Lady Gaga’s Born This Way single has been released. I’m torn. I bought The Fame Monster and it was pretty good in places. It was a keeper, that was for sure. But if this is an indication of what the Born This Way album is going to sound like, I’ve got nothing. The singer admitted she didn’t really spend any time on its creation, admitting in her Vogue interview that she wrote the song in 1o minutes. Upon hearing the track, Elton John declared it the ‘gayest ever’ that would replace ‘I Will Survive’ as the gay and straight anthems to people’s lives. I disagree. I tried to listen, and harder to tolerate the beat, but all I could hear was Express Yourself by Madonna and When Love Takes Over by David Guetta. Someone in the comment section of Jezebel.com (a site I’m also trying not to hate after its calamitous redesign) notes they hear undertones of Waterfalls by TLC. I’m not the only one to notice the Madonna comparison. The Express Yourself music video’s comments on YouTube are flooded with fans pointing out the similarities. The official Born This Way video from Gaga’s YouTube/VEVO is the same. People Magazine literally wrote an article entitled: ‘Does Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Sound like Madonna’s Express Yourself?’ noting that ‘ExpressYourself’ became a more popular topic than ‘bornthiswayfriday’, on Twitter, hours after the song’s release. Us Magazine wrote a piece entitled: ‘Is Lady Gaga’s Born This Way a Madonna Rip Off?’ Listen below. Is it good? Is it derivative? Yahoo Music goes into a deeper analysis and adds more comparisons.
Born This Way follows the blueprint for an early ’90s club hit remarkably carefully: keening strings on the first verse, a propulsive four-on-the-floor thump, layers of squelching synths, soulful vocals. We hear a bit of Kelly Rowland and David Guetta’s When Love Takes Over in here and some melody from TLC’s Waterfalls, but mostly it’s a hodge-podge of Madonna’s greatest hits: the chorus from Express Yourself, the glitter disco of Ray of Light, the spoken-word bridge from Vogue, there’s even a hint of Future Lovers from her 2005 disc Confessions on a Dance Floor in the last 10 seconds. Bits of the song [were] so reminiscent of Express Yourself, the name of the 1989 track [trended] on Twitter. [Yahoo Music]
As an aside, it’s also alleged Gaga copied the cover art from Kylie Minogue’s 2007 single 2 Hearts. That cover’s shown below, side-by-side, for comparison.
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