The singer's new track, "Born This Way," was intended as an anthem to diversity and acceptance. But as Jacob Bernstein reports, her core fanbase thinks it's just a pandering piece of pop. 
 
 In her new single "Born This Way," Lady Gaga implores listeners "don't be a drag, just be a queen," and says, "it doesn't matter whether you love him or capital H-I-M." The singer has said she wanted to create the ultimate gay anthem, and perhaps she's succeeded. By Friday night, the track had raced to the top of the iTunes charts and gotten a stellar plug from her gay consigliere in cyberspace, Perez Hilton. Rolling Stone also applauded Gaga's effort, with Rob Sheffield giving the song four stars. 
 
 Still, among a specific set of urban gay men—many of whom had bought tickets to her shows, worked out at Equinox with her album The Fame Monster blaring in their ears, danced to her music on Fire Island, and discussed her outré wardrobe with a tendency that would alarm even the most pro-gay straight people—the reaction was surprisingly mixed. 
 
 Some of the swipes were minor. Aaron Hicklin, the editor of Out (one of the earliest publications to put Gaga on the cover) was the first to break ranks. On Saturday, he took to his Facebook account and wrote a message saying, "Gaga shmaga." He urged friends to go out and buy the new Adele album instead. 
 
 On Monday—after Gaga performed the song at the Grammys with a troupe of scantily clad dancers while donning a ponytail reminiscent of early '90s Madonna—Andy Cohen, the Bravo host, wrote on his blog that he found her number "very Blond Ambition meets Express Yourself." This did not appear to be a compliment. 
 
 Eric Ord, an openly gay chap working in New York in commercial real estate, said, "I think she sees herself as the gay messiah and it bugs me." According to him, the song would be like "white people writing a song about breaking free from slavery and expecting black people to worship us for it." (To be fair, Lady Gaga has said she's attracted to both men and women.) And Aaron Newbill, a modeling agent, referred to an old quote where Gaga said she wrote the song in 10 minutes. "She should have taken at least 11," he said. 
 
 "I sort of liked Gaga more when she sang about dancing as opposed to trying to be the voice of a generation," says a gay party promoter in New York. 
 
 Michael Caulfield / Getty Images 
 
 Even among Gaga's most reliable demographic—denizens of the gay club world—the reaction was far from uniformly positive. Jared Needle, who with his business partner Josh Wood is the biggest gay party promoter in New York, said, "I find the lyrics cliché and the melody overly Madonna-esque. It seems pretty en vogue at the moment to pander to people's concerns about bullying. It's a good PR move because it's hard to hate a song that speaks to acceptance—unless that dialogue seems forced, inauthentic, and disingenuous. I sort of liked Gaga more when she sang about dancing as opposed to trying to be the voice of a generation." 
 
 It's worth noting that artists who get political always get blowback from people who think they ought to stop proselytizing and just entertain. Madonna has heard it numerous times, especially when she approached issues like AIDS and sexuality nearly 25 years ago. So did Bono, back when he and his band sang about Martin Luther King Jr. on "Pride (In the Name of Love)." And at least one gay I know was quick to defend Gaga on the issue of using the song as a marketing ploy. Said Corey Johnson, the political director for Towleroad.com and a consultant who's worked on numerous political campaigns for Democrats, like Howard Dean and Mark Green: "Gaga has used her celebrity to advocate for equality more than anyone else—not just by tweeting but actually going to the state of Maine to activate young people to contact the two moderate Republican senators there and bring discharged veterans to the Video Music Awards. She has walked the walk and I don't second guess it, not even for a moment." ||||| In a profanity-laced interview in the new NME, recently hatched pop icon Lady Gaga had some strong words for anyone who thinks her song "Born This Way" sounds a lot like Madonna's "Express Yourself." The very notion, in fact, is downright "retarded," and any co-writing credit should go to Capital H-I-M. 
 
 When the interviewer first broached the tender subject — observing that "a bit of ['Born This Way'] does sound quite a lot" like Madonna's song — Gaga vehemently denied having knowingly referenced it, saying, "I am not stupid enough to put out a record and be that moronic." 
 
 But the interviewer pressed on, and that's when she really went off: 
 
 No. Listen to me. Why the f**k? I'm a songwriter...Why would I try to put out a song and think I'm getting one over on everybody? That's retarded. If you put the songs next to each other, side by side, the only similarities are the chord progression. It's the same on that's been in disco music for the last 50 years. Just because I'm the first f**king artist in 25 years to think of putting it on Top 40 radio, it doesn't mean I'm a plagiarist. It means I'm f**king smart. Sorry. 
 
 The reporter then changed the subject to Gaga's new single, "Judas." But the singer, now in tears, only wanted to talk about "Born This Way." 
 
 I feel like honestly that God sent me those lyrics and that melody...There's no way for something that pure to be wrong. 
 
 Not to add yet another sermon, but it's getting a little difficult to stay sympathetic to Gaga's divine cause when she casually throws around terms like "retarded." Last time I checked, the intellectually disabled were born that way, too. 
 
 [NME via ONTD, photo via Getty] ||||| Lady Gaga's religious firestorm may have blown over in the United States, but the government of Lebanon found it so enflaming that they've banned the popstar's new album from the country's stores. 
 
 Multiple reports say that the Lebanese government impounded shipments of "Born This Way," the already-platinum album due to its alleged insults to Christianity and its all around "bad taste." 
 
 The Lebanese government has made clear their distaste in Gaga, having already banned her single "Judas" from the airwaves. That song caused a brief ruckus in the United States, too, as conservative religious leaders, including those from the Catholic League, initially protested the song's lyrics and pending video. 
 
 "This is a stunt... Lady Gaga tries to continue to shock Catholics and Christians in general: she dresses as a nun... she swallows the rosary. She has now morphed into a caricature of herself," Catholic League President Bill Donohue said in a statement before the video came out. 
 
 He then sang a somewhat different tune, waving off the video as a mess and incoherent. 
 
 According to Metro UK, the song "Born This Way" was banned from radio play by the government of Malaysia, too. In response to that banning, Gaga, responded, "What I would say is for all the young people in Malaysia that want those words to be played on the radio, it is your job and it is your duty as young people to have your voices heard." 
 
 "Born This Way" went platinum in its first week out, selling 1.1 million copies in the United States alone. 
 
 According to one Lebanese blogger, he had already downloaded the album via Amazon, with the songs existing safely in the cloud; so, many Lebanese still have the ability to listen to Gaga's latest opus. 
 
 In a prescient comment, in a recent feature in the British newspaper The Guardian, Gaga decried religion's impact on government. 
 
 "The influence of institutionalised religion on government is vast. So religion then begins to affect social values and that in turn affects self-esteem, bullying in school, teen suicides, all those things," she told the paper. 
 
 Lebanon has a history of banning entertainment they find religiously offensive; in 2004, they banned the Tom Hanks-starring big screen adaptation of "The Da Vinci Code." ||||| Finally! Hear Lady Gaga's New Song 'Born This Way' 
 
 Email This She's on the right track, baby! 
 
 
 
 After months of hype and teasing, Lady Gaga debuted her new single, 'Born This Way,' this morning. The track, written by Gaga and produced by DJ White Shadow, Gaga and Fernando Garibay, makes good use of the diva's big voice and penchant for drama, combining powerhouse vocals with in-your-face lyrics about race and sexuality. It also sounds an awful lot like Madonna's 'Express Yourself,' which is 
 
 
 
 I wrote ['Born This Way'] in 10 f**king minutes," Gaga told She's on the right track, baby!After months of hype and teasing, Lady Gaga debuted her new single, 'Born This Way,' this morning. The track, written by Gaga and produced by DJ White Shadow, Gaga and Fernando Garibay, makes good use of the diva's big voice and penchant for drama, combining powerhouse vocals with in-your-face lyrics about race and sexuality. It also sounds an awful lot like Madonna's 'Express Yourself,' which is causing a commotion on Twitter.I wrote ['Born This Way'] in 10 f**king minutes," Gaga told Vogue . "And it is a completely magical message song. And after I wrote it, the gates just opened, and the songs kept coming. It was like an immaculate conception." 
 
 The pop star will perform the song on Sunday at the Grammy Awards, where she is nominated for six prizes, including Album of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.Gaga has been hyping the track for months. She sent her fans into a frenzy in September at the MTV Video Music Awards by launching into an a cappella take on the song's chorus. In late January, she leaked the lyrics to 'Born This Way' on Twitter, and soon thereafter announced that she was moving up the single's release date from Feb. 13 to Feb. 11, tweeting , "Can't wait any longer.""I think 'Born This Way' is the kind of record that if you are really paying attention you will get the full depth of Gaga as a songwriter," Akon, a frequent Gaga collaborator who signed the pop star to his Kon Live Distribution label in 2007, recently told. "Sometimes, the creative image hides the element of her lyrical content. That's why she wanted to give people a better idea of what she was saying outside of her image when she dropped those lyrics."Gaga's new album, also titled 'Born This Way,' drops on May 23.So, are you loving 'Born this Way' as much as we are? Let us know in the comments. ||||| radio vulture Lady Gaga Keeps It Simple on ‘Born This Way’ — and That’s Clever 
 
 Good news about Lady Gaga: She’s smart enough to know precisely when to stop acting smart. 
 
 Consider this: I just woke up, at five-thirty in the morning, to attend to the unveiling of her big new single, “Born This Way.” (Big enough that there was basically no question, before anyone even heard the thing, that it would run straight to No. 1 on the charts  Billboard’s 1,000th official chart-topper, actually.) I dragged diligently out of bed. I made a serious pot of coffee. I got all psyched to bring as much high-level analytical skill as I could muster to whatever this song turned out to be. Time to make the critical doughnuts, etc.  no point in rolling out of bed early just to say “nice song.” 
 
 And this one seemed like it might be complicated, too. Because we’d already seen the lyrics to “Born This Way,” and I can’t even tell you how skeptical they made me. “You’re black, white, beige, chola descent / You’re Lebanese, you’re Orient?” Gaga said she wrote this in ten minutes; rhyming “chola descent” with “Orient” is what happens when you do that. The main hook  “don’t be a drag, just be a queen”  that’s a good one, good for pop, applicable to all. But it comes after months and months of what one terrific critic has already called “The Great Gay Pander-Off of 2010”: A long run of housey dance tunes in which half the women of pop sing reassuringly about embracing and celebrating ourselves for whoever we are. 
 
 These songs are all fundamentally good-hearted and probably good for the world, but they’re also strange. They nod to gay struggles, or all the attention that’s been paid to bullying and suicide. (Ke$ha has variously claimed that “We R Who We R” was inspired by teen suicide, or else by seeing a drag show long before “It Gets Better” was a thing.) But the real goal is to do what pop does, and open up that circle of self-acceptance to anyone who wants in. And that’s something worth thinking about, and maybe even being skeptical of, because at some point we might all start using gay men as simple totems or avatars for whatever little personal struggles we go through, right down to the point where some horrible egomaniac on a reality-TV show starts talking about having been born that way. This is a weird amount of pop songs in which, to put it really bluntly, white women point to gay men to explain to all of us how to survive. Not bad, just weird. Because all of these songs get to look like they're giving something to a community they're really taking something from. 
 
 “Born This Way” opens up the circle as wide as it can, shouting out ethnic backgrounds with fascinating specificity, and working in a line about the disabled. Never mind that I guarantee you Lady Gaga will eventually make some aesthetic choice that offends or disappoints members of every community she reaches out to. Consider instead that the greatest trick Lady Gaga has pulled  the thing that makes her a genuinely impressive pop star  is creating an atmosphere where people can legitimately feel like revolutionary all-embracing gender-queering “little monsters” by listening to one of the most popular artists in the country. That’s rare and makes for vital pop. 
 
 And it’s with all this in mind that I sit down with the serious pot of coffee and listen to “Born This Way,” wondering what all will be in there and how it will make me feel about all these issues, wondering what kind of musical presentation can possibly pull off these somewhat bonkers lyrics about being-who-you-are  (the only people excluded by this type of song are those who are not exactly sure who they are in the first place)  and the answer comes and it’s bonkers mecha-disco! The sound of Lady Gaga shouting in my ear that I am totally overthinking things, this time. The song’s so disco that the mention of a mother’s “boudoir” in the first verse becomes totally natural and hilarious. The song’s so disco that the line about people being “Orient-made” barely even registers, because it sounds like something nobody would have thought twice about saying in 1978. The vocals are so bonkers disco that I almost wish we could make them extra-bonkers by having Christina Aguilera sing them. Beyond which, this song has Gaga, an artist constantly compared to Madonna, cheerfully swiping some melodies from Madonna's "Express Yourself"  because this is not the kind of song where that feels like a big deal, or anything much at all seems like a big deal. 
 
 I guess I’d forgotten that this is the thing to do when you’ve reached the top, and everyone is celebrating you and awaiting your next move: Just sort of celebrate back. “Born This Way” is loose and uncomplicated and fundamentally just fun; it uses fans’ goodwill toward Gaga to throw a party instead of an art happening. After a year of everyone up to Camille Paglia bringing all kinds of intense critical thought to everything Gaga does  what does she mean, what is she saying, what is her effect on the culture  this is smart: Come raging back with something simple, gleeful, and straightforward. 
 
 My bad!
– Lady Gaga’s new single is here (click here to listen), and, shockingly, the Guardian notes, the throngs of people freaking out over it has not yet broken the Internet. Early reactions: It sounds "a lot like Madonna’s 'Express Yourself,'" writes Michael Cragg for the Guardian. “So much so that those two words are currently trending on Twitter.” The spoken-word parts definitely hearken back to the Material Girl, but ultimately Cragg deems the song less a copycat, more “a knowing nod and a cute wink.” And while it might be “ridiculously camp ... one suspects it will probably shift a few copies.” The Sun is slightly less forgiving, concurring with many Twitter users that the song “bears more than a passing resemblance” to Madonna’s 1989 track. The newspaper notes that one Twitter user even claims, “you can literally sing the original over this one.” Nitsuh Abebe went into his first listen of the track completely prepared to analyze its deeper meaning, especially in regards to the gay community, but was soon overwhelmed by the fact that the song is “bonkers mecha-disco,” he writes in New York. “The song’s so disco that the line about people being ‘Orient-made’ barely even registers, because it sounds like something nobody would have thought twice about saying in 1978.” The Huffington Post notes that some believe this will become “a legendary anthem.” One of those people is Elton John, who told Rolling Stone he believes “Born This Way” will “obliterate 'I Will Survive.' I can't think of how huge it's going to be." Click for more on the song, or to listen.