Born This Way Review

The received wisdom on release was that it was too much. Fourteen years later the excess is the point and the record sounds enormous. Marry the Night opens with a four minute build that has no business working. The title track is shameless in a way that made it useful to a great many people who needed something shameless. Judas is a genuinely weird single, all clattering percussion and religious blasphemy, and it charted anyway.

Scheisse is a highlight nobody mentions. The Edge of Glory is the finest thing here, a synth ballad with Clarence Clemons blowing over the outro, and it earns every second of that saxophone. The writing is broad and occasionally clumsy, big slogans rather than fine detail, but the conviction covers a lot, and the album's whole argument is that being too much is preferable to being careful. Her most influential record and the one that made her a serious artist rather than a novelty.