Baby, I Was Born This Way

[manman85]

I love that the criticism of "Born This Way" (sort of like the criticism of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark) matters not at all. The song is a huge hit and for good reason: it's fucking awesome.

I listened to it like ten times on the way home. Just kept hitting replay. It's not something I do often.

I don't understand why people hate on pop music. If

Comments

[manman85]

Of course there's more than one way to love a song. I don't think one way is any more or less valid than another.

There was a conversation on Jacob's Facebook about this. He said that it's ironic that everyone is saying Lady Gaga is unoriginal. The Madonna comparisons specifically have been going on since Gaga became famous. She's always been quite upfront about her influences and one of the reasons I love her, I think, is because she is a year younger than I am and all of the music she grew up with is the music I grew up with. You hear it in her work a lot, the recycling of '90s pop music sounds.

I also think she has been able to recreate the fan culture that Madonna had at her height in the '80s. Gaga has girls (and boys) dressing up like her and that excites me since I was too young to experience it with Madonna. When I see girls dressed like Lady Gaga in Penn Station, that makes me really happy and I feel a sense of community with these people, even though they are strangers. And I realize that's exactly what Gaga wants, not just because of celebrity narcissism (I want everyone to adore me so much that they want to be me), but because of her sheer love for her fans and her marrow-deep humanity. She wants us to feel beautiful and fearless enough to go pantsless.