Lady Gaga's Born This Way Is Still On The Right Track, 10 Years Later

(Gaga borrowed the phrase “born this way” directly from the lyrics of “I Was Born This Way,” Bean’s prescient Motown hit from 1977.) “I don’t want to make money,” she famously told Anderson Cooper in 2011. “I want to make a difference.” Today, Garibay refers to Born This Way as a “Holy Grail”: a hit record that still sounds fresh and enjoyable years down the line. Born This Way’s divisive subject matter gave it an edge, but Gaga and her team still wrestled creatively making the title track sound empowering and not cheesy or clichéd.As a co-writer on “Born This Way,” Garibay, who’d penned hits like Paris Hilton’s “Stars Are Blind,” helped her find that sonic sweet spot by writing the bombastic song as if it were a ballad. House, country, pop-rock — name a genre, and they tried it.“It was torture,” Garibay says with a laugh, but the exhaustive process paid off: Born This Way became an undeniable hit, scoring Gaga three Grammy noms and a slew of new chart-toppers. I hadn't heard one on Top 40 radio until ‘Born This Way,’ and as a young gay man, it meant everything to me.” He compares “Born This Way” to other pop songs in the queer-anthem canon like Katy Perry’s “Firework” or Kesha’s “We R Who We R,” which are generic enough to mean whatever the listener wants them to mean. They hadn’t heard the word in a song, much less a chart-topping dance-pop track from one of the world’s hottest pop stars.On “Born This Way,” Gaga speaks directly to her marginalized listeners. But LGBTQ+ Americans today are more able to embrace fluidity and abandon “born this way” narratives because our community has reached those basic goalposts — both on a legislative level and as individuals navigating a cisnormative, heteronormative world.In 2011, Born This Way also spawned a charitable foundation of the same name, founded by Gaga to support young people around the world who feel othered for any reason.