Music Monday

Full disclosure: I am not a Lady Gaga fan. I don’t dislike her, but I don’t get the hype around her either. To me, she’s more of a media icon than a musician. But she sells records and I can’t be mad at her for that. Gaga’s album “Born This Way”, the long-awaited follow-up to the ridiculously popular “The Fame”, was released late last month and sold over 1.1 million copies in its first week of release.

That is a staggering number of records. Albums haven’t moved in that high a volume since the heady days of Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys in the late 90s. Of course, Gaga’s record sales were tremendously helped by a promotion on Amazon.com that offered the entire album for 99 cents for a whole day. The large number of sales crashed Amazon’s servers and caused the site to quickly outsell traditional music retailers.

So, “Born This Way” is selling like crazy, but is it any good? Reviews of the album have been pretty good, but many reviewers say the album is inconsistent with no real theme. Not that that really matters to most young listeners, anyway. The Guardian’s Kitty Empire gave “Born This Way” three stars out of five, praising Gaga’s fun dance tempos but disdaining the lyrics of some tracks, which she says are shallow. “Gaga’s urge to liberate everyone from all yokes sometimes merely produces songs about doing things to your hair to spite your parents”, Empire writes.

Entertainment Weekly’s Adam Markowitz was also underwhelmed by the album’s overall message, comparing Gaga to an “earnest dance-party evangelist” who preaches on “fanatically inspirational” tracks. Despite the tepid lyrics, Markowitz liked the sound of the album, giving it a B+ rating.

Image c/o: Domain Barnyard