The Lady Gaga Anthem That Previewed a Decade of Culture Wars
Updated at 5:45 p.m. on February 11, 2021.
The social-media celebrity JoJo Siwa has built an empire by dressing in sparkly rainbow outfits while chattering about individuality and self-acceptance. But when she wanted the world to know that she was queer, she let Lady Gaga do the talking. In a TikTok last month, the 17-year-old Siwa filmed herself grinning and lip-synching to Gaga’s 2011 hit “Born This Way.” In the comments section, fans immediately began congratulating Siwa for coming out. “No matter gay, straight, or bi, lesbian, transgendered life, I’m on the right track, baby,” Gaga sings—and Siwa, her later posts confirmed, was announcing herself as being somewhere on that list outside of “straight.”
How many other pop songs could do a job like this? How many songs let listeners make a statement, understandable to just about everyone, by simply singing along? A fritzing and fidgeting masterpiece of disco didacticism, “Born This Way” seems to have fulfilled the outrageous ambitions Gaga signaled when she released it 10 years ago this month. She promoted the debut single off her second album by wearing prosthetic cheekbones and hatching from an egg at the Grammys. A seven-minute music video packed with ab-flashing extraterrestrial dancers began with the recitation of “,” which touts “the beginning of the new race … a race which bears no prejudice.” The song itself salutes not just the LGBTQ community, but also people of various skin colors, nationalities, and abilities, plus “subway kid[s]” and “the insecure.”
