Gaga’s new album: Pop for the download generation

Lady Gaga — Born This Way (Interscope)

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Lady Gaga is known to the world not for her music, but for her “canniness in chasing fame,” said Elysa Gardner in USA Today. Far from dispelling that reputation, her new album makes it even harder to distinguish “between her creative ambition and her desire to simply sustain and milk our fascination.” The plain fact of the 25-year-old’s pop pre-eminence raises a lot of questions, said Stephen Marche in Esquire. “Are we entering a world in which the new amounts to nothing but endless recombinations” of old songs and costumery? And what does it say about the performer’s generation that “even their most radical pop star is fundamentally a pleaser?”

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The new album “plays like a souped-up rebuild” of a Madonna greatest-hits collection, said Thomas Conner in the Chicago Sun-Times. Sure, only the record’s title track is a “litigation-ready” lift. But there are enough “semi-religious button-pushers, gay-culture co-opts,” and Euro-disco tributes here to make it seem as if the bad girl of the 1980s just handed over her blueprint. Gaga’s only new trick is to bring in some arena-rock flavoring courtesy of Def Leppard’s producer, Queen guitarist Brian May, and E Street Band sax player Clarence Clemons. The result is music so derivative that it “effectively contradicts” Gaga’s lyrical mantra: “Just be yourself.”

The songs on Born This Way might just be “too overblown” to be appreciated for the “sing-along melodies” they deliver, said Neil McCormick in the London Telegraph. But that’s part of Gaga’s dilemma. Unlike Madonna—or Elvis Presley—she’s attempting to become a pop god in a music industry crippled by downloading. New levels of novelty and sensation are required to hold the public’s attention, and she’s answered that appetite by making her outrageous fashion aesthetic central to her persona. An album is probably not even “the thing we should judge her on.” In fact, no one will know if this album represents a new career pinnacle until a year from now, when the “added dimensions” of videos and performances” will have “reshaped the songs.”