Abracadabra is indeed better than Bad Romance

[Mars 2,455]

BR stood the test of time, lets see if in 10 years Abra has..

[stevana229 1,897]

I agree... Abra follows the exact same structure as Bad Romance but is just way more modern. Abra is her strongest, radio friendly, most hard hitting pop song she's released 

[TheARTPOPball 929]

Bad romance captured a brilliant youthful sentiment in Gaga that will never be able to be replicated. And that’s fine, the song is arguably one of if not the best pop songs ever written and has reached many people who weren’t even born when it came out. It will serve as a time capsule in the decades to come of the potential of pure pop and will remain a blueprint for writers and musicians alike for a millennium. It transcended any boundary music had and created a truly timeless track that I still believe whole heartedly, would be just as impactful if released today, or in 20 years. It’s just that good. 

[MountainMonster 1,122]

It’s very good. We all know that. On a personal preference, I almost never listen to BR. But I feel like that’s perhaps just because I beat that song into the ground over the years, playing it so many times. And Abra is my current number one. But I always feel like my favorite Gaga record is whatever the latest one is.

[zevthepaparazzo 884]

23 hours ago, zevthepaparazzo said:

bad romance is in a minor and abra is in f minor

you can't make a mashup without one of them sounding like a chipmunk 

oop i forgot about formant shifters 

[Anderson123 39,582]

5 hours ago, Monstermilo said:

chart performance is the only objective way to see how a song is received by the public

bad romance is still way bigger of a song than abra even today in terms of impact 

Bad Romance didn’t even hit #1 and got blocked by Kesha’s Tik Tok. 

Charts are also very random sometimes and can be manipulated. Britney’s Toxic and Slave 4 U weren’t even Top 10 and they’re some of her most iconic singles. 
 

[Ziggy 12,298]

3 hours ago, stevana229 said:

I agree... Abra follows the exact same structure as Bad Romance but is just way more modern. Abra is her strongest, radio friendly, most hard hitting pop song she's released 

Uhhhh that would be Die With a Smile and I don’t even like her like that lol

OT: personally I think BR takes it. It was a moment. Abra is a big hit. Big difference imo. I mean, both are impressive but I think BR captures its moment of music and culture so well people (including Gaga) were chasing its impact for years after. Idk if we can say the same of Abracadabra

Edited Sunday at 11:59 PM by Ziggy

[Gorehound 4,858]

On 12/6/2025 at 11:34 PM, Lava said:

It’s been long enough. Let’s be real. Bad Romance was world stopping we know, but it was genuinely just a different era. Sonically, Abracadabra takes everything Bad Romance debuted, emphasizes it, and goes extremely above and beyond. The instrumentals, the classic Gaga sound, and the heavenly vocals all morph Abracadabra into arguably her best, most Gaga song ever. 

Abracadabra is excellent, but no. Love it or hate it Bad Romance still remains Gaga's best song. 

[PornoDanceFight 345]

Taste is subjective, and there’s a lot of it missing here!

lol jk

Abra doesn’t hold a matchstick to BR. Abra is one of her best bangers, but the verse lyrics border on trite platitudes. Abra’s chorus, while fun, exhilarating, and campy, does less with the nonsense lyricism than BR does.

BR’s verses are overflowing with metaphors, imagery, and themes that make it iconoclastic not just for pop music, but Gaga’s music in general. I will die on the hill that the Hitch**** references in the second verse are some of the most clever and provocative pop lyrics in the past 20 years, and they again further the themes of the song and TFM as a whole. The deconstructed “rah rahs” are also more thematically resonant to BR (being the word “romance” but deconstructed), while the “amor-ooh-nana/morta-ooh-gaga” in Abra is deliberately campy and connects to the idea of speaking in tongues, but stops there.

Furthermore, BR is more avant garde in production, composition, lyrics, and thematic content. The “razor” synths in the verses emphasize the sense of danger this bad romance possesses. The Hitch**** references are clever, tongue-in-cheek, obsessive, disturbing, and ****ographic. The bridge is C*NT personified. Remixing the chorus in French also gives it more of an avant garde edge.

Besides being her most definitive work, BR also sets the ethos for Gaga’s feminist messaging in future songs with “I’m a free bitch, baby,” which also makes BR somewhat of a feminist manifesto. It also goes without saying that without JD, PF, and BR = no Judas, Scheiße, or Abra. All in all, I love Abracadabra, but Bad Romance has and always will remain the better song AND her best song. 

[BELLYACHE 1,426]

53 minutes ago, ****oDanceFight said:

Taste is subjective, and there’s a lot of it missing here!

lol jk

Abra doesn’t hold a matchstick to BR. Abra is one of her best bangers, but the verse lyrics border on trite platitudes. Abra’s chorus, while fun, exhilarating, and campy, does less with the nonsense lyricism than BR does.

BR’s verses are overflowing with metaphors, imagery, and themes that make it iconoclastic not just for pop music, but Gaga’s music in general. I will die on the hill that the Hitch**** references in the second verse are some of the most clever and provocative pop lyrics in the past 20 years, and they again further the themes of the song and TFM as a whole. The deconstructed “rah rahs” are also more thematically resonant to BR (being the word “romance” but deconstructed), while the “amor-ooh-nana/morta-ooh-gaga” in Abra is deliberately campy and connects to the idea of speaking in tongues, but stops there.

Furthermore, BR is more avant garde in production, composition, lyrics, and thematic content. The “razor” synths in the verses emphasize the sense of danger this bad romance possesses. The Hitch**** references are clever, tongue-in-cheek, obsessive, disturbing, and ****ographic. The bridge is C*NT personified. Remixing the chorus in French also gives it more of an avant garde edge.

Besides being her most definitive work, BR also sets the ethos for Gaga’s feminist messaging in future songs with “I’m a free bitch, baby,” which also makes BR somewhat of a feminist manifesto. It also goes without saying that without JD, PF, and BR = no Judas, Scheiße, or Abra. All in all, I love Abracadabra, but Bad Romance has and always will remain the better song AND her best song. 

Abra is a cheesy version of BR yes

[Gorehound 4,858]

12 hours ago, ****oDanceFight said:

Taste is subjective, and there’s a lot of it missing here!

lol jk

Abra doesn’t hold a matchstick to BR. Abra is one of her best bangers, but the verse lyrics border on trite platitudes. Abra’s chorus, while fun, exhilarating, and campy, does less with the nonsense lyricism than BR does.

BR’s verses are overflowing with metaphors, imagery, and themes that make it iconoclastic not just for pop music, but Gaga’s music in general. I will die on the hill that the Hitch**** references in the second verse are some of the most clever and provocative pop lyrics in the past 20 years, and they again further the themes of the song and TFM as a whole. The deconstructed “rah rahs” are also more thematically resonant to BR (being the word “romance” but deconstructed), while the “amor-ooh-nana/morta-ooh-gaga” in Abra is deliberately campy and connects to the idea of speaking in tongues, but stops there.

Furthermore, BR is more avant garde in production, composition, lyrics, and thematic content. The “razor” synths in the verses emphasize the sense of danger this bad romance possesses. The Hitch**** references are clever, tongue-in-cheek, obsessive, disturbing, and ****ographic. The bridge is C*NT personified. Remixing the chorus in French also gives it more of an avant garde edge.

Besides being her most definitive work, BR also sets the ethos for Gaga’s feminist messaging in future songs with “I’m a free bitch, baby,” which also makes BR somewhat of a feminist manifesto. It also goes without saying that without JD, PF, and BR = no Judas, Scheiße, or Abra. All in all, I love Abracadabra, but Bad Romance has and always will remain the better song AND her best song. 

THIS xxx

[Ladle Ghoulash 30,636]

15 hours ago, ****oDanceFight said:

Taste is subjective, and there’s a lot of it missing here!

lol jk

Abra doesn’t hold a matchstick to BR. Abra is one of her best bangers, but the verse lyrics border on trite platitudes. Abra’s chorus, while fun, exhilarating, and campy, does less with the nonsense lyricism than BR does.

BR’s verses are overflowing with metaphors, imagery, and themes that make it iconoclastic not just for pop music, but Gaga’s music in general. I will die on the hill that the Hitch**** references in the second verse are some of the most clever and provocative pop lyrics in the past 20 years, and they again further the themes of the song and TFM as a whole. The deconstructed “rah rahs” are also more thematically resonant to BR (being the word “romance” but deconstructed), while the “amor-ooh-nana/morta-ooh-gaga” in Abra is deliberately campy and connects to the idea of speaking in tongues, but stops there.

Furthermore, BR is more avant garde in production, composition, lyrics, and thematic content. The “razor” synths in the verses emphasize the sense of danger this bad romance possesses. The Hitch**** references are clever, tongue-in-cheek, obsessive, disturbing, and ****ographic. The bridge is C*NT personified. Remixing the chorus in French also gives it more of an avant garde edge.

Besides being her most definitive work, BR also sets the ethos for Gaga’s feminist messaging in future songs with “I’m a free bitch, baby,” which also makes BR somewhat of a feminist manifesto. It also goes without saying that without JD, PF, and BR = no Judas, Scheiße, or Abra. All in all, I love Abracadabra, but Bad Romance has and always will remain the better song AND her best song. 

You can’t praise BR for the “roma-roma”lyric but criticize the quasi-Latin gibberish in Abra when you know damn well Abra’s chorus includes “amor” and “morta” for “death or love.” Also, I love BR down but we can’t be acting like the verses are loaded with metaphors lol. She’s essentially saying a variation of the same thing with each line (“I want the ugly/bad/disgusting parts of you”). I’d also argue that the juxtaposition of the hard techno breakdown in the post-chorus, acid techno, 90s house, euro dance, gothic pop (interpolating a post-punk banger), and the classical pastiche in the bridge makes Abra equally (if not even slightly more) sonically/compositionally progressive than BR. 
 

Lady Gaga, imo, is a master of dramaturgy + semiotics and I think where she shines is how she uses her songs as instruments for storytelling (and, as a pretext, assigns a certain mutability to the lyrics to allow for them to serve as springboards for theatrical extrapolation), so I think both Abra and BR in how they’ve been contextualized in her MVs and live performances are rich with meaning, but I’m not sure I’d go as far as to say *either* are profound in and of themselves.

BR’s surface interpretation (what’s actually in the lyrics): Toxic relationship, a codependent yearning for every part of someone even though they’re bad for you.

BR’s meta interpretation (via MV, live performances): A song from Stefani to Gaga, Gaga to her audience…I know fame could get ugly, but I want every part of it. I’m going to embrace my own darkness and the darkness of everything I encounter as Gaga and take it on romantically even if it (or especially if) it hurts me.

Abra’s surface interpretation (what’s actually in the lyrics): Dancing as a form of striving to get better, to get stronger, to overcome adversity, to find yourself, to find love, to survive in a club where the stakes are existential (literally life or death)

Abra’s meta interpretation (via MV, live performances): A summoning ritual for “Gaga,” a protection spell against negative energy from any detractors, synthesis of darkness + light. Striving, not as suffering as it is in BR, but as a way of growing, purifying, and integrating.

IMO, I think Abra, in that context, is deeper than BR (and the stakes are absolutely higher), but I also think that its meaning at least partially builds on BR, so they’re complementary, but each can stand on their own.

But part of why I love both songs (and why I would never make my children fight each other) is that I think both are quintessentially Gaga in every sense: they function as surface level, indulgent, absurd pop bombast, while simultaneously being dramaturgically and semiotically weight bearing for Gaga’s meta theatrical narrative. 

Edited Monday at 03:21 PM by Ladle Ghoulash

[Ladle Ghoulash 30,636]

12 hours ago, BELLYACHE said:

Abra is a cheesy version of BR yes

I love someone writing a detailed, nuanced write up and your takeaway being

”So you’re saying it’s cheesy” 

Also, once again, Bad Romance is cheesy/campy as hell lol. “Rah rah ah ah ah, roma, roma ma ma,” “I want you in my rear window, baby you’re sick” (while miming a pregnant belly with her hands in the MV when she sings the word “baby,” mind you).

I honestly think because many of us were younger when we found Gaga and that she was darker than most mainstream pop, people have this sense that she’s like *incredibly* edgy (like Marilyn Manson some ****) or that she’s like super c*nt (like Daphne Guinness), or avant garde (like Björk), but the answer is that she’s a purposefully tongue-in-cheek, campy absurd amalgam of the those things (and much more). She’s corny! She’s pop! She’s camp! She’s absurd and sincere at the same time! Embrace it!

Edited Monday at 01:47 PM by Ladle Ghoulash

[juicyjuicy 1,992]

Bad Romance walked so Abracadabra could run. I still prefer BR over Abra - the iconic, cultural impact it had...and still being talked about today as one of the best songs EVER. We'll see if Abracadabra has that impact in years to come.

[Lextyr97 20,232]

I can’t agree only because Bad Romance has better lyrics and I like its switch ups. Abra is still a 14/10 though. Bad Romance is like a 14.5/10. And yes I know I rated them 140% and 145%. It’s what they deserve