Video: http://youtu.be/u3YmMqPEb_I
2:54 — MADONNA SINGS “EXPRESS YOURSELF”, “BORN THIS WAY” AND “SHE’S NOT ME” in her MDNA TOUR (Tel Aviv, Israel)
What she’s implying here is the already given impression that her 1989 hit “Express Yourself” (ooh, 2 decades later it’s finally stamped a classic!) and Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” do sound alike. You can’t really tell if it’s an act of gratitude, just a silly trip or mockery but I’d definitely buy the last, because singin’ two sonically identical songs back-to-back and then wrapping it up with “She’s Not Me” (Lyrics for the tour: “she’s not me” 5x) doesn’t represent anything more or less than a punch.
I don’t know why she had to bother really. Her whole fanbase has done the slagging too much, this just seems like a nod to the whole issue. “Express Yourself” comes off as a Madonna-serving anthem to the love-yourself-and-your-friends-and-your-God of “Born This Way”. She yelled numerous times “express yourseeeeelf!”. So now that she’s threatened/annoyed/whatever by a “reductive” fellow pop star who’s standing high and proud and following Madonna’s rants of self-expression for the conception of a therapeutic self-hugging song (call it melodramatic, but the Gaga saved me with her presence in pop alone), she tends to slag her off by mocking her.
Perhaps it’s just a matter of relevance. In 1993, when she was doing so much to be the most controversial, a financially-lesser but very talented singer named Sinead O’Connor raised more eyebrows with an SNL performance that included the tearing of an image of Pope John Paul II. Madonna, on the same show, did the same thing but with a different picture and attacked O’Connor’s action for being offensive to the Catholic Church.
In response, Sinead told Spin magazine “Madonna is probably the hugest role model for women in America. There’s a woman who people look up to as being a woman who campaigns for women’s rights. A woman who in an abusive way towards me, said that I look like I had a run in with a lawnmower and that I was about as sexy as a Venetian blind.”
And for the kicker: “Now there’s the woman that America looks up to as being a campaigner for women, slagging off another woman, for not being sexy”. In Gaga’s case, for following Madonna. Hey hey.
