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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Madonna cannibalizes herself in a misguided attempt to appeal to today's youth. Who is she becoming? The crazed Joan Crawford of "Torch Song"? The pathetic Bette Davis in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane"? Charo?
Illustration by Zach Trenholm
Dec 2, 2005 | Last week Madonna's new CD, "Confessions on a Dance Floor," entered pop album charts at No. 1 in the United States, Canada and Great Britain, and in countries around the world from Europe to Mexico, Taiwan and Japan. It was also announced that, with her song "Hung Up," Madonna had become the first performer in the rock era to match Elvis Presley's record of 36 singles reaching the top 10.
This week, Madonna's album suddenly dropped to No. 4 on the Billboard chart, suggesting that, at least in the U.S., word of mouth has not been as enthusiastic as expected. Nevertheless, this smash success has restored Madonna's reputation for commercial viability after the flop three years ago of her excruciatingly unfunny film "Swept Away" (directed by her husband, Guy Ritchie), as well as the lackluster returns on her last CD, the stiff and dreary "American Life."
With its infectious melodies and upbeat rhythms, "Confessions on a Dance Floor" is a good album -- but it is not a great one. And it certainly does not equal or surpass Madonna's early work. Normally, it is wrong and presumptuous to expect artists or performers to tarry in their first phase; we should welcome their creative evolution and stifle our own nostalgia. For example, much as we may adore Diana Rigg as the karate-chopping Mrs. Peel in that 1960s proto-feminist TV classic "The Avengers," Rigg is quite right to be irritated by fans who fail to recognize her towering stature as a serious stage actress of major dramatic roles from Greek to modern.
But in this case, Madonna has invited and courted the comparison to her younger self by going ostentatiously retro, from the discotheque cover image of "Confessions on a Dance Floor" to the vintage violet leather jacket and slutty pink leotard she is wearing in the album's publicity photos and debut video, with its "Saturday Night Fever" empty dance studio.
Madonna emerged from the New York dance club scene of the early 1980s as a reinterpreter of disco music, which had been declared dead after the Bee Gees juggernaut of the late '70s but was still thriving in the gay and black worlds. Her superb 1983 song "Burning Up" (recently covered by Boston's the Rudds) was the first step in her monumental creative renewal of disco, which would surge forward and by the late '80s and early '90s start to splinter and proliferate into the dozens of still-booming subforms of techno and trance music.
As a trained dancer who combined Martha Graham with jazz style, Madonna intuitively understood the deep dynamics of disco -- its implacable grandeur, its liquid pulses and skittering polyrhythms, its flamboyant emotionalism. It wasn't just the clunky thump-thump-thump of drum machines, as hard-rock acolytes contemptuously dismissed it. In a 1991 cover story on Madonna for London's Sunday Independent Review, I described disco as "a dark, grand Dionysian music with roots in African earth-cult" -- a defense that seemed bizarre because disco had yet to achieve academic legitimacy (which arrived in the '90s as more writers embraced popular gay history).
Through her fusion of Graham primitivism with Italian Catholic ritualism, Madonna caught the pagan majesty of disco and embodied it in a stunning body of original compositions that conquered the world and have never gone out of airplay -- "Into the Groove," "Open Your Heart," "Vogue" and a host of others. Her primary inspiration wasn't ABBA, the prolific and beloved Swedish pop group whose 1979 hit, "Gimme Gimme Gimme," is reworked -- or should I say pirated -- on "Hung Up," the signature song on her new CD. No, her real ancestor was the Italian magician, Giorgio Moroder, celebrated for the operatic albums he produced for Donna Summer in Germany, which were a direct influence on several of Madonna's fine early producers, like Jellybean Benitez.
Moroder does make an appearance on "Confessions on a Dance Floor" in the beat from Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" borrowed for "Future Lovers" (a track produced by Mirwais Ahmadzai), but it feels listless and undigested. Madonna's current main producer, Stuart Price, appears to have little feeling for or understanding of Moroder, who in my view remains the benchmark by which all old and new disco music must be measured. Last summer, Madonna described her forthcoming CD as "future disco" -- which raised the hopes of all die-hard disco fans that "Confessions on a Dance Floor" would be a masterpiece, a return to roots but also a visionary breakthrough.
That's not what we got -- though you'd never know it from the gushing reviews, which applauded the CD for achieving Madonna's purported aim of making people dance. My blood boiled at this insulting reduction of dance music to gymnastics -- mere recreational aerobics. I for one do not dance to dance music; disco for me is a lofty metaphysical mode that induces contemplation. (Of course, this may partly descend from my Agnes Gooch marginalization in the old bar scene, where I was -- as Nora Ephron would say -- a wallflower at the orgy.) Giorgio Moroder's albums, which I listened to obsessively on headphones, were an enormous inspiration to me throughout the writing of "Sexual Personae" in the 1970s and '80s. Disco at its best is a neurological event, a shamanistic vehicle of space-time travel.
Because they rarely get the high-profile mainstream reviews automatically snagged by the product of Madonna Inc., dance albums are sorely in need of a more sophisticated critical vocabulary, comparable to what has been lavished on hard rock for 30 years. Reviewers of "Confessions" who were casting around for something to say often resorted to simply listing the samples or cataloging the alleged technical wizardry. There was rarely any discerning reference to the massive history of disco, which this album is explicitly invoking.
When my partner, Alison Maddex (a true blue Madonna fan), bought the CD a few days after its release on Nov. 15, I was shocked at how the reviews had failed to note its tinny shrillness, sonic clichis, and intermittently clumsy or muddy layering -- a startling lapse in Madonna's usually impeccable quality control. Even worse, the stitching together of one track into the next -- a basic disco convention that some reviews carelessly allowed readers to think was Madonna's innovation -- is in every case but one embarrassingly weak, wavering and amateurish. For decades, hundreds of ace DJs all over the world, in clubs or on street corners, have been doing masterly hypnotic variations of disco's seamless segue.
