The familiar opening line of “Born This Way,” the title track from a certain seminal album, carries just a little weight for Lady Gaga, who was born Stefani Germanotta, and who by her own volition became a classically-trained, boundary-pushing social provocateur with a vital presence in the pop zeitgeist. It takes a certain caliber of artist to become mononymous: Prince. Madonna. Gaga.
Lady Gaga and pop culture both looked quite different in 2011 during Born This Way’s initial release, and reviewing Gaga’s boldness from that time — both in her melodramatic public persona and innovative production choices — serves as a reminder for how much has changed in the decade that has passed since. Gay marriage had not yet been legalized in America in 2011; themes of same-sex romance run like an electric current through the record. Born This Way was, by any metric, risky. Upon release, it was also, by any metric, an absolute smash.
Off the heels of The Fame Monster, Gaga’s explosive debut studio album, anticipation for Born This Way was through the roof. (Remember, this was before Twitter standom as we know it today, so such hype was mostly expressed through message boards, the flying off the stands of magazines featuring Gaga, iTunes downloads, and good ol’ word of mouth.) Ahead of the full record, the single “Born This Way” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold 448,000 digital downloads in three days — the most downloads in a first week by a female artist at the time. Upon release, the full album went platinum immediately, selling over a million copies its first week.
Appropriately, for an album heavily rooted in themes of catharsis and freedom, Born This Way allowed Lady Gaga to shed just a few of her many brightly colored layers and begin to refine her voice as a fully-formed artist.
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