Baby I Was Born This Way (Express Yourself)

The debut of the new Lady Gaga single Born This Way marks the culmination of one of the most hyped releases in recent memory. There's no video up yet (understandably, it's only just premiered on US Radio) but you can listen to it here, for the time being.

But enough of all that. What's it actually like?

First of all, take this:



Then add a bit of this:



And that's pretty much Born This Way.

Is it a good song? Yes. The lyrics in particular are unbelievably catchy and we can just imagine ourselves repeating "I'm on the right track, baby I was born this way" for about 80% of the rest of the day. The only problem we have is that at the moment, Born This Way doesn't have quite the initial impact that it does if it wasn't so reminiscent of what had gone before. Obviously a little bit of incessent radio play will soon sort that out, but for now it feels like "Gaga does Madonna" instead of "Gaga does a third album".

The good news is that Gaga has impeccabe taste in what she chooses to pay homage to. Born This Way is in every way as catchy and joyful as its source material. And there's something quite refreshing, amidst all of this impossible hype, to hear a record that's purely disco, rather than an 8 minute long operatic masterclass in which Gaga performs an aria all in the name of equal rights. Gaga has oriented Born This Way firmly to the dancefloor and does a fantastic job of it. This is a catchy, addictive record which will have people falling over themselves to dance to it (possibly literally).

When the initial excitement and "spot the similarities" competition dies down, we're confident that Born This Way will sit comfortably alongside Alejandro, Dance in the Dark and Paparazzi in the Gaga canon. It certainly whets the apppetite for when the album Born This Way makes its way out into the world.

Hitch Your Caravan

Recently, we've become increasingly obsessed with a new single by a "new" artist by the name of Neon Hitch. That's not some kind of "let's throw this out to a random word generator and see what we come up with" kind of name. It's her actual name. So things are off to a good start there.

Neon has actually been hanging around the pop scene for a little while, and has had her fingers in the co-writing pies of such artists as... well... 3OH!3 and... erm... Ke$ha. But before you go screaming off to the nearest pop Anderson shelter, give the video below a play. It just happens to be her first proper video for a song called Get Over U



We certainly wouldn't be the first to sum this all up by saying that if you liked Robyn's Hang With Me or Dancing On My Own you're probably going to love this. Lyrically, it errs towards the latter, but in general aura and production it gravitates towards the former. And yet, despite that hastily-thrown-together frame of reference, it's important to underscore the fact that Get Over U offers something different and interesting on its own terms.

Lyrically, Get Over U is pretty heartbreaking. For instance, "and I couldn't see all your flaws through all your charms/and you cannot see all my scars your love has caused" is a signpost that this isn't exactly veering into happily-ever-after territory. Yet the track is nonetheless driven by a persistent optimism which seems to be conveyed through the juddering backing track and the insistent drumbeat. The result is a song which not only reels you in effortlessly, but also sticks with you. Days after first hearing it, the fact that it had firmly settled in our subconscious was confirmed by the way in which the completely unbidden humming out loud of the chorus drew some truly strange looks in the queue at Tesco (other good supermarkets are, of course, available).

This is a track which well and truly gets under one's skin and as such is the perfect introduction to an artist, who, if the initial buzz is to be believed, is going to go on to truly great things in 2011. Which in turn makes the final scene in the video all the more captivating. We very much doubt that a submersion into a rose-water abyss is going to be a fitting metaphor for this talented popstar's career.

Don't Go Blue and Pass Out

Nicole Scherzinger is back with a new single. Cast your mind back three years when that news heralded the arrival of the distinctly underwhelming Baby Love (feat. Will.I.Am) and it probably wouldn't even register on your "important pop news radar". Following as it does on the heels of the little-bit-brilliant Poison, however, and it becomes something to get at least mildly excited about.

Don't Hold Your Breath started out as a track recorded by Keri Hilson (her of the The Way I Are) fame, but the track didn't make it on to her No Boys Allowed album. If you're interested, though, this is what her version sounded like. The raw materials are certainly there, but frankly there's far too much Timbaland and auto-tune and not enough proper pop-ballad warbling. So far, so run of the mill.

Enter Nicole and RedOne to rescue the whole thing from cutting-floor obscurity. In lieu of an official video (seriously, please can someone get on with that) here's an audio rip from youtube which you can expect to be pulled as soon as the song gets popular enough. Such is life.



Let's set aside for a moment that Nicole brings a pop/RnB vocal which is on the right side of "on the money", would you just LISTEN TO THAT PRODUCTION? The "swoosh" heading into the chorus and the catchiest hook since the DNA of the common cold virus, turns what in Hilson/Timbaland hands was a bit of a pedestrian album track into an excellent follow-up single.

All in all, we can't help but being reminded not only of Nicole's disaster of a first attempt at a solo career, but also the trend towards the end of the Pussycat Dolls to bill them as "featuring Nicole Scherzinger". At the time, it was difficult to understand exactly what the "powers that be" were trying to achieve. On the one hand you had a wildly successful and fairly edgy girl band with a lead singer who had a pleasant voice and could, to say the least, dance a bit. On the other, it was difficult to see what there was that was particularly marketable about Nicole as a solo artist. Sure, cameos on tracks like Scream were pleasant enough, but her vocals aren't that strong, and what she makes up for in looks, she does lack a bit in charisma.

Yet creative decisions like Poison and now, Don't Hold Your Breath just go to show what you can do with the right production team and a decent A&R team. So much so that we've gone from being completely apathetic about the prospect of a Nicole Scherzinger solo album, to actually desperately wanting to get our hands on a copy.

Which, at the end of the day, is Music marketing 101 really.