Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Alamy
A Star is Born, the Bradley Cooper-directed remake of a remake of a remake starring Lady Gaga as an up-and-coming pop star and Cooper as her grizzled mentor and husband, premiered five years ago this month. The lead single from its soundtrack, “Shallow,” got its flowers, going on to win the Oscar for Best Original Song and two Grammys. Even “I’ll Never Love Again,” the closing ballad—spoiler alert for a five-year-old movie—that Gaga’s character Ally performs after the death by suicide of Cooper’s Jackson Maine, won the Grammy for Best Song Written for Visual Media. But it’s “Why Did You Do That?” Ally’s debut pop single that remains the movie’s most slept on cult song.
The song was written by Gaga and prolific songwriter Diane Warren “maybe like a week” after the 2016 Academy Awards ceremony, Warren says, where the two were nominated for their ballad, “Til It Happens To You,” for the campus rape documentary, The Hunting Ground. At that point, A Star is Born was but a star in Cooper’s eye, so it originally wasn’t meant specifically for the film Gaga would eventually star in. Fast forward two-and-a-half years, and its placement in the movie occurs at Ally’s “sellout moment,” when she eschews the soulful ballads she wrote and performed with Maine for a mainstream pop career replete with lyrics about being undone by a man’s fine ass.
“That’s the line he quotes when she’s in the bathtub and he goes, ‘Really?! Why’d you come around me with an ass like that?!’ And I’m like, ‘Guilty!’ I’m the one who made her sell out,” Warren says, laughing over the phone from her Los Angeles home on the fifth anniversary.