This is the long lost Born This Way essay, written back when the video was new but never posted...
“How can a man be born when he is old?” Nichodemus asked. “Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born!” John 3:4
Lady Gaga’s Born This Way video is a creation myth! (Literature 101 recap: a creation myth is a story about origins meant to symbolically portray truths about who we are.) So… why did Lady Gaga place her equality anthem Born This Way inside the context of a creation myth? I’m not Lady Gaga, but I’m betting it’s because she wants to examine the double-metaphor of immaculate conception as divine inspiration and spiritual rebirth.
If you know anything about Lady Gaga’s art, you know that her art is art that comments on art. (If you don’t know anything about Lady Gaga’s art, you might want to read that last sentence again.) She has described her creative process writing Born This Way as “immaculate conception.” So, by using the music video to show herself as a vehicle for an actual immaculate conception, she reinforces the relationship between creative inspiration and divine imparting.
Shall we slow down? Before we get too excited by the religiously-charged language, let me take a minute to assert that Lady Gaga is not heretical for a) writing a creation myth, b) claiming that Born This Way was divinely inspired, or c) positing herself as the creator-mother/Virgin Mary. Because actually, you’re going to find that you’ve heard most of this before.
Everyone is a creator – that’s one of the lovelier aspects of humanity. We’re creating all the time, when we don’t even know it. And Lady Gaga never misses an opportunity to remind us that she is creating every moment. Our capability, as humans, to create (art, influence, ideology, family, government, community) is considered by many to be a spiritual gift, a divine quality – so posing a human being as a mother-creator functions metaphorically to highlight the spiritual specialness of creativity. Posing Lady Gaga as the mother-creator in her own creation myth works doubly to comment on the creation of Born This Way through the spiritual gift of creativity. That’s a lot of creating.
So human creation is similar to divine creation because both are spiritual acts. That’s easy enough to accept. But can we make the metaphor even grander? We can if we’re bold. And Lady Gaga is. So was the Apostle John.
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” John 1:14a.
We’ve heard this before: John writes in the opening of his gospel that Jesus was the Word in the flesh. He’s taking two of God’s creations, the divinely inspired Word and the divine Son, and comparing them, metaphorically. He’s saying Jesus being born on earth is like the Word becoming flesh. Just like it, actually.
Now Lady Gaga is not an apostle, and the words to Born This Way are not the Word, if you know what I mean. But Lady Gaga is using the same poetic devices, so hold on because it’s about to get spiritual in here.
If a person is setting out to create art and coming from a spiritual place, that person may feel that the inspiration or even the art itself is coming from God, is being transferred directly from God’s mind to her own, and that she, as the artist, becomes only the vessel for delivering a message that is not her own at all.
IF that is the case, then divinely conceiving a prophecy from God is kind of similar to divinely conceiving a human being from God. Especially if the human being from God IS the Word of God as well. See how John set that one up for us?
We are pretty lucky with this video because Lady Gaga has put it all out there directly, saying that the writing of Born This Way was like an immaculate conception. She believes that the message imparted in Born This Way, the message of love, acceptance and freedom, comes from God, and she believes that she (like all of us who will accept the call) is responsible for promoting this message. It’s art that is like a prophecy that is like an immaculate conception.
And we get to see it all play out in just the first seconds of the video: Lady Gaga’s voice speaks the story of Lady Gaga as the mother-creator immaculately conceiving and delivering a new truth. (Of course it isn’t really a new truth, but it is a truth that we must newly receive. But I’m jumping ahead here.) So in this spectacular, perhaps hyperbolic, way, the video tells the story of its own creation – commenting on creative art in general and emphasizing the spiritual import you’ll find in this particular song. And guess what Lady Gaga’s choreographer Laurie Ann Gibson said when MTV asked her to explain the video? She said, “I told the story of the record.”
Now wait a minute, I hear you saying. It wasn’t truth I saw emerging from Gaga’s shadowy, cosmic birth canal. I know. It’s time to take a shot of that “Inception” drug and go down another level.
The song’s title is a good place to start. The song is called Born This Way, so the birth(s) that take place at the start of the video should give us a clue as to what exactly is born, and in what way.
It seemed simple when the song first aired, without the video. We all know that LGBT rights are a top platform for Lady Gaga, and Born This Way, clearly an equality anthem, speaks directly to that issue. But assuming that Born This Way is Lady Gaga’s way of declaring that sexual orientation is a from-birth quality is taking the easy road, and Lady Gaga does not want that! That’s one reason there are now horns on her head.
However Lady Gaga was born, we’re all pretty sure it was not with horns on her head. She quickly set about undermining the title’s most obvious interpretation – that is, that the song is addressing an actual way in which people are actually born.
Now that we know what it’s not, let’s go back to the video’s creation myth. A mother-creator gives birth to good (in the shape of humans) and evil (in the shape of a machine gun). There’s two ways to look at it. One, sticking with our earlier track of looking at how the song comments on art, we can place ourselves in the position of the mother-creator and say, “Each of us creates both good and evil.” Cool, but that doesn’t take us further into the song. Option two, since it is “I” in the song who is “born this way,” we can say that we are the offspring of the mother-creator’s womb. That means that we are each both the human and the machine gun, good and evil.
Now that is REALLY nothing new. Good and evil are cut from the same cloth, and that cloth is us. You didn’t need me OR Lady Gaga to tell you that. But Born This Way asks us to imagine a new race of people who are all good. These people love and accept all people, regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation or gender identity – in fact, they are invulnerable to prejudice. And they were born that way.
But how can that be what the song means for us? People are not born invulnerable to prejudice. So how can we be like Lady Gaga’s imaginary race? How can we be “born this way”? It’s the same way everything else in this video has been achieved. By being born. Again.
Sounds familiar, right? By showing us an imaginary birth of an all good, no evil race, Lady Gaga is asking us to consider undergoing a spiritual rebirth of our own. We can choose to be born this way. We can look at Gaga’s alien race as not just the elusive concept of ultimate good, but as a spiritual potential toward which we can strive, by refining ourselves, transforming ourselves, being born again, and again and again. Choreographer Laurie Ann Gibson explains, “It’s a race within our race. It’s a mindset, it’s an eternal journey.”
This spiritual journey is presented visually through the dancers and their choreography throughout the video. “We actually birth ourselves out of the womb when we start on the ground, and there’s lots of pushing and birthing … in the movement. And there’s a lot of punching through the adversity. And then we go to church. It’s very symbolic as far as how to pull yourself out of something and become new,” Gibson explained.
The amazing thing about it is that our spiritual rebirth is both divinely orchestrated and self-commanded. Lady Gaga has always said that her constructed self-images – the clothes, wigs, shoes and now those crazy horns – are her real self, she was “born that way.” Because what we’re talking about here is the “self” we constantly form and reform throughout our lives through the process of spiritual refinement. Our souls are a work in progress, and we ourselves are at work on them. So being “born that way” again points to our inherent creative power at work on its greatest project – ourselves. We are striving to be born the way we were meant to be – with love for ourselves and all people, with soul freedom.
That’s what Lady Gaga expressly asks of us in this song, to love ourselves and one another without judgment, to resist hate and discrimination. So when I sing those words, well, I was born that way.
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