Lady Gaga songs by critic's description

This song depicts fame not as a hedonistic playground, but an erotic thriller turned horror film. Gaga’s lyrics weave together love, voyeurism, and stalkerish obsession, as she forces her subject into the role she wants them to play.Dissonant verses give way to a major-key chorus that’s so pretty it’s unsettling, unreal. On the radio it sounded alluring and dangerous — there was nothing else like it.

A huge, major-key, Springsteen-infused dance anthem — and the rare pop song that dares to stare death in the face. Opening with the sound of a heartbeat, synthesizers pulse and swirl around Gaga, building to an electrified chorus. As her voice climbs higher and higher Gaga makes you a believer. The song was inspired by her grandfather’s passing; death comes for us all, but Gaga transcends it by living without fear. It may channel ’80s pop, but it already feels timeless — it’s one of the most joyful, existential pop songs ever written.

This song isn’t just about love, or even a toxic relationship; it’s about confronting the darkness that lies within and outside of you. every element is at war with itself; hooks, verses, and pre-choruses collide and repeat in different formations. RedOne’s signature sound becomes nightmarish: His four-on-the-floor drums are explosive, his synths ice-cold. The dissonant hoover synths seethe like Bernard Herrmann strings, echoing the lyrics’ references to Hitchcock. Over one of the most powerful bridges in pop history, tension builds as Gaga’s vocals cascade around you. She begs over and over, until her voice leaps up an octave, quavering with vibrato, and the music drops out. It's all or nothing. It draws no distinctions between classical music, high fashion, avant-garde cinema, dance, or pop

Driven by endless variations on six looping chords, this song is Gaga’s grandest moment of meta-commentary. but in hindsight, it was the most aggressively theatrical single she’s ever released. Her androgynous, Bowie-esque verses; that unforgettable, accelerating drum fill; the uniquely offbeat chorus; and the bridge, the highest note she’s hit on record — these were all things we’d never heard from Gaga before, nor since.

Written as a plea to her father, who was refusing to undergo open-heart surgery for a life-threatening condition, this song is one of pop’s great Oedipal-complex ballads. For the first time, she’s seeing her beloved, troubled parent as an equal, addressing him with the heartbroken candor of a lover. with its lilting rock production and a vocal performance that recalls Freddie Mercury, represented the crucial moment on its respective album.

This song begins as a melancholy hymn that accelerates into an electro-rock opera, as Gaga romanticizes her days as a struggling artist, determined to succeed at any cost. Gaga sings of despair and glory, love and loss, until you no longer know which is which, till the song ends on synth chords that ascend like a neon-lit stairway to heaven.a pilgrimage to New York City’s Lower East Side, the site of Stefani Germanotta’s rebirth as Lady Gaga.

Backed by ’80s toms and beautiful, melancholy synth chords, this song is among the best pop songs ever written about losing your innocence — how sex and intimacy can feel like you’re being eaten alive. she lay her deepest fears bare. “He ate my heart and then he ate my brain,” sings Gaga in the bridge, unsure if she’s in love, or lost all control.

The power of this song lies in its directness. It pulls no punches; it demands self-respect. Even if you don’t believe in yourself, Gaga believes in you. Her vocals, inspired by Whitney Houston, channel the higher power of gospel music. Yet she sings over a synth-heavy track that growls and crackles with electricity, so loudly that you can barely make out the individual elements. Perhaps no pop song this decade has provoked so much debate, even from those sympathetic to its message.

This song sounds like a tour bus barreling down a highway at breakneck speed, knowing the thrill can’t last forever. In hindsight, it was the last gasp of the first half of Gaga’s career, when the costumes were wild, EDM ruled pop, and our cultural optimism seemed boundless. Ultimately, the era’s excesses took a toll on Gaga’s mind, body, and the perception of her public persona … but this song makes it feel like it was all worth it.

This song is a work of camp, melodrama, opera, pop, dance, mythology, religion, morality, and slamming industrial beats all in one. Gaga retells the story of Judas Iscariot through the eyes of a Mary Magdalene torn between Jesus and Judas, love and temptation, aggressive verses and dazzling melodic choruses.

This song is about a woman who can only have sex with the lights off — who finds liberation, her will to live, in the darkness. The song’s spoken-word bridge evokes Madonna’s “Vogue,” but Gaga speaks to the dead, summoning her icons as ghosts that haunt our memories: Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Judy Garland, JonBenét Ramsey, Liberace, Jesus, Stanley Kubrick, and Princess Diana.

Gaga’s most explicit song about identity, this song reimagines her teenage years as a kind of West Side Story musical battlefield. She struggles with her parents’ and society’s expectations, but finds liberation in the one thing that’s hers. The song is built from elements that could come off as ’80s kitsch — synth-metal riffs, broad Springsteen inflections, Clarence Clemons’s saxophone — but Gaga’s self-belief is so powerful that not one second of it feels cliché. Gaga chose to recast pop as a safe space for vulnerable, misfit, queer kids to find their individuality and reinvent the world in their image.

A duet between a man who longs for change, and a woman who ultimately embraces it.

In this song Gaga rejects a string of Latin suitors via melodies that evoke ABBA and Madonna, over a thumping beat, like Ace of Base gone EDM. Rejection has rarely sounded so sweet. It paired one of Gaga’s catchiest pop songs with her darkest visuals.

With this song, Lady Gaga engineered a sound that would define the next five years of pop: American R&B melodies, Europop synthesizers, four-on-the-floor dance rhythms, and just a tinge of pop-punk and emo’s brattiness. wildly ambitious fired by a star in the making

Over ’70s soul piano borrowed from “Bennie and the Jets,” Gaga gently exchanges lines and lifts another up. It’s no motivational anthem, just a simple ode to women supporting women.

A relentlessly catchy R&B-synth-pop banger, this song is a statement of artistic defiance through sexual freedom

This song is dedicated to Lady Gaga's auntie - who she never met - who was an artist and a painter, but they’ve long shared a spiritual connection.Llike Stevie Nicks over fingerpicked guitars Gaga drawls old sounds that are new to her. It’s as if we’re eavesdropping on an intimate family conversation

A “mariachi techno-house record” about the injustices of U.S. immigration law. “It sounds like a pop record, but when I sing it, I see Édith Piaf in a spotlight with an old microphone.” Said Gaga.

This song is a power-bottom anthem fueled by Zedd’s vicious, stuttering groove. Like Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” Gaga dreams of reversing the roles in her relationship

Her most sonically aggressive opening track, this song blends mariachi guitars with growling, inhuman synths. But the chorus soars, seemingly foreshadowing the album to come.

This song has a faux-German hook that’s as nonsensical as it is catchy, but the song’s message is crystal clear: “If you’re a strong female / You don’t need permission.” It’s impossible to hear this and not want to strut down a catwalk in oversize platform heels.

A tribute to Marilyn Monroe and other women who influenced politicians in the bedroom, peaking with Gaga’s incredible spoken bridge. This song would be the perfect soundtrack for a military-industrial-themed fashion show on Mars, with buzz-saw synthesizers as sharp as Gaga’s prosthetic cheekbones.

The most uncomfortably strange song in Lady Gaga’s discography. Incited by her sexual assault at the hands of a music producer when she was 19, this song urges you to embrace your deepest, darkest feelings of revulsion.

In this electropop opera, Gaga assumes the role of Mary Magdalene — “the ultimate rock star’s girlfriend” — as she forgives the world for taking her beloved Jesus away from her. This song could be sacrilegious, but like in The Last Temptation of Christ, humanizing icons only makes them more relatable. Oh, and it helps that the track’s ruthlessly danceable, too.

One of Gaga’s most spiritual songs, a dreamy ode to self-love and discovery that floats on sparkling amber synths. The subject matter isn’t too far removed from “Just Dance,” really, but this song stands on its own, feeling more like a shared moment with a friend in a club at midnight.

Gaga’s horniest song to date.Bassy synths grind like metal guitars, buzzing with desire. The song’s fantasies are autobiographical, with references to Lüc Carl

This song is where her iconography truly begins. not just because it was a strange, minor-key earworm, but because Lady Gaga was a puzzle we couldn’t figure out. We expect pop to be glittery surfaces, but here was Gaga telling us love, sex, and fame are all a performance. Gaga refused to be pigeonholed as an artist, or objectified as a woman in pop. she wielded her sexuality like a weapon — not simply to please her audience, but to leave us wanting more.

Originally a demo written for Britney Spears, this song takes a simple premise and elevates it to high pop art: Don’t call me in the club; I’m out dancing. This song is Gaga’s ultimate feminist statement: She does things her way, with no regard for the male gaze or the music industry’s gatekeepers. It didn’t just elevate Gaga as a pop star — it made her a new American icon.

This song marks her first unconditional love song — a bluesy, country-rock tribute to her ex-boyfriend Lüc Carl. the song’s lovestruck lyrics went a long way to humanizing Gaga. His drum track, built from an unnecessary “We Will Rock You” sample, is overly stiff and mechanical — everything that Gaga’s voice isn’t.