How similar are Lady Gaga’s songs Bad Romance and Judas?

Comparsion of Lady Gaga's songs Bad Romance and Judas
Comparsion of Lady Gaga’s songs Bad Romance and Judas – click to full view

Lady Gaga is my dirty little secret. Behind closed doors I’ll happily sing along to her songs, watch her music videos and read her twitter posts. She’s like an addiction and from what it seems I’m not the only one, because a few friends have told me the same thing.

When she released her new song Judas on YouTube, I ended up watching it over and over again. I took in every detail of it and I ended up having the song stuck in my head for days. As I was singing it to myself, I began to realise that I was replacing parts of the song with lyrics from Bad Romance. I’ve been known to do this with songs before, however the more I thought about it the more it seemed that Judas was sped up version of Bad Romance with new lyrics. I decided to see if this was the case by graphing and analyzing the two songs side by side.

I should note before I start that I named the individual sections with titles that made sense to me so my apologies if some are not ‘musically correct’. Comment if you know what they should be!

Structure

Lady Gaga's Songs
Actual Time of Songs

I listened to the songs, divided them up into sections and then colour coded and mapped them out. The songs are different lengths, with Bad Romance being slightly longer however looking at this graph, I started to see the first signs that there were definitely some similarities between the two.

The Structure of the Two Songs
The Structure of Bad Romance and Judas

Once I made the graphs the same length though,  this really started to show. You can see that the structure of the 2 songs is very close with the only main difference being the length of time for each section. I removed the lyric gaps in Judas to get a more accurate comparison and it’s quite clear – are almost identical in their structure with only one main difference between the 2nd chorus and the breakdown in Bad Romance.

Lyrics

Now you’re probably thinking “…but Tash, most mainstream songs have the same structure”. This is true, however I didn’t just divide the song up into sections of Choruses and Verses, it’s also split it up on similar lyrical elements.

“Ooooh”

"Oooooh" section of Lady Gaga lyrics
Ohhh Lyrics

It’s pretty easy to see that these are the same and you can interchange when singing the songs. Try it yourself. These particular sections appear in the exact same spots in both songs; at the start and after each chorus. The only exception to this is in Bad Romance which combines it with the Build up.

‘Ah Ah Gaga’

"ah ah gaga" section of lyrics
Ah Ah Gaga Lyrics

While not identical, it’s very close. Apart from Judas after the 2nd chorus, these are also always placed the same, just after each “Oooooh” section.

Verses/Bridge

Verses and Bridge of Lady Gaga's Songs
Verses and Bridge Lyrics

No similar lyrical elements here except that verses in both songs are 4 lines long. Bad Romance has 2 verses and a bridge verse, while Judas has 1 verse and 2 bridge verses.

Chorus

Chorus of Lady Gaga Songs
Chorus Lyrics

I could get some disagreement on this but to me both chorus have a similar tune.

Sing them to yourself for a bit and tell me if you can hear it. I should note that in both songs the choruses are repeated twice and go for about 15 seconds in each song.

Breakdown/Build up

Breakdown/Buildup of Lady Gaga
Breakdown and Build Up Lyrics

These are probably the least similar sections. The only thing I can see worth noting is that both build-ups start off nearly the same.

So as you can see there are a lot elements within both the structure and lyrics of Bad Romance and Judas. I didn’t make this to point out anything negative about Gaga, it was actually more of a creative exercise to map out what I found. Let me know what you think about all of these –  I’m curious to know what others’ thoughts are about this.

3 comments on “How similar are Lady Gaga’s songs Bad Romance and Judas?

  1. Nathan Wong

    Thank God I’m not the only one who thought this! ๐Ÿ˜‚ I feel relieved that I have not gone insane…

    Reply

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