You probably noticed a few things missing from Lady Gaga’s just-premiered video for “The Edge of Glory.” The video, for instance. We were promised a mermaid-laden extravaganza led by the extravaganzic Joseph Kahn, who probably directed your going to sleep last night. We received abandonitis. What happened to the ambiguously brown casting-call description of a dude? And what of “wacky,” “lovable” Laurieann Gibson’s cryptic-crossword revelation that the video was “fishy”? The only thing fishy was the lapse in spectacle, which would be worth nary a note from a 2011 C-lister or a 2005 anything-lister but for post-“Paparazzi” Gaga, on Born This Way’s most triumphant song, was bizarre.
As you read this, the fan world is frantically mashing buttons on their now-fritzing blenders so they can liquefy this impurity into a creamy note, undetectable in the slurry. Simultaneously, the anti-fan world -– a sizable world, consisting as it does of every other land of stans –- has deemed this piecemeal evidence that Gaga lost it, never had it and crumples in comparison to [insert idol of choice]. Music writers are generally doing one of three things: leapfrogging between the two camps when their Google News scoreboard pings a hit for either side; blithely ignoring whichever side left the fewest profane comments or frontloaded the flimsiest arguments, or staying silent altogether, their piece already written or delayed indefinitely.
It’s hard to blame people, though, because “The Edge of Glory” doesn’t seem to fit into the Lady Gaga Narrative. You know the one: it’s both been written explicitly and implied by the keyboard storms stirred up by La Gaga’s every move and every restyled hair. It’s the narrative of Born This Way as Gaga’s great triumph, the edict handed down by the Queen in her imperial phase for the edification of all the fiefdom’s fans. A peak beyond a peak. But then stuff keeps happening to undermine the narrative. “Judas” toppled down the charts upon release, as did subsequent singles. Born This Way’s album sales crumpled after Amazon stopped being a dollar store. Kahn was hired, then fired, through what by all accounts is the sort of petty backstage drama that real-world imperial sorts would keep hidden. Like so many others in pop — Beyonce, for instance — you can make a case for Lady Gaga being the pinnacle of her field, but you could just as easily say she’s on the decline. The cracks are showing.
None of this should be a surprise, though, if you listened to the album. Part of the problem is that Born This Way is so cluttered it actively undermines any overarching thesis you try to nurture into it — anything can make 75% sense. Almost everyone’s (rightly) mentioned the triumph in every song, but that’s only the edge of the story; there’s triumph, but it’s desperate, performed and as apt to crumble as Gaga’s storyline. Alex Macpherson wrote that Born This Way” was composed of songs designed to make the listener feel strong, invulnerable and 73 feet tall.” It’s accurate, but only just; these songs are more like the patterns you can use to cast invulnerable 73-foot-tall shadows on the wall behind you with your scrawny Wizard of Oz hands. There’s too much talk of tears on the album, of facing love gone turncoat and facing death with stolen glory, for any strength to be unqualified. For all the rah-rah gravitas Lady Gaga gives her Monsters, there’s something truly monstrous about Born This Way: something small and ugly lurking behind the corners and constantly clawing forth its tendrils. And in its presence, all of Gaga’s showy self-regard, gunk of ideas, cranked-high BPM and dingy subject matter are just boards and plaster straining to keep it shut away.
Take “Government Hooker,” the most outwardly provocative song on Born This Way. (“Scheisse” hides its shit behind its German; “Heavy Metal Lover” tucks its sleaze in its lyrics, far from the title.) Like the rest of the album, it is a mess, “Funkytown” chiptune clicks coexisting with angry guitars and mock opera and Italian and Spanish and nonsense trampling each other. The “government” bit exists only because Gaga thinks Big Brother is a provocative form of politics; the “hooker” bit exists only because Gaga thinks prostitution is a provocative form of sex; the fame metaphor exists only because Gaga still thinks it’s provocative at all. But she says other words, too, and they’re a leaky water balloon of long-fetid self-esteem:
“I can be good, if you just want to be bad.
I can be cool, if you just want to be mad.
I can be anything — I’ll be your everything.
Just touch me, baby. I don’t want to be sad.”
These are not the words of anybody in a good place. They’re the words of someone in a completely self-negating relationship — abusive, even, if you take “bad” and “mad” to be kindergarten-rhyme standins for something else, and “cool” as “cool with it.” They take the ballads-old trope of “if you turn into _____, then I’ll turn into ________ to counter you” and make it utterly dependent. And they’re all the sadder for being (unintentionally?) written at a third-grade reading level.
The creepiness keeps coming: the way the pre-chorus would be amelodic if the roboguy didn’t distract you, the twisted self-sufficiency of “I’m gonna drink my tears and cry,” the mocking laughter that keeps growing louder, and Gaga’s voice. She’s used her vocal style as a signifier ever since “Just Dance,” even if nobody believed her back then when she said the autotune had a purpose. Here, she turns “I know you love me, baby” into guttural sarcasm, disgust covering for hurt, spits the chorus out of her mouth like a loogie and deploys something new: a wisp of a soprano that makes even her own name seem tentative. All of these are details from the fifth listen or more, though; “Government Hooker” has such a loud and brash and cluttered surface that the pain’s only apparent if you look really close.
This sort of thing happens everywhere. ”Judas” is enough of a sonic and scriptural clusterfuck that it’s tempting to miss the human story there. But at least Gaga’s vocals are consistent. The affected toughness of her patois on the verses (which is stupid appropriation, of course, but nobody’s calling Born This Way sensitive) conceals the fact that she’s singing things like “I’ll wash his feet with my hair if he needs” and “I couldn’t love a man so purely,” and the pathos of the chorus is doused in a Madonna-wash. “Bloody Mary” is a muddy pile of camp, Dan Brown plotlines and pretentious bullshit, but the chorus is genuinely painful. She’s still telling herself not to cry, imagining a scenario about waiting either for her lover or death (in these scenarios it doesn’t really matter) atop Paris mountaintops that’d be ridiculous if it weren’t so archetypical, and saying “I don’t want to die alone”—hidden behind French, of course.
It’s no wonder it took critics (myself included) weeks to realize “Scheisse” was a) a jam, and b) about needing somebody around to be strong, and hating it — the track practically begged for its initial “is she saying Hitler? What does it MEAN?” commentary, and more importantly, the lyrics coexist with pretty-pretty vocals, smeared-lipstick feminism (Born This Way might be the only major pop album in 2011 to say the F-word) and a too-fast-to-think BPM. She’ll be the one to take you out, but all she can think of doing is “whatever you like”; she’ll say or hear “be mine,” but she’ll think “it’s all bullshit.” Along the same lines, ”Electric Chapel” has strangely mournful church bells, guitars in the intro paced like fleeing footsteps, and choral swells that sound less Biblical epic than Lex Luger via Warcraft II. She wants his love, but it’s not enough, and the lack of closure in the track suggests it never will be.
You can’t say this about every track — see that 75% statement up top. “Born This Way,” “Hair” and “Bad Kids” are all highly straightforward, their only surprise being how well Gaga adopts the mindset of a 13-year-old. “You and I” is a Mutt Lange sop with umlauts and too much biographical criticism. “Americano” is a shitty B-side that somehow wandered onto the final cut. But those are just three among many anthems, and they’re not all this free of cracks. “Heavy Metal Lover” is so far gone with its sleaze, its shoutouts and Playboy-pose vocals, that it’s not really surprising when Gaga lets a drunken confession of a bridge slip: “I could be your girl-girl-girl, girl-girl-girl-girl-girl, but would you love me if I ruled the world?” Similarly, it’s almost impossible to take anything seriously that’s called “Highway Unicorn (Road 2 Love)” and that thinks lyrics like “she’s got a rainbow syrup in her heart that she bleeds” are meaningful. But Gaga can’t ride fast enough to escape the desperation in RedOne’s “Poker Face” synths. If she’s on the road to love, that means she isn’t there yet, and finding it’s still going to involve drinking until she dies — a note she lets echo out into the void, all major keys dropped. Speaking of which, that’s what’s beyond “The Edge of Glory” is the final track, meaning the end of the story. Life’s a bosh, and then you die.
You might have noticed I’ve left out one song. It’s deliberate. Everything above would be reading a ridiculous amount into Lady Gaga’s mental vomit had Lady Gaga herself not basically said the same thing, right at the start.
“I’m gonna marry the night.
I won’t give up on my life.
I’m a warrior queen, live passionately tonight.…
I’m gonna marry the night,
I’m not gonna cry anymore…”
There you have it: the thesis of Born This Way (and if you’re not averse to biographical criticism, perhaps Stefani Germanotta), right at the start where it’s supposed to go. It’s a complete transformation, from loser who cries in bars (that’s the only way the line placement makes any sense) to force. Pat Benatar is a common namedrop for “Marry the Night,” as is Bonnie Tyler, but they’re a decade too early. This is Believe-era Cher: specifically, “Runaway.” Gaga’s melodic dips on “marry the night” echo Cher’s on “I’ve gotta run away” exactly. They echo other things too — Madonna’s “Hung Up” is a recent and unsurprising example — but only “Runaway” is this good a match. “Run away,” Cher sings, “gotta let these feelings go…. Though my heart is always searching, if I can’t find love, I’ve gotta run away.” The fleeing, the tears, the broken hearts, the synths, the camp: it’s all on Born This Way, and it’s all distilled here.
“Here” means on the best song, where tears become fuel for flight, cries become belting, and self-pity is stuffed down in favor of rebellion. It’s loud and ugly, quickly and shoddily made and prone to cracks, but it’s better than the alternative. So it’s no wonder that “The Edge of Glory“‘s video sees Gaga wandering the streets alone, with only Clarence Clemons, may he rest in peace, at her side for a few seconds at a time. That’s been beyond the artifice all this time, and if it took a lot of drama and failure to break through the junk-barrier of Catholic exploitation and cured meat dresses and sonic stupidity, perhaps it’s for the better.
