Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
Perhaps the gap between P.R. and reality in the reviews can be traced to Madonna's ban on advance promotional CDs. Some journalists from newspapers and magazines that planned for reviews to appear, as is customary, at the release date were forced to make pilgrimages to designated offices for "listening sessions" (sounds like something out of a Hillary campaign), where they heard the album under controlled and presumably optimal conditions. This authoritarian strategy (which I rejected outright when Salon told me about it) was perhaps designed to stop dissemination of the CD on the Web -- one of Madonna's crusades -- thus ensuring that high first-week sales would top the charts. But the end result is that the lowly hoi polloi of the buying public (including me) were snookered by a bait-and-switch.
Nevertheless, the positive response to "Confessions" probably signals a thirst on the part of the pop audience for emotional directness and shaped melody, which have languished in the hip-hop era, with its aggressive, incantatory rhyming and grinding percussive effects. Even Madonna's archrival, Mariah Carey, with her virtuoso lyricism, is given to long, meandering vocal lines that assert passionate feeling (stressed in performance by pentecostal hand-waving and arm swoops) but in fact go nowhere. It's a crooning, swooning, melting style that makes too many of Mariah's songs sound the same.
Incidentally, the claim repeatedly made by CNN and the British press that Madonna is now "the undisputed queen of pop" was undercut by CNN.com's current poll, "Who is today's real 'Queen of Pop'?" After 93,000 worldwide votes (as of this writing), Mariah is kicking Madonna's hot pants at 57 percent to 34 percent. Far behind trail Britney Spears, Kylie Minogue and Beyonci Knowles -- all of whose careers were in varying degrees influenced by Madonna. The poll results will surely surprise most observers because Madonna, unlike Mariah, has such a hammerlock on MTV and international magazine journalism.
What is disappointing in "Confessions on a Dance Floor" is that its songs don't feel fully developed. It's like a first draft: Madonna is generating many interesting melodic ideas that stay in the mind, as on "Get Together" or "Forbidden Love," but they haven't really been thought through or lived with, and they are often suffocated or undermined by Price's tacky, penny-arcade embellishments. Price plainly lacks the elegant musicianship of a true techno artist like Paul van Dyk. Disco is visceral -- a quality missing here. In my opinion, there are only two truly strong songs, "Hung Up" and "Jump" -- especially the latter, with its magnificent, hymnlike ascensions.
Madonna's lyrics on the CD range from the merely adequate to the cringe-making. Reviews have universally jeered at her juvenile rhyming of "New York" with "dork," but equally absurd (also in "I Love New York") is her lame cut at George Bush -- "Just go to Texas -- isn't that where they golf?" Evidently, her husband's wearing of a kilt with his family tartan at their wedding (which Madonna then popularized as a fashion statement) has never tweaked her curiosity about his cultural heritage: Scotland, of course, is the proud birthplace of golf.
The use of Mideastern tonalities on "Isaac" (which features a Yemeni singer from the London Kabbalah Centre) is ambitious, but the refrain becomes monotonous. The Israeli singer Ofra Haza was more effective with these atmospherics in the haunting "Love Song" and "Galbi" on her 1988 disco album, "Shaday." In interviews, Madonna has imprudently boasted of how little time her collaborative songwriting with Price took. "Confessions" may have been hurried out to meet an artificial deadline -- perhaps to beat Britney Spears' post-childbirth remix CD, which was released last week.
Is Madonna suffering Mick Jagger syndrome? Jagger, like Madonna, has tremendous managerial and business aptitude. It is he who single-handedly saved the Rolling Stones during Keith Richards' reclusive period of heroin addiction in the 1970s. But the end result was that the once-Dionysian Jagger became trapped in the crisp, precise Apollonian realm and was no longer capable of producing lyrics that match Richards' thunderous, blues-based inventions. (Full disclosure: Keith Richards has been my idol and role model for over 40 years.) As a lyricist, Jagger has fallen very far indeed from his glorious zenith in "Sympathy for the Devil"-- the greatest of all rock songs and demonstrably superior to Bob Dylan's exhilarating but over-cynical "Like a Rolling Stone" (which came in first this year in Rolling Stone's industry-wide poll of the Top 500 Songs).
But it seems querulous to blame Madonna for anything, because she has given so much to the world. She is a model of prodigious productivity without any affectations of avant-garde self-destructiveness or anomie. Her dance moves and ensemble work have been absorbed by performers in film and TV all over the world, from Latin America to India and Japan. She revolutionized feminism by giving enormous momentum to the pro-sex wing that had been ostracized throughout the p.c. era of those puritan censors, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. When I wrote in my polemical 1990 New York Times op-ed that "Madonna is the future of feminism," there were squawks of disbelief on all sides -- but that is exactly what came to pass over the next decade.
Madonna is her own Hollywood studio -- a popelike mogul and divine superstar in one. She has a laserlike instinct for publicity, aided by her visual genius for still photography (which none of her legion of imitators has). Unfortunately, her public life has dissolved into a series of staged photo ops. She has become a fashion icon more than a music pioneer. She lives in a peripatetic court of paid retainers -- flacks, flunkies, cooks, nannies and adoring handmaidens (no wonder she compares herself to Cleopatra in "Like It or Not"). She acquires properties and objects to flaunt in glossy magazines but somehow expects us to accept her as a spiritual wayfarer in Kabbalah, that chic brand of gnostic mysticism that she keeps doggedly and foolishly describing as "older than religion" (sigh -- doesn't she ever read books?).
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