LADY GAGA: BORN THIS WAY

Lady Gaga has returned with her long awaited new album, "Born This Way" and what I've heard, I have really liked,.however, after seeing her HBO special, "The Monster Ball Tour", it made it even more clear that I much more enjoy just listening to her music as I'm far less enamored of watching any of her theatrical antics on display on stage. I really appreciate that she is giving every ounce of her being to all of her "little monsters" but one overly elaborate, overly choreographed  production number after another, it all grew tiresome and just came across as clunky and amateurish.

As much as Gaga likes to think of her self as an "artist", much of her show felt artless. In fact, the only part I truly enjoyed was during the end credits when she was backstage singing a passionate a Capella version of "Born This Way" with her background singers. It was beautiful in it's simplicity and I would really love to have a recorded version of this but the rest of the show was fine musically but whatever message she is trying to convey tends to get muddled by all of the random and meaningless visual noise.

I think her insistence of being Lady Gaga 24/7 is ultimately going to be detrimental to her to health with all of the pressures of fame combined with the short attention span of her fans and the inevitable critical backlash, I'm afraid to say that she is a nervous breakdown waiting to happen.

As for her new music,  this is a strong collection that makes the songs are on debut, "The Fame" seem subtle as Gaga feels more comfortable to push her quirky Eurodisco sound even more aggressively forward with echoes of eighties rock as well as shamelessly following the lead of the Material Girl.when she courted controversy by using religious images in her music.

Have a listen to a few of my favorite tracks from the new album:

"Marry The Night" - Lady Gaga

"Government Hooker" - Lady Gaga

"Schibe" - Lady Gaga

This is the video for the second single off the album,"Judas" in all of it's excessive glory:




And as a bonus, here is Beyonce's new video for "Run The World (Girls)", a song I don't care for but I LUV the video. You can clearly see how she has been influenced by Gaga's eccentric imagery: