Here's the problem with Lady Gaga's Born This Way: There are some problems with Lady Gaga's Born This Way. There's an exceedingly bombastic track that swipes elements of Madonna songs wholesale. There's a schizoid disaster that goes to hell and back to drum up religious controversy. There's a cheesy sax-fest that uses hair as a symbol of empowerment... much like the entire musical Hair. And these are three of the first singles the 25-year-old singer and her label chose to release. We disliked them all. She also told fans, "I promise to give you the greatest album of this decade, just for you." We found that distasteful. She called equality "the prime rib of America," for the love of God. We found that really irritating.

But Born This Way is brilliant.

There are 14 songs on the standard version of Lady Gaga's second full-length album, and those three singles -- "Born This Way," "Judas," and "Hair" -- are among its weakest tracks (in the context of the LP, they don't sound quite as

Marilyn Manon's website just got a fancy makeover, a fresh snippet of new music, and an ominous journal entry from the Antichrist Superstar. The clip comes with the note "I am among no one (excerpt from an undisclosed song with an unreleased title)," so do with that what you will -- it's a quick blast of retro punk followed by dead air. Manson guitarist Twiggy Ramirez has said the band's upcoming disc is a "punk rock Mechanical Animals," which actually sounds like a cool thing that's substantiated by this extremely brief sample.

The music comes with an equally opaque video featuring shots of Manson looking vampy and evil (as opposed to what, we can't say), and as a special treat, the rocker's own reflections on the Rapture that wasn't. "Don't ever believe what you read, especially if you are illiterate," he writes (good advice, sir). His journal entry makes references to "burning churches, burning beds, burning witches, burning bridges, burning Cadillacs, burning forests, burning

For the price of a McDonald's McChicken sandwich, two copies of this morning's New York Post, or a Mega Millions ticket, you can now purchase a digital copy of Lady Gaga's Born This Way. Talk about depreciating the value of a singer's work of art: On Amazon, Born This Way can be yours for 99 cents. By comparison, purchasing the song "The Edge of Glory" on iTunes for $1.29 is more expensive than buying all of Born This Way on Amazon. The most anticipated album of 2011, and it's available for half the price of Chinese Democracy. Meanwhile, Best Buy is handing out free copies of BTW with all cell phone purchases this week, a move that should boost sales by another 200,000 copies. Buy a Droid, get a Born This Way, even if you're not a Lady Gaga fan. Update: A SoundScan rep tells The Amp that those cell phone freebees won't count toward Gaga's sales figures. 

After months of exhaustive promotion, we understand why it's important for Born This Way to generate some industry-saving sales

Billboard Music Awards are determined by record sales, so nobody should be surprised by who won them during the magazine's big Las Vegas blowout last night -- artists who sold a ton of albums in the past 12 months, like Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Lady Antebellum, the Black Eyed Peas, and Rihanna. (There was sadly no Arcade Fire moment where usually-funny-but-not-very-funny host Ken Jeung opened an envelope and gave perplexed Barbra Streisand face.)

Since the winners were a fait accompli, the only things worth seeing other than OMG did you watch Justin Bieber kiss Selena Gomez!? were the performances. There were many on what looked like an extremely low-budget stage -- the Black Eyed Peas, Keith Urban, Pitbull and Ne-Yo, Lady Antebellum, Taio Cruz, Far East Movement with OneRepublic and Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige with Lil Wayne, Ke$ha, Neil Diamond -- but only four songs (and two acceptance speeches) are worthy of further discussion. Here they are in order of awesomeness, starting