The term “genius” gets bandied about a lot—although I’ve never heard it, thank god, applied to Kid Rock—but Madonna is the real Ciccone. Madonna studies are a real thing, and no less a cultural critic than Camille Paglia called Madonna a “historical figure.” Not to be outdone, the French literary critic Georges-Claude Guilbert went so far as to declare her a postmodern “myth.”
Madonna’s impact on popular culture is inestimable. She’s always been refreshingly sex positive, a musical and fashion trend setter and image maker who changed the way both men and women looked, dressed, danced, and felt about themselves, and we’re still feeling the repercussions of her influence on diva culture—Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift and countless others are all her progeny.
She also happens to be the most successful female pop artist in the history of the planet. Small wonder that the staff of Billboard wrote of the feminist and queer icon that “the history of pop music can essentially be divided into two eras: pre-Madonna and post-Madonna.” Just like Elvis, The Beatles, and the Sex Pistols. Wherever you go, there she is. This is Madonna’s world—we poor serfs merely live in it. And our standard of living is higher thanks to her.
Lady Gaga—whose brief feud with Madonna over the latter’s claim that the woman who wears meat “blatantly ripped off” her song “Express Yourself” ended amicably—once said, “I have this weird thing that if I sleep with someone, they’re going to take my creativity from me through my vagina.” Madonna would never have said such a thing. She obviously loves sex and views it at as creative force rather than a form of labial banditry. Besides, artists have been copping Madonna’s shtick for four decades now, and she’s not a whit creatively (or financially) poorer for it.
Madonna’s eponymous 1983 debut was no grand artistic statement—it eschewed the (wonderful) sensationalism of 1992’s Erotica and its accompanying coffee table book Sex. No issue songs, no controversy—it was just a record jam-packed with irresistible electro-disco pop songs. You couldn’t go to a dance club, house party, backyard barbeque, or strip club without hearing songs like “Lucky Star” and “Borderline,” and the odds were surprisingly high that you’d hear one or the other (or the other three songs from the LP released as singles) when you turned on your car radio.
The music on Madonna is an infectious species of post-disco so simple and direct you can’t deny it—Madonna may have made use of the latest studio technology, but Madonna doesn’t sound like your typical eighties victim of studio overkill. It sounds fresh. It doesn’t sink beneath the weight of its gadgetry—it’s too airy and open. It gives you ample dance floor on which to shove off your moves.
Madonna, on the make in the Big Apple at the dawn of the eighties, finally went the solo route after stints in largely forgotten bands with names like the Breakfast Club and Emmy and the Emmys. And by dint of ceaseless DIY self-promotion she finally got played by club DJs and produced a few demos that won her the ear of legendary Sire Records head honcho Seymour Stein.
After recording the self-financed single “Everybody”—which became a US hit—Madonna found herself in a studio with a real budget. The sessions were contentious; after falling out with hand-picked producer Reggie Lucas—who contributed the songs “Borderline” and “Physical Attraction”—Madonna ultimately turned to Funhouse disco DJ John “Jellybean” Benitez to remix the available tracks.
The results were, well, the beginning of a dynasty. Madonna’s first track, “Lucky Star,” opens with some space age synth noodle, and is one of most flat-out intoxicating dance songs you’ll ever hear. It’s pure pop bliss and funky as all get-out, and Madonna’s oft-derided “Micky Mouse on helium” vocals ride atop a busy but never obtrusive array of synth lines, robotic handclaps, drum machines, and some perfect backing vocals. “Be my heavenly body tonight,” she sings, and somehow manages to infuse the simple line with raw sexual power. The production never gets in the song’s way—nothing could get in the way of this one.
“Borderline” is, if anything, even better. It opens with a synthesizer playing the melody, which is as catchy as Ebola, then in come Madonna’s vocals front and center. “Borderline” has an inexorable push that echoes the lyrics (she keeps on pushing her love over the borderline.) It succeeds not because it’s simplicity itself (there’s a whole lot going on) but because it sounds like simplicity itself.
Like the rest of the songs on the album it’s an open air affair—it leaves you lots of breathing space, and never leaves you feeling trapped in a studio with too many people twisting too many knobs to the song’s detriment. I would take a bullet for the song—there’s a reason my ex-wife and I, who wanted nothing to do with dance music or pop music in general, kept a cassette copy in our car. You never knew when a steady diet of hardcore would leave you in need of a sudden revitalizing infusion of pure ravishing pop joy.
“Burning Up” is a rocker, no other way to put it. It really moves—at 138 beats per minute to be exact, but who’s counting?—and features a searing guitar and a prominent tom tom beat. When Madonna isn’t doing some mechanized panting—she’s on fire, you know—she’s bemoaning the fact that the target of her lust doesn’t even know she exists. There’s a sense of real urgency to her vocals, and she’s willing to go to any lengths to get what she wants; “Do you want to see me down on my knees,” she asks, and she’s talking about more than just begging.
I wouldn’t call follow-up “I Know It” a misstep, but it won’t set you on fire—the melody doesn’t exactly stick to the ribs, and the synthesizer line that runs through it is unnecessarily baroque. No Roman candles here—just a workmanlike example of songcraft and not one of Madonna’s more inspired moments.
“Holiday” harkens back to the frothy disco fun of “Lucky Star” and “Borderline”—it’s a cut-to-the-chase dance track guaranteed to keep the boys and girls swinging. Happy go lucky—those are the words I’m looking for. The synthesizer line is infectious, the drum machine keeps a beat as steady as a heart at rest, and Madonna’s call for worldwide celebration is as wonderful as Fred Zarr’s devil-may-care piano solo. And Madonna plays cowbell better than Will Ferrell!
“Think of Me” has an addictive dance beat, and you have to love Ms. Ciccone’s assertiveness–that “You’d better think of me” is a command, not a hope. It may not have the effortless melodicism of songs like “Borderline” and “Holiday,” and I could do without Bob Matach’s smooth jazz tenor saxophone, but it holds up even if it doesn’t stand out. The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau didn’t like it either, but it didn’t impede his enjoyment of the album—referring to it and side one’s “I Know It” he wrote, “At one stiff per four-song side, smarter than Elvis Costello.”
Madonna gets physical—kind of like Olivia Newton-John, but far less theoretical—on “Physical Attraction,” a propulsive dance track that Christgau referred to as “electro-porn.” On it Madonna goes on about chemical reactions like she has a degree in the field. Carnal and repetitive, it may be busy but the studio hijinks never stand in the way of Madonna’s salute to sexual pneumatics.
The instrumental interlude is stripped-down perfection, and the spoken word interlude that follows is a precursor to the one on “Erotica.” A perfect example of Funkadelic’s dictum “Free your ass… and your mind will follow,” “Physical Attraction” is about sex for sex’s sake—ain’t an ounce of Puritan blood in this Catholic girl. Far from it. Madonna has always considered “Thou shall commit fornication” an unofficial Eleventh Commandment.
“Everybody” was, in effect, the song that started it all. An unsigned and relatively unknown Madonna went from dance club to dance club trying to convince DJs to spin the demo, and finally hit paydirt with Danceteria’s Mark Kamins, who was so besotted with it he produced a finished version. And the rest, as they say, is Herstory. Lyrically “Everybody” may be a string of cliches, but it’s an incontrovertible fact that no one has ever danced their way to Heaven on the poetry of John Milton.
The song opens with a slinky synth line, then in comes Madonna sounding breathless with lust. It’s nuclear reactor meltdown hot, and it was perhaps in the interest of public safety that she switches tracks and starts issuing commands. “Everybody” is a communal celebration of the beat—and the beat on this one is nonstop. She delivers some blowtorch hot “yeahs,” the room begins to sway, and you have no alternative but to surrender to the rhythm. Madonna is a lot of things to a lot of people, but love her or hate her you have to concede she’s never taken no for an answer. It’s always dance or die in Madonnaworld.
Madonna would go on to become every bit the trendsetter and vanguardist that David Bowie was, but she never switched personae the way he did—she was always Madonna and she always got there first. She was a prophet of the simple verities of human dignity—be strong, be glamorous, love your body, love other people’s bodies. She’s celebrated Eros more than any artist of hers or anyone’s time, with the possible exception of Prince.
Divas have come and divas have gone since Madonna conquered the material world, but none—including Diana Ross—have shaped the culture at large to the extent that she has. Her sole messages has always been I’m fabulous and you can be fabulous too, no matter how marginalized you are or feel, or who or what you love. Madonna was a cry for dance floor unity at a time when unity in any way, shape or form was unimaginable. Oscar Wilde may never have said, “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.” But Madonna’s been saying it her entire career, in a way that can be summed up with the words “express yourself.”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
