ReBorn This Way: In Defense of Lady GaGa’s Schlock Pop
Revisiting the pop star’s derided third album reveals a glorious exercise in bad taste
John Waters’ 1972 film Pink Flamingos is subtitled “An Exercise in Poor Taste,” and it is. The film pushes gaucheness to its utter limit, notoriously climaxing with a drag queen eating dog shit. Indeed, Flamingos is total schlock, crude bad taste as art, but it’s schlock in the finest sense of the word. Waters relishes the heart in sleaze, the delight in the demented and the rush of completely overdoing it.
Waters’ penchant for schlock has found an unlikely contemporary practitioner in Lady GaGa, a performer who has utilized obscene extravagance to her advantage and has, at times, been able to elevate gaudy camp into art. A primary distinction between the two, of course, is that GaGa was once one of the most popular artists in the world.
From 2008 through the end of 2010, GaGa had an unprecedented run—colossal singles, a standard-shifting public persona and a stranglehold over popular culture. But just as Pink Flamingos was Waters’ most famous entree into the deification of schlock, so it was with GaGa’s third album, 2011’s Born This Way, a proudly tasteless and gleefully chintzy album that swiftly ended her reign as Pop Doyenne. Born This Way is considered one of the biggest fumbles in the history of popular music.
But is it the disaster that it has been pegged as? BTW’s commercial prospects certainly fell short of GaGa’s previous work, but could its unabashed overindulgence, seediness and overkill actually make it a noted camp devotee’s purest statement? Is Born This Way a failed pop record or is it actually a schlock masterpiece?
Revisiting the album recently, I’ve wondered if we’ve been looking at Born This Way all wrong. Because while it may not be a “great album,” it is certainly a noble exercise in poor taste.
It’s hard to remember now but a mere five years ago, pop culture existed merely in Lady GaGa’s image. From her first appearance in 2008 and through the release of her second album, 2010’s The Fame Monster, GaGa couldn’t blink without garnering massive attention. It was a level of media saturation like only the Twitter age could espouse and she worked the new system perfectly. She even looked like a completely different person each day.
In this period, GaGa experienced what Tom Ewing coined as a pop star’s “imperial phase,” in which a superstar becomes so influential that she is incapable of doing wrong in the public eye, setting the agenda for the entire genre merely by existing. Lady GaGa achieved imperiality faster than any of her predecessors—quicker than Michael or Madonna, Prince, Beyonce, Kanye and now Taylor Swift.
Some of it was luck. GaGa had the fortune of emerging at the intersection of an important end and an important beginning. When her ascent began in 2008, her outsized persona, brash statements and, most importantly, her campy fashion and presentation marked the end of an era of “perfect”-if-benign female pop stars. Britney Spears, Nelly Furtado and Jennifer Lopez, for instance, were early and mid aughts pop singers who slid easily into existing beauty and fashion norms and their quirk-free sexuality was the pop paradigm.
GaGa, often obscuring her face behind extravagant masks and her body under garish ensembles, represented a stark rebellion against that brand of female iconography. But instead of hurting her, her ostentatious vulgarity and outrageous appearance became a breath fresh air contrasted with the flawless—and banal—veneer of the women who preceded her.
Simultaneously 2008 marked the beginning of an explosion of house music—what we have retroactively dubbed as “EDM”—in America. Whereas pre-GaGa-ian radio music adhered to hip-hop tropes, GaGa abandoned rap influences altogether in favor of thudding, four-on-the-floor dance music. This sound defined pop everywhere in the world and had notoriously failed to gel stateside, but GaGa proved herself both bold and prescient. The success of “Just Dance” and then “Poker Face” played a part in launching the EDM boom in American popular music.
Perhaps the most notable aspect of her peak success, however, was GaGa’s ability to flaunt her affinity for the grotesque without sacrificing commerciality. She was a master at melding cheap camp with mass popular culture. Sure, she’d simulate hanging herself on national television or wear plastic sunglasses covered in burning cigarettes, but she’d do so while singing simple, radio-friendly songs. “Paparazzi” and “Telephone,” for example, are delightful, perfectly constructed pop tunes which, unlike her appearance, are smooth and accessible.
But this balancing act between the basic and the absurd proved a tough one to maintain, especially with a public mandate like GaGa had on the eve of Born This Way. John Waters once famously encouraged, “have faith in your own bad taste” and Born This Way was the moment GaGa discovered her unbreakable confidence in hers. It also served as the death knell for her imperial phase.
Massive expectations have often spelt death in pop culture, and this was certainly true with Lady GaGa’s career—anticipation for Born This Way couldn’t have been more outsized. When the album streeted in mid 2011, GaGa had been consistently validated on such a high level for her sheer “GaGaness” that she appeared infallible. She had full license to explore her deepest eccentricities and the darkest crevices of her psyche with full public (and major label) support.
And it should have been no surprise: freakiest GaGa is also schlockiest GaGa.
But it wasn’t the pop album we necessarily wanted. In their review, the American Songreader decried, “Born This Way isn’t the landmark record it could or should be.” The L.A. Times bemoaned, “If GaGa had only spent as much time on pushing musical boundaries as she has social ones, Born This Way would have been a lot more successful.” The Boston Globe summed up the initial reaction to BTW clearest: “It’s a letdown, the most deflated moment in pop music this year.”
To their credit, Born This Way is a deeply weird album, far more eccentric—and trashy—than her earlier catalogue. In some ways, it made her music more congruous with her appearance: almost too inordinate to bear. Born This Way is C-List Springsteenian trash pop for closeted gay 13-year-old boys.
The title song, the album’s lead single, represents many of the unwieldy cornerstones that define the album as a whole. There’s the tacky melodic retread of a superior 80s hit (in this instance, Madonna’s “Express Yourself”), completely subverted by LGBT-themed self-improvement lyrics so clunky they require a double-take. “No matter gay, straight or bi, lesbian, transgendered life, I’m on the right track, baby, I was born to survive!” sang the woman who broke through with the chorus, “Just dance. Gonna be okay! Da Da, Do Do.”
Puerile lyrics and tactless cadence abound elsewhere on BTW. The Bonnie Tyler-cum-Kidz Bop “Hair” features the sloppy bridge “I just wanna be free, I just wanna be me, and I want lots of friends that invite me to their parties.” “Bad Kids” cloys “I’m a nerd. I chew gum in your face, baby, I’m absurd.” Some lyrical content even borders on full-blown nonsense. “Highway Unicorn (Road to Love),” for instance: “She’s just an American, riding the dream. When she’s got a rainbow syrup and her heart that she bleeds.” Um… Okay? Ariana Grande may slur her words, but her message is plain and comprehensible.
On the production side of things, we’re introduced to the union of elements that initially appear senseless. GaGa’s Springsteen-philia is on abundant display on songs like “Marry The Night,” “Hair” and most clearly on “The Edge Of Glory.” The latter two even go as far as to feature famed Springsteen cohort Clarence Clemons on saxophone.
These lush 80s arena rock elements, however, are poisoned by kitschy and dated dance-pop elements that make Born This Way sound like the bastard child of of Born To Run, Reading Rainbow and Jock Jams. Contrasted against live components like Clemons and acoustic piano are brazenly cheesy 80s synthesizers, egregious distortion and booming synthetic four-on-the-floor drums.
If this all sounds like a hot mess, it is. Born This Way is unmitigated mayhem, the sound of a superstar with every single resource at her fingertips and full permission to go completely off the rails. It was also completely out of step with radio, then dominated by Katy Perry’s basic-bitch juggernaut Teenage Dream. As Tiny Mixtape said in their 0/100 review, “Think of this zero as [a] massive, bedazzled orifice.” I too initially rejected Born This Way just like the rest of the world, shelving it in my mind for the next four years. The album went on to sell less than half of its predecessor.
In late 2014, I picked up Jody Rosen’s article, “In Defense of Schlock Music,” where the critic sums up the often underappreciated value of schlock. “Schlock, at its finest, is where bad taste becomes great art. Schlock is music that subjugates all other values to brute emotional impact; it aims to overwhelm, to body-slam the senses, to deliver catharsis like a linebacker delivers a clothesline tackle.” When I read this sentence, I immediately thought of Born This Way and decided to return with fresh ears.
Listening to the album outside of the arc of GaGa’s rise and fall, free from deadly expectations—and thanks to Rosen, from the burden of good taste—revealed many of BTW’s assets. It’s not always a pretty record to be sure, but it’s certainly a fascinating one, more than you can say for most modern pop music. More than that, my return to Born This Way unveiled one of the most compelling and enigmatic mainstream pop records ever produced because of its blundering gluttony. Maybe it’s a schlock pop masterpiece, I thought, more Waters than Perry. Aha!
“Marry The Night,” for example, initially presents itself as an organ ballad before a growling synthesizer rings out in the background and slamming, tactless drum programming appear to hijack the whole affair. There’s two bridges, a funk breakdown, passionate claims at being a “warrior queen,” references to gay cruising, a hook that slyly plays on Lopez’s “Waiting for Tonight,” and finally an extended, wailing outro. And that’s just the first song! These are riotous, indulgent creative choices that make “Poker Face” seem like a bastion of elegance, unity and prudence.
I found myself trying to get inside GaGa’s head: Maybe the lyrics are infantile on purpose, a reflection of pop culture’s desire for un-nuanced simplicity? Perhaps the abrasive sound is a commentary on the ugliness of a world that doesn’t accept gay kids? Or maybe it’s the aural manifestation of the clashing inner turmoil of a closeted teen? Are its flamboyantly dated production elements a referendum on our karaoke popular culture that trivially fetishes, among other things, 80s aesthetics?
Or maybe none of this was on purpose. Maybe this is just what GaGa thinks is beautiful. It ultimately doesn’t matter. Looking back, like most camp, BTW’s utterly confounding nature—its sheer awkwardness—is a huge part of it’s intrigue. This is high complexity masquerading as confounding baseness.
And somehow in spite of itself, the album still manages to land on pop nirvana a couple of times: “Edge of Glory,” “Judas” and “You and I” hold up as some of her best material. Sometimes, great schlock and great pop are one in the same. It was also a little a more forward-thinking than I initially gave it credit it for. Listen to the guttural screams that precede “Bloody Mary’s” bridge and tell me you don’t hear a little Yeezus, an album that was still two years in the future.
Listening back, I also realized what a coup Born This Way was in the context of the modern pop culture industrial complex. Genuine oddness, the freedom to be an ugly mess, is something that is almost absent in the highly streamlined, big bucks world of Dr. Luke-defined 21st Century pop radio. On Born This Way, GaGa pulled off her drag queen-eating-dog-shit moment backed by the the biggest record label on earth. It was pop cultural subversion at the highest level, certainly GaGa’s most profound achievement.
What registered most, though, and what keeps the titanic chaos of Born This Way in check is GaGa herself. In Rob Sheffield’s review of Born This Way in Rolling Stone, he rightly concluded, “The more excessive GaGa gets, the more honest she sounds.” Indeed, her formidable pipes and most crucially, her abundant open-heartedness throughout the album is what tethers this beautifully deranged, tacky record. She sells every heinous platitude and bathes heartily in every cheesy synthesizer. She believes in this schlock and she makes you believe. She “delivers catharsis like a linebacker,” as Rosen says. I even started to feel like Lady GaGa genuinely cared about me. What more could you ask for from a mainstream pop record?
Of course, none of this makes Born This Way a great piece of music—it’s still a tough listen, just the way Pink Flamingos is a tough watch. And GaGa’s post BTW-career isn’t promising a grand future of big-scale schlock in pop music.
Recently, we’ve had her mea-culpa, ArtPop, which felt like the antithesis of BTW: completely lacking in surefootedness. Then we’ve had her forays into the tasteful: her jazz duets album with Tony Bennett and her beautiful performance of Sound of Music classics at last weekend’s Oscar ceremony. Gone is her subversive presentation—the dresses made of meat, the lobster tiaras on her head and the proudly ugly music. Post-BTW GaGa falls much more in line with Pre-GaGa female superstar expectations—long blonde hair and glittering gowns are her new look, for instance.
In some ways GaGa’s luxuriation in schlock, her affinity for irreverent tastelessness, was unsustainable for a modern pop star. But if it’s true that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone, it’s hard not to miss the schlocky GaGa, perhaps the truest GaGa, and it’s peak with Born This Way. I wish I, and everyone else, had appreciated it more when it was happening. Because in the end, Waters’ sentiments say it best: “Bad taste is what entertainment is all about.”
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