It’s Just Eh.

I’ve been waiting allllll year for Gaga’s new album, and it came out TODAY.  My initial thought is that The Fame it isn’t.  It’s much more generic pop and really very samey.  Edge of Glory, Fashion of his Love and The Queen are all essentially the same song with the added bonus that Fashion of his Love is also a blatant Whitney rip-off of I Wanna Dance With Somebody.  I don’t like the single Hair at all, and it almost comes across like the smarmy appeals to high schoolers that I’ve come to expect from Taylor Swift.  ”I just want lots of friends who invite me to their parties?”  Barf.  Gaga and Swift are both too old and famous to pretend to still be insecure about how they were (or likely were not) treated in high school.  Not to mention the obvious incongruity of the simultaneous messages of loving who you are and insisting on getting crazy red highlights to “make sure your friends know you’re dynamite.”  I thought that The Fame and The Fame Monster were a revolution in pop music and constituted an elevation of the potential artistic quality of pop, but Born This Way doesn’t live up.  In fact, it seems more in the domain of the lip-synced pop that Gaga proclaims to hate.  Gaga can barely sing her current singles live (particularly Judas) because the choreography is too challenging.  Ultimately she’ll have to decide if she’s a musician first or a performance artist first; whether she’s truly a Liza Minnelli, or a Britney Spears in a meat gown.