17 February 2011
Here we are again: another of those gargantuan early-’10s Lady Gaga hits. The blaring, overproduced, identikit, corporate-level EDM track at the centre of all this event-release, expensive-video foofaraw is bland, cliched, and fatuous. Anyone at the time who recalled Madonna’s ‘Express Yourself’—and ‘Born This Way’ certainly helps to jog memories in that direction—found it especially tedious. As with ‘Poker Face’ and the like, I think of Gaga’s fantastic ‘Just Dance’ and sigh at how she ended up painting herself into a corner like this.
Little did we know in February 2011 that ‘Born This Way’ would be Lady Gaga’s last Irish number one single for a whole seven years. She continued to have hit records during that time, of course, plus other interests and a consistently high public profile. Still, though, it’s telling that ‘Born This Way’ only tops the charts in Ireland for a solitary week before being displaced by the return of Jessie J’s ‘Price Tag’ to number one; maybe we were beginning to tire of the lack of substance at the heart of the Gaga hullaballoo. Smart cookie that she is, perhaps Gaga herself was too.
So Gaga departs from the top of our charts for the next few years. In the meantime, the 2011 Irish number one spot is now about to welcome a radically different sort of singer, as a brand new superstar is born.
