Cruel joke?

When Lady GaGa first emerged in 2008 we were in love. We're not going to lie or pretend we saw through her from the start. We genuinely thought she was incredible/the future/incendiary.

In interviews she was charming and intelligent and self-aware. In performances she was brave and unusual and fierce (NOT THAT KIND OF FIERCE). Her music was superpop but with kitsch Americana worked in. Reviewers kept banging on about the supposed euro house influence, but we heard pure 80s synthpop humping the leg of American chart R&B, whilst 70s glam rock looked on and rubbed its pervy hands in glee.

Almost everything she did sounded and looked unfathomably fresh because NO new artist in 20 years had put this much effort into being the perfect pop star. We were living through a dearth of good pop in the charts. Amazing pop by the likes of Robyn and Róisín and Ladyhawke and Goldfrapp was appreciated on a small scale but wasn't pushing through.

So Lady GaGa single handedly changed the landscape of pop music (for ever?).

Even with the release of her irritatingly confusing EP/Second Album?/Rerelease? The Fame Monster, we were still mightily impressed. There wasn't a total progression in sound (yet) but it was infinitely more focussed, more mature, wiser, less one-tone, less camp, less dependent on nostalgia mixed with novelty.

But that's exactly what the lead single from her Second Album Proper, Born This Way, is: nostalgia mixed with novelty.

When reviewers said that "Born This Way" was going to sound like Madonna, specifically "Express Yourself", we didn't realise that the resemblance was going to be so... uncanny. Referencing or being inspired by Madonna is never something that we're going to criticise or sneer at. We worship Madge, we revere her. But simply cutting and pasting a melody from one of her 80s hits and changing the lyrics (to something contrived and embarrassing) and adding a four-to-the-floor pounding house beat isn't adding a new twist to anything.

We've been cynical about GaGa for a while (since we went to her live show at the O2 and spent more time listening to her make up a plot that wasn't even ROOTED in sense than actually watching an exhilarating show) but we still held out hope.

This project sounded like it was going to be darker, grittier with a more varied set of references. In the interview Gaga just did with American Vogue, the journalist described tracks with intriguing names like "Judas" and "Government Hooker", whilst "Scheiße", a track that appeared online (albeit in remix form) seemed to be reminiscent of scary German industrial. The Vogue interviewer, when describing the sound of the new material threw around phrases and words like Edith Piaf, mariachi band, sledgehammering, and biblical.

Believe it or not, we were actually hoping (and still are, secretly) that these were indicators that Lady GaGa's second album would be an epic, gothic rock opera incorporating unusual and disparate sounds into a huge tangled web of what she does best: soaring melodies and eye-raising lyrics and superior pop multi-choruses. Not camp, lukewarm retreads.

Of course, you can judge for yourself, but as far as we're concerned, this isn't even a step backwards for the Lady. It's a step down.