Artist: Lady Gaga

Album: Born This Way

Record Label: Interscope

Soundwaves: 2/5

Sounds Like: Trashy Europop meets club-thumping dubstep

Lady Gaga has achieved cult status in mainstream music culture, toeing the line between being larger than life and stranger than fiction. Gaga is not an artist afraid to push boundaries and stir up controversy (Case in point: walking into the 2010 MTV Music Video Awards looking like something out of Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’).

But it seems the only thing Gaga isn’t capable of doing is following up a club-banger of an EP with an album of any substance. She ramped up the hype machine by declaring ‘Born This Way’ as the album of the decade, but released a lackluster album with only a few tracks that hold a candle to her impressive list of Billboard chart-toppers.

If ‘The Fame Monster’ was an Oreo cookie, a sweet eight track effort that whetted fans’ appetites for Gaga’s glitzy dance-pop shtick, then new album ‘Born This Way’ is the famous cookie’s Double Stuf counterpart, with the same bland flavor as the last release but this time with twice the filler.

One main problem in ‘Born This Way’ rears its ugly head before the listener even opens the CD. The album cover depicts a Gaga-Harley Davidson hybrid. So does ‘Born This Way’ refer to Lady Gaga being born as a transformer? If Gaga were indeed a robot in disguise, it would at least explain her inexplicable forays into looping techno beats on power ballads like the saxophone-backed ‘Hair’ or the shamefully Madonna-influenced opener ‘Marry the Night.’

Most songs on ‘Born This Way’ are so chock-full of bells and whistles that it comes across as an album for the crowd who suffers from musical attention deficit disorder. ‘Government Hooker’ drowns in its own cacophony, flailing under waves of secondhand dubstep instrumentation that even Skrillex wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole and a lackluster chorus that seems oddly out of character for Gaga. It’s as if Gaga is afraid that any second without some kind of overblown electronic effect is a second wasted.

Not to mention, Gaga doesn’t hesitate to show off her prowess at singing in foreign languages using vocabulary that even 101 students would scoff at. ‘Americano’ sounds like a track straight from the cutting room floor of ‘Moulin Rouge,’ and, while more organic than the vast majority of ‘Born This Way,’ it borders on offensive with trite lyrics sung mostly in broken Spanglish. Gaga tackles German slang on ‘Scheibe,’ and at least forewarns listeners that ‘I don’t speak German, but I can if you like’ before rambling on in spoken verses that sound like Gaga accidentally switched on the ‘Repeat’ button during production.

A great deal of the album packs an enormous punch when it comes to hook-laden choruses, but are easily derailed by lazily written verses that, at first listen, sound rehashed from her previous hit singles. The chorus of ‘Bloody Mary’ is a copy-pasted doppelganger of ‘Paparazzi’ and the schlock-pop of ‘Judas’ could easily be mistaken for a remix of ‘Bad Romance,’ stuttering vocals and all.

There are some diamonds in the rough on the album, including the Elton John-esque ‘You and I’ and the vintage 80s inspired ‘The Edge of Glory,’ but it’s almost not worth the effort to play junior archaeologist and dig deep for the few gems scattered in the album.

Will the album sell a lot of copies? Yes. Will her devout fans proclaim this album as an all-time classic? Of course. But Lady Gaga’s magnum opus is nothing more than a disappointment of epic proportions.

ervanrhe@syr.edu

Published on May 26, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Erik: ervanrhe@syr.edu | @therealvandyman