Snap Judgment: Lady Gaga, 'Born This Way'

In pop, liberation is much the backbone in a selling plan. Whether or not personal conviction compels an artist to recite stories that inspire listeners to strive toward greater compassion toward themselves and others, pop stars and their producers know that fan loyalty is most predictably earned by generating good times: A sad song usually gets its hooks into listeners one at a time, but with a party song, you can get the jumbo pack.

The savviest crowd pleasers perfectly balance danceable music that sheds inhibitions like so many jackets thrown off on a dance floor with bearably pious lyrics that make getting down feel like a form of moral uplift.

Ladies and queens, Gaga gives you "Born This Way."

Notable not simply because it's the low one from her forthcoming album of the same title, but also as a command of design for the monster-diva at this stage in her career, "Born This Way" is a freak anthem (one of the basic formations in Gaga's double playbook of dance music and classic rock) that directly connects to the most powerful tendency in current liberation movements - which doesn't necessarily point toward the joyful subversion of norms that Gaga seems to otherwise champion.

"This opinion in a predetermined sexual orientation is almost visible in the emerging conservatism in the gay rights movement," the communications professor Robert Alan Brookey has written, noting that "assimilationists attempt to exhibit that homosexuals can cover the same values they are alleged to threaten." Instead of embracing pacifism, gays and lesbians fight to enter in the military; the ambition of building new, polymorphous versions of sex and family gives way to the conflict to get a matching-tux or white-gown wedding.

Gaga's new song serves as the pure reflection of this bold mainstreaming of cultural outlaws. "Don't be a drag, just be a queen!" she chants in her furious voice, pointing her fans away from the incendiary trickery of the flamboyant transvestite and toward a more feel-good sort of individual celebration.