My relationship with Lady Gaga is complicated.

For a college freshman waiting to escape from mom and dad’s watchful eye for the first time, “The Fame” and subsequently “The Fame Monster” became anthems of a new-age feminist movement that simultaneously excused and even encouraged smutty dancing and irresponsibility. I reveled in the catchy lyrics and heavy beats of “Just Dance” and “Bad Romance.” Even when Gaga started pulling that symbolic crap on me in late 2009, I let it slide because the songs were just so fun and empowering.

“Who wouldn’t feel sexy listening to this?” semi-coherent me would think, belting “WANYOUBAROMAAANCE” at the top of my lungs on the dance floor at some scuzzy Champaign bar or another. Queen Gaga could open a megachurch covered in glitter and rhinestones, and I’d be dancing with a hymnal and a disco stick in the front row. And it would be fabulous.

But it wasn’t long before our tryst turned borderline abusive.

Last year, I began setting myself up for the release of “Born This Way,” though somewhat reluctantly. I wasn’t happy that she began dangling it in front of me 79 months prematurely while halfheartedly wrapping up a confusing and stunted second album campaign.

Instead of giving breathing room to what was truly a technically solid and rewarding EP, I got three singles and two bloated music videos (NOT Bad Romance, which was perfection) before Gaga dropped TFM to start championing the release of her third album in almost as many years. My faith in Gags was challenged early — the first single had not even clawed its way out of the womb before she started bragging that “Born This Way” was “the greatest album in a decade.”

The super fans and mainstream pop media devoured the hype, and the Gaga camp did little to stifle the embarrassing circle jerk that was emerging: “I’ll unveil the album title at midnight on New Year’s!” she shouted to legions of adoring fans. “Only 23,348 seconds until I tweet the cover art!” “I’ve tattooed a hidden message revealing the fourth single’s release date on my ass! See if you can spot it at my next concert!”

I might be getting a bit hyperbolic, but the deluge of praise became so nauseating that by the time the title song was released, I was beyond consolation. “Born This Way” was disappointing in every way I had anticipated, a shameless “Express Yourself” rip-off filled with schmaltzy bromides that didn’t cater to Gaga’s LGBT audience so much as patronize them. “Judas,” an overproduced “Bad Romance” 2.0, did little to comfort me — I was confused as to why someone with years of classical music training didn’t understand that putting five hooks into a single song created a bloated mess, not a masterpiece.

As more singles were released, my suspicions about the album’s schizophrenic nature were confirmed. What was this? A pop/dance hybrid or glam metal new-age expressionism? Industrial? Inspirational? Blasphemous?

I didn’t care anymore, I just wanted to know which theme I was supposed to support and freaking go with it. What do you want from me, Gaga?

By the time the album hit the shelves, I was almost too revolted to listen. The singles might have been commercial enough to succeed on the radio, but they all sounded like they were products of a board meeting filled with executives so confident in Gaga’s abilities to sell absolute rubbish that they cast aside the normal process of constructive criticism and outside input. I can almost hear the Interscope bigwigs mulling it over with Gaga herself:

“The inspiration for the melody on this one comes from the glam-hair-metal-pop subculture that emerged out of Berlin in the late 1980s,” Gaga would state matter-of-factly, hair from the dead disco jacket-wearing rat perched atop her cranium falling into her heroin-laced cup of Earl Grey: “It’s about finding your inner Jesus during the robot apocalypse.”

“Thanks Steph,” one executive says. “We’ll think it over.”

“IT’S GAGA!” she hisses, before leaping up from her chair and riding out of the room on one of her backup dancers.

“This is a bit crappy, but shouldn’t we just let her do it?” another exec says. “I mean, this is the girl that became a superstar after she smeared herself in blood and staged her own fake suicide at a major music awards show. The kids WANT this, I think.”

I wasn’t on the “edge of glory,” and I certainly didn’t want to be “as free as my hair” — I just wanted to cut it off and throw it in the trash.

But the inner fangirl protested, and I decided to give it a spin.

As much as I want to hate this album — break it in half, spit on its grave, a plague on both your houses, etc. — I just can’t bring myself to do it.

It’s cheesy. It’s gratuitous. It’s self-indulgent (See: “Born This Way,” “Judas,” “The Edge of Glory,” “Hair”).

But for every “Born This Way,” there’s something actually worthy of my attention, and a few songs stand out as truly building on the Gaga dance track model that burst onto the scene in late 2008.

The album is rife with Eurotrance and ’80s pop-rock influences, especially in numbers like the guitar-heavy “Electric Chapel” and Madonna-esque “Fashion of His Love” (available on the special edition only). But they’re well balanced and well produced, with the right mixture of catchy hooks and thumping backbeats to carry you through to the end of each song. They’re still cheesy — see how much faux-culture she tries to inject into “Scheibe” and “Americano” for reference — but somehow it’s okay. It’s self-aware. It’s exactly what I’d want to be listening to, if I was blitzed out of my brains on the piss-stained dance floor of a trashy European club at 2 a.m.

And the unifying element that these tracks contain? Many of them just aren’t single material.

Perhaps it’s not so much a difference in production values between these tracks and the singles as it is my abhorrence for this marketing campaign. Their present obscurity helps the album stay grounded and thus enjoyable. Who knows, depending on the way this campaign spins and whatever nonsense meaning Gaga tries to shoehorn into her next single(s), in six months I could end up hating the very songs I’m praising.

But no matter how many tracks impress me now, the album still fails to touch the level of tightness and coherency that “The Fame” and “The Fame Monster” achieved. “Born This Way” could never have been the album of a generation.

It was just too “big” to succeed.

_Jill is a senior in Media._