Rogueish

That they are terrible is not, I think, in any doubt; but most people seem to have just taken this as a brute fact, when it really needs explaining. Lady Gaga has written lots of songs, none of which are close to as clumsy as “Born This Way.” I wonder if the issue here is that she’s writing in a new idiom, one that prizes transparency and personal intimacy, and writing is not a transferable skill. I have what I think may be an inaccurate memory that Judith Butler prefaces her first book with an apology for the clumsiness of the final chapter, which represents, she says (in my memory, if not in fact), her first attempt to write about feminist theories in which she has a personal investment which isn’t present in the more abstractly philosophical discussion in the rest of the book. Perhaps Lady Gaga finds herself in a similar situation.