译Pitchfork评Lady Gaga 2011年专辑《Born This Way》十周年纪念版（天生完美）
翻译：Nomanlandever
A decade ago, Lady Gaga created an enormous, bravura flex of electronic pop. An anniversary edition arrives with six “reimagined” versions of its songs by LGBTQ+ artists and allies.
十年前，Lady Gaga做出一张伟大前卫先锋的电子流行专辑。十周年纪念版专辑额外收录六首LGBTQ+盟友艺人“重新构造”版的歌曲。
Lady Gaga was wrapped in raw beef when she announced her third album at 2010’s MTV VMAs. The meat dress was only a warm-up. Born This Way, first released in May 2011, is a bravura flex of electronic pop as big as a Bosch canvas that charges between hair metal riffs, taint-tightening bass, and synths that crackle like hot coals. On her best front-to-back album, Gaga belts each crushing hook with every fiber of her chest, with personal pain turned into placard-ready manifestos. She sings like she’s making a blood pact.
Lady Gaga在2010年VMA颁奖典礼上宣布她的第三张专辑(第二张录音室专辑)即将发行时，她身裹生牛肉。而牛肉装只是预热。《Born This Way》于2011年5月首度发行，这是一张伟大前卫先锋的电子流行专辑，犹如杰罗姆博世的画作一样伟大，交织着流行金属的重复乐段、紧绷的贝斯和火炭般噼里啪啦的合成器音效。在这张她整体性最好的专辑中，Lady Gaga呕心沥血地编织每一处猛烈的hook旋律，将个人伤痛蜕变为游行标语的宣言，她的歌唱如同是在撰写血契，某种程度上是这样的。
In a way she was. On Born This Way, Gaga, who is bisexual, made pop her pulpit and pledged her fight for LGBTQ+ rights in alliance with her young, queer fanbase. In February 2011, the album’s bright, brash title track became the first U.S. No. 1 hit to directly reference the trans community, with the lyrics, “No matter gay, straight, or bi/Lesbian, transgender life/I’m on the right track, baby/I was born to survive.”
在专辑《Born This Way》中，身为双性恋的她将流行音乐视作她的讲坛，发誓与她年轻的酷儿粉丝们一起为LGBTQ+群体权利而战。在2011年2月，激昂傲然的专辑同名曲"Born This Way"成为美国第一首直接提及跨性别群体的冠单，其歌词是 “No matter gay, straight, or bi/Lesbian, transgender life/I’m on the right track, baby/I was born to survive.”
As if to reinforce that these songs are for everyone, Gaga now marks 10 years of Born This Way with six “reimagined” versions of its songs by LGBTQ+ artists and allies. It works best when they scorch the earth. Big Freedia, who was supposed to be part of the album back in 2011, turns “Judas” into exuberant New Orleans bounce with drumline snares, squealing sax, and a gospel choir; The Highwomen’s “Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)” is inviting folk-rock that could be an early Heart treasure. The faithful covers from Years & Years, Orville Peck, and Kylie Minogue are less distinctive; most unforgivable is Ben Platt’s mawkish take of “Yoü and I,” which already has two wonderful, and very different, remixes from Mark Taylor and Metronomy.
似乎是为了强调专辑是献给世间万物的作品，Gaga在十周年纪念版专辑额外收录六首LGBTQ+盟友艺人“重新构造”版的歌曲。客座歌手采取“焦土战略”（如军队撤退时销毁一切敌军可利用之物）的改编效果最佳。原本应在2011年参与专辑制作的Big Freedia，将"Judas"改编成气派十足的新奥尔良bounce说唱风音乐，并加入军鼓乐队、呼啸的萨克斯与福音唱诗班。由The Highwomen演绎的"Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)"是魅力十足的民谣摇滚风，仿佛是早期Heart乐队的遗珠歌曲。Years & Years、Orville Peck与Kylie Minogue几位诚意十足的翻唱就逊色些，最不能忍的是Ben Platt对"Yoü and I"矫揉造作的翻唱，况且这首歌已经有Mark Taylor与Metronomy的两个精彩纷呈又彰显个性的混音版本了。
A decade ago, Born This Way was mostly co-produced by Gaga with RedOne, DJ White Shadow, and her then-musical director Garibay. The “Banditos,” as Gaga called the crew, made the record over 18 months on her 2009-2011 tour. They worked around her erratic schedule—Gaga claimed to hardly sleep, subsisting on “music and coffee”—and set up laptops backstage and a makeshift vocal booth in her tour bus. On-the-road recording isn’t uncommon for a busy pop star—Rihanna recorded 2011’s Talk That Talk in a similar fashion—but the time crunch distills the kinetic energy of Gaga’s stadium-sized life straight into music. If it sounds like she’s singing every phrase with an exclamation point, well, it’s likely because she was due on stage in 10. There was also a practical reason for urgency: Incredibly, given the commercial success of The Fame and its sibling EP The Fame Monster, Gaga’s Monster Ball live dates had put her three million dollars in debt, and she needed the next record to get her back on the road and out of the red.
十年前，专辑《Born This Way》主要由Lady Gaga与RedOne，DJ White Shadow和她当时的音乐总监Fernando Garibay共同制作。这个被Lady Gaga称作"Banditos"的团队，在她2009-2011年的巡演期间，历时18个月做出这张专辑。他们在她飘忽不定的日程表中开展工作——当时Lady Gaga表示自己几乎不怎么睡觉，靠音乐和咖啡度日——并在演出后台购置笔记本电脑，在巡演大巴上设置临时录音室。对忙碌的流行明星来说，巡演大巴上的录音棚并非新奇事物——Rihanna便以类似方式在2011年录制好专辑《Talk That Talk》。但火烧眉毛的Lady Gaga将体育馆巡演生活里激情澎湃的能量提取至音乐中。如果你感觉专辑每句话都像被感叹号附体一样的话，那么很可能是因为她十秒后就要上台了。这样做还有一个现实的原因：很神奇的是，考虑到《The Fame》和姊妹EP专辑《The Fame Monster》大爆的商业成绩，Lady Gaga的Monster Ball巡演反而使她负债300万美元，因此她急需下一张专辑使她重回正轨，摆脱负债。
She called the album “a giant musical-opus theater piece.” It was made to be performed on a stage set up like a Transylvanian castle, and is laced with enjoyably over-the-top gothic flourishes: Gregorian chants on “Bloody Mary,” echoey organ on “Highway Unicorn.” Created in arenas, for arenas, Born This Way’s Vatican-sized ambitions imbue the album with a holistic sense of scale. With the exception of Taylor Swift’s Reputation, mainstream pop hasn’t sounded this big since. And it set a bar for promo excess in the iTunes era too, with stunts that dropped a spider-silk blanket across pop culture. Gaga arrived at the Grammys in an egg, wore prosthetic horns, and partnered with corporations like Google, Starbucks, and Zynga, the tech company whose popular FarmVille app offered in-game album previews and motorbike-riding sheep.
她称这张专辑是"一部伟大的音乐剧作品"，专辑就是为能在一个类似特兰西瓦尼亚城堡的舞台上表演而生，精心加入了过多惊喜的哥特元素："Bloody Mary"里的格列高利圣咏（教皇格列高利一世采用，常无伴奏），"Highway Unicorn"里在体育馆录制的的回声风琴，也是为体育馆巡演而生的歌曲。《Born This Way》堪比罗马教廷的雄心使整张专辑大气磅礴。在《Born This Way》后，除了Taylor Swift的专辑《reputation》之外，流行音乐从未如此宏大。这张专辑也在iTunes下载时代设置了一个高强度宣传的门槛，其噱头炒作在流行文化中无孔不入，掀起轩然大波。Lady Gaga带着人造犄角，躺在蛋壳里出席2011年第53届格莱美颁奖典礼，随后与Google, Starbucks及Zynga等公司开展合作。Zynga是一家科技公司，其广受欢迎的《FarmVille》应用程序在游戏中可以看到专辑预览和骑摩托车的绵羊。
Gaga often sounds like she has gazed into the depths of hell and is back to tell the tale. (“I have been for three years baking cakes, and now I’m going to bake a cake that has a bitter jelly,” she said of her music’s evolution). “Government Hooker” is a sneering dance stormer that sends up powerful creeps and, with DJ White Shadow’s aircraft hangar-sized techno, takes her pointed polemic to the rave. Amid the airtight industrial pop of “Scheiße,” the best non-single of Gaga’s career, she rebukes the dumb shit that trailed her—the sexism, the transphobia—with a monster hook sung in pseudo-German and vulcanized synths that squeal like a Formula 1 starting grid. Caustic messages make Born This Way’s triumphant moments feel alluringly sweet. The fist-pumping album closer “The Edge of Glory” soars with self-belief, as Gaga’s repetitions of “I’m on the edge/The edge/The edge” build momentum like an athlete spinning the hammer throw.
Lady Gaga很多时候听起来像是在凝视地狱的深渊，并回来叙述整个故事。(“我已经烤了三年蛋糕了，现在我要烤一个带苦味果冻的蛋糕，”她谈到自己的音乐演变历程时说道)。"Government Hooker"是一首咄咄逼人的激烈舞曲且引起大街小巷的讨论，在DJ White Shadow飞机库般的techno制作下，Lady Gaga舆论争议也被带入到这首电子舞曲中。在Lady Gaga职业生涯最好的非主打单曲"Scheiße"中，Lady Gaga谴责那些牵连到她的愚蠢事物——性别歧视，跨性别恐惧症，用假德语唱着怪物级的hook旋律，伴随着硫化的合成器音效和赛车起步时的鸣叫声。外界的刻薄言论使《Born This Way》凯旋而归的时刻格外安抚人心。握拳庆祝的专辑收尾曲"The Edge of Glory"是展翅高飞的自信，Lady Gaga重复的那句（歌词）“I’m on the edge/The edge/The edge”，仿佛运动员旋转链球一样蓄势待发。
She switches vocal styles like she changes satellite-dish-sized hats. On the scuzzy disco-pop “Heavy Metal Lover,” she coos coquettishly before flipping to Auto-Tuned camp. “Dirty pony, I can’t wait to hose you down,” she growls. The wonderfully blasphemous “Judas” is pop-house whiplash with the drama of Mosaic law. You can guarantee that some gay bar, somewhere in the world, is blasting it right now, with or without the video starring Norman Reedus as the sleazy daddy love interest. “Hooker prostitute wench vomits her mind,” she sings, as if catching darts in her teeth and spitting them back.
她变换着不同声乐风格，如同变换不同天线接收器般大的帽子(Marry The Night造型)。在暗黑的迪斯科流行歌曲"Heavy Metal Lover"中，她先撒娇地低语着， Auto-Tune变声后她突然咆哮着唱道：" “Dirty pony, I can’t wait to hose you down,” 。极亵渎神灵的"Judas"是流行文化中对摩西律法的鞭挞，你可以随时找到在世界某个角落的Gay吧正在播放这首歌，无论Norman Reedus是否出演了这首歌MV里卑鄙的爹地恋人。（歌词）“Hooker prostitute wench vomits her mind,” Lady Gaga唱道，如同用牙齿咬住飞镖再扔回给他们。
Gaga described Born This Way’s title track as a “magical message song” for the Prop 8 era, and, she wrote on Instagram recently, it was inspired by disco artist Carl Bean’s fabulous 1977 cover of the gay liberation classic “I Was Born This Way.” Of the whole record, it’s the song that has aged least well, both for its essentialist message and dated electropop. As Owen Pallett recognized in a 2014 article for Slate, its major-key composition was a departure from the “sexy, spooky” minor-key songwriting of Gaga’s biggest hits. In an aim to reach everyone, she broke from her own winning formula. In 2011, the unsubtle “Born This Way” may have been what the world needed, and it’s intensely meaningful to many queer people—including Gaga, who has the phrase tattooed on her left thigh. Still, you wish a better song had become the de facto soundtrack to LGBTQ+ rights in the Obama era. Ten years on, it’s a weak link in an album that has so much more to say about freedom and autonomy, and, elsewhere, embraces being an outsider while pausing to question the social norms that push some of us to the fringes.
Lady Gaga将专辑同名曲"Born This Way"描述为一首涉及加州8号提案的“魔幻又信息量巨大的歌曲”，她最近也在Instagram上写道，这首歌的灵感来自迪斯科艺人Carl Bean在1977年发行的经典平权翻唱歌曲"I Was Born This Way"。在整张专辑中，这是最不过时最不贬值的歌曲，因其本质主义的歌词内容和过时的电音风格有点过时。正如Owen Pallett在2014年在《Slate》杂志发表的内容，歌曲的大调作曲不同于Gaga其他热门歌曲的“性感、诡异”的小调作曲。为了使所有人都能感同身受，Lady Gaga打破自身的制胜之道。在2011年，直言坦率的"Born This Way"可能正是这个世界所需要的，它对许多酷儿人士意义深远，包括Lady Gaga自己，她把歌名纹在了她左大腿上。尽管如此，你还是期望能有一首更好的歌曲来代表奥巴马时期的LGBTQ+平权主题曲。十年后再看，这首歌长篇累赘的自由平权内容是其专辑的薄弱部分。并且在专辑其他地方，她作为一个局外人，会暂停质问那些忽视边缘人群的社会问题。
These days, it’s cool for pop stars to play the bad guy or the vengeful ex. But it was less so in the early ’10s, when the charts were cluttered with party-rocking rubbish and self-affirmative dreck. It’s hard to rankle at Gaga’s version of outsider empowerment, perhaps because it’s rooted in something real. On the joyful “Bad Kids,” a song inspired by hearing fans’ stories while on the road, Gaga makes high school jibes sound like phrases you’d want to wear on a badge: a “degenerate young rebel,” a “bitch,” a “jerk,” a “brat,” “a selfish punk [who] really should be smacked.” At other times, she looks unflinchingly inwards. “Marry the Night,” a song about Gaga’s pre-fame years on the Lower East Side, puts a megaphone to a bruised mind racing with survival instinct. A cinematic video seems to reference the sexual assaults she suffered at 19, which, she said in a 2019 interview, led to hospitalization and a “psychotic break.” These details, which she didn’t share at the time of Born This Way’s initial release, cast a starker shadow on this hustler’s anthem. It was always a fantastic soundtrack for stomping down the street; it’s also a solemn vow to “marry the dark” despite the violence that can lurk in its shadows.
如今，流行歌星的反派人设或复仇前任似乎是件很酷的事、但在10年代初不是这样，当时的排行榜上充斥着一堆“party rocking”的垃圾歌曲和鸡汤废话歌曲。我们很难反感Lady Gaga的局外人赋权方式，或许是因为那是骨子里真实的一面。在欢快的"Bad Kids"中，一首灵感来自Lady Gaga在旅途中倾听粉丝讲述的亲身经历的歌曲，将高中时期的嘲笑话语变为人们想刻在徽章上的标语：如"堕落的年轻叛逆小子"，“bitch,” ， “jerk,” 、"不听话的小孩"、"自私又欠揍的朋克一族"。在其他时刻，Lady Gaga会毫无畏缩地深挖自己的内心。"Marry the Night"是一首讲述Lady Gaga成名前在纽约下东城时生活举步维艰，尽管内心早已千疮百孔，但依旧拿大喇叭鼓励自己坚强勇敢的歌曲。有一段视频似乎提到了她在19岁时遭受性侵，她在2019年的一次采访中提到这段MV电影片段是讲她19岁时遭受性侵，最终住院治疗和"精神崩溃"的经历。在首次发行专辑《Born This Way》时，她并未透露这些细节，这些细节又使这位诈骗者的神曲更为阴暗。这首歌绝对是你走在街上跺脚狂嗨的好歌，它也是"嫁给黑夜"时的庄严誓词，尽管黑暗中潜伏着暴力。
Born This Way’s reclaimed confidence goes down to the half-woman, half-machine composite on its cover, a mutant gynoid that screams with the fury of a saint. It’s ridiculous, ugly. People hate it. It’s also a perfectly punkish match for this scrappy colossus of an album, an apex of off-the-leash creativity and unapologetic commerce. It still makes you want to live without the Scheiße—but is just as suited for a world full of it. For an hour it makes you feel like you are made of steel.
《Born This Way》重获的自信还得归结于专辑封面的半女半机车造型，一个基因突变的女仿生人，伴随着圣人般的愤怒尖叫着。很荒谬，很丑陋，人们讨厌它。不过朋克风的完美诠释蛮适合这张专辑的，不连贯的宏大概念，无拘无束的巅峰创作水平，无需证明的商业成绩。这张专辑仍想让你生活中没有Scheiße（烦心事）的世界，但它同样适合一个充满它的世界。花一个小时聆听这张专辑，你就会感受到你身体像是钢铁做的一样。
