaga's urge to liberate everyone from all yokes sometimes merely produces songs about doing things to your hair to spite your parents. Hair has long been a metaphor for all sorts of things - religious affiliation, subcultural membership, a woman's state of mind - but "Hair" - soft-rock ballad on top, Eurodisco sides, great digital zigzag two-thirds of the way in - doesn't really add to the coiffure canon. "Bad Kids", meanwhile, is the kind of rebel theme tune that gives rebel theme tunes a bad name, outlining various brattish behaviours before promising the naughty a sanctuary in Mama Monster's bosom.
Enthrallingly, though, the album never lets up, as her producers chuck entire studios at her fulsome vocals. Many songs here are crafted from radically different tunes all stitched together for an attention-deficit generation: a song may start with an intro from one genre, segue into a verse from another, switchback into a surprise pre-chorus, follow that with a fist-pump major-chord chorus, before inserting a hard-edged clubby middle eight. Amid all the maximalism and the references to "an American riding a dream", there are three out-and-out fascinating songs. One is the fierce recent single "Judas", in which one lover's betrayal is amped up to Judaeo-Christian levels.
Another is "Sheiße", rapped in a dominatrix's made-up German that is as comedy-Teutonic as techno gets. Finally, and in radical contrast, there's "Yoü and I". "Yoü And I" is an umlaut-toting digital country power ballad which contains two Springsteen references - "born to run" and Nebraska - as well as a lover playing Gaga Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" on her birthday. It is Gaga's unlikely heartland moment - a bid, perhaps, to locate herself as an all-American balladeer as well as an art-disco avatar with tent pegs under her skin.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/may/23/lady-gaga-born-this-way-review
Lady Gaga
'Born This Way'
The raging Queen of Pop ecstatically ransacks the '80s
Life is a highway, and Lady Gaga wants to ride it on a unicorn with Jesus strapped to her back all night long. Born This Way is a literal road record -- the 25-year-old singer recorded it during her travels promoting 2008 debut The Fame, and follow-up EP The Fame Monster -- but it also charts Gaga's speedy trip from a chick with a disco shtick to our most absurd pop star for our absurd times. Gaga couldn't have changed course faster if she'd hopped in Marty McFly's DeLorean, which is essentially what she does on this gloriously weird album. She borrows the grandiose flavor of 1980s radio rock, adds Catholicism, gay pride, and mythical creatures, then stirs it all with a comically gigantic high heel.
Like the other dyed-blond Italian-American superstar who blazed this trail, Lady Gaga drags her conflicting obsessions with religion and sex onto the dance floor. Gaga and cowriter Fernando Garibay wedge church organ into the four-on-the-floor banger "Marry the Night" and sedate the beat to a hypnotically sleazy grind for "Bloody Mary." But despite the title track's utopian message, Born This Way's songs are not created equal: Holy dud "Judas" is a frantic puzzle whose pieces never quite fit, and the tracks that compare godliness to self-empowerment are likewise labored. The echoes of Bruce Springsteen on messy "Hair" don't meld with its cutesy chorus -- even E Street sax man Clarence Clemons sounds like he's not sure why he's there -- and the painfully trite, though well-intentioned lyrics to Madonna rip-off "Born This Way" aren't helped by a glitter grenade of synthesizers.
Excess is Gaga's riskiest musical gamble, but it's also her greatest weapon, and Born This Way relentlessly bludgeons listeners' pleasure centers. "Electric Chapel" pairs divine diva thump with a Van Halen guitar solo and "Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)" rubs clubby keyboards against the hopeful angst of "Thunder Road," capturing the effect of spinning a radio dial in the '80s, when frizzy pop and over-the-top rock mingled outrageously on the airwaves. Even when she sticks to a single sonic path -- grimy doom disco on "Government Hooker," "Scheiße," and "Heavy Metal Lover" -- Gaga coos nutty come-ons that range from the ludicrous ("Put your hands on me, John F. Kennedy") to the hilariously ludicrous ("I don't speak German, but I can if you like") to the awesomely ludicrous ("I want your whiskey mouth all over my blond south").
The cult of Gaga has already eclipsed her music, so it's only fitting that she turn to the decade of bloat for inspiration, nicking bits from Pat Benatar, Whitney Houston, and Journey. Producer Mutt Lange feeds "Yoü and I" through the Def Leppard filter and brings in Queen guitarist Brian May to crank the love song into a stompy lighter-waver (echoing Elton John and Spinal Tap). It's the perfect lead-in to closer "The Edge of Glory," which sounds exactly like its title, uniting all of Gaga's contradictory impulses in an ecstatic, anthemic, five-minute lunge to the finish line -- there's strings and synths, Eurodisco beats and saxophone solos, love and death.
Calibrating the crazy in her music is no easy task, but Gaga twists the right knobs on Born This Way, applying her '80s pastiche to throbby grooves and sentimental tunes that'll pierce the hearts of both Little Monsters and heartland moms. At times, the journey to "Glory" nearly pushes Gaga over the edge, but while most 21st-century pop stars pulverize their imperfections into an Auto-Tuned slurry, she boldly wears her audacity like a meat dress. Lady Gaga certainly wasn't born this way, but she's making a convincing case that she's evolving into our most surreally brilliant pop star.
http://www.spin.com/reviews/lady-gaga-born-way-streamlinekonliveinterscope/
ALBUM REVIEW: Lady Gaga - Born This Way
The Second Advent of Gaga is at hand! She has returned, with earsplitting and escalating fanfare, to the club, bearing a club. The former is her birthplace and temple, her “Electric Chapel.” The latter is the instrument of salvation with which she will bludgeon us all into an oozing puddle, a feverishly anticipated new pop album called Born This Way. On it, Lady Gaga has transformed herself from a detached critic of celebrity to pop music’s version of Oprah, a superstar with a megaphone, hell-bent on your personal betterment.
No matter what you think of Lady Gaga as an artist, her meteoric rise in the last two-and-a-half years has been startling. Gaga owes her success in no small part to constant and scrupulous self-promotion and nonstop effort, reminding more than a few of another self-made pop icon. Comparisons to Madonna have grown threadbare through repetition, but the two artists’ career trajectories have been strikingly similar. Unlike other modern pop stars, Gaga is a tightly controlled product. She rarely lends her talent out to other artists and projects. Her debut album The Fame and its addendum The Fame Monster have spawned seven hit singles the old fashioned way, through artfully made music videos and organic pop-cultural saturation. She has toured relentlessly, not only amassing an army of fans, but also winning over the mainstream despite, or perhaps thanks to, her avant-garde hijinks.
Bombastic and schmaltzy, brimming with lyrical howlers (“Love is the new denim or black”), and all wrapped up in a ludicrous Heavy Metal cover-art package, Born This Way is as tasteful as teased hair and acid wash Daisy Dukes. Pop music is rarely this patronizing and emphatic. The blaring monotony of the album wears you down. Which is a shame, as Gaga can be her most emotive when she’s alone with her piano. Compare her wonderful, Elton John-worthy rendition of “Yoü and I” from her HBO special to the bloated album version to see just what’s been trampled in the studio.
But here’s the thing. Born This Way succeeds through sheer force of will, even with its flaws. Lady Gaga has created fourteen incredible pop songs that manage to survive her ambition and execution. Anthemic singles “Born This Way” and “Judas” have already done their job, joining the ranks of her earlier club staples “Paparazzi,” “Bad Romance,” and “Telephone.” The album’s power ballads (“Hair,” “The Edge of Glory,” “Yoü and I”) are ready-made for shouted highway sing-alongs. But it’s on the stranger detours of its middle section where Born This Way really scores: the haughty catwalk strut of “Scheiße,” the guitar-tinged bubblegum pop of “Bad Kids,” and the slinky and effortless “Bloody Mary” all move Gaga into fresh territory.
Lady Gaga deserves much of the criticism lobbed at her, but accusations of her supposed kleptomania seem bizarre. That artists steal from one another is not only uncontroversial, but any argument to the contrary would consequently damn all popular music since Elvis Presley. For Lady Gaga, all instances of theft (which on Born This Way range from diverse sources like Bonnie Tyler, Bruce Springsteen, 4 Non Blondes, TLC, and, of course, herself) are merely the components of her weirdo vision, which she crafts into something both familiar and new.
Born This Way is a work of art. Born This Way is trash. Either way, it’s more than just another pop album. The debate will only further cement Lady Gaga’s stardom. The truckloads of money? Just a happy consequence. Gaga wins again.
http://prettymuchamazing.com/reviews/albumreviews/bornthisway
How E Street Band Saxophonist Clarence Clemons Ended Up on Lady Gaga's New Album
"She came running down the hall," Clemons says. "She was like 'Big Man!' I was like 'Holy shit, man. Damn!'"
By Andy Greene
February 18, 2011 2:20 PM ET
Three weeks ago E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons was putting together an exercise machine in his Florida house when his wife told him that Lady Gaga's people were on the phone. "They said to me, 'Lady Gaga wants you to play on her album,'" Clemons says. "This is on a Friday afternoon at 4:00 pm. I said, 'When do you want me to do it? I'm free Monday or Tuesday.' They go, "No, she needs you RIGHT NOW in New York City." Clemons dropped what he was doing and started driving to the airport. "I almost got a ticket I drove so fast," says Clemons. "It was wild. I was so excited. I'm a Gaga-ite."
Clemons arrived at the Manhattan studio at midnight with his saxophone, not quite sure what to expect. "She came running down the hall," Clemons says. "She was like 'Big Man!' I was like, 'Holy shit, man. Damn!'" Gaga wanted him to play saxophone on multiple tracks, including the in-progress song "Hair." In a recent interview with Ryan Seacrest, Gaga talked about the song. "It's uptemo, but it's sort of got this Bruce Springsteen vibe to it," she said. "I actually had Clarence Clemons come in. He played saxophone. It's really interesting, because it's putting saxophone on this really huge electronic record." She also gave Seacrest a bit of the lyrics: "Whenever I dress cool my parents put up a fight / And if I'm a hotshot Mom will cut my hair at night / And in the morning I'm shorn of my identity / I scream, "Mom and Dad, why can't I be who I want to be?"
Before Clemons started work on the song, she explained the lyrics to him. "It made so much sense," he says. "It's a story about growing up." She gave him very few instructions about how to play on the song. "She said 'we'll put the tape on and you just play,'" Clemons says. "She said to me, 'Play from your heart. Play what you feel.' It was all very pure."
By 3:00 am, after just a few takes, they were done. "I play sax through the whole song and I have a solo," says Clemons. "I'm surprised I'm getting paid for this. I would have done it for free. I can never believe something that feels so good earns me money." Clemons was a huge Gaga fan before the session, but now he loves her even more. "She's the real deal," he says. "All the craziness and stuff, there's a purpose to all of it. She has no boundaries ... It's a day I'll never forget. I always wait for Bruce to call and say 'come do this' and it's real exciting for me. I never saw this happening, though.'"
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/exclusive-how-e-street-band-saxophonist-clarence-clemons-ended-up-on-lady-gagas-new-album-20110218
