Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
A self-described "work Nazi," Madonna is overscheduled and overprogrammed. Remarkably for a Graham dancer, she has become poor at improvisation -- which produces her manic, mechanical stage shows, where little room is left for natural warmth or banter with the audience and where the production is always too small and precious for large arenas. There is a painfully tight calculation to Madonna's self-presentation that has certainly blighted this CD, with its preachy, sepulchral voiceovers. "I hate to waste time," Madonna says. But artists recharge themselves and their imaginations precisely when they are doing nothing.
"How much fortune can you make?" Madonna rhetorically asks in "How High." Exactly: When will she decide she has made enough money for 10 lifetimes and recommit herself to the noble cause of making music? Music never dies. Do we really need another Madonna tour? Does she have to compete with women performers 25 years her junior? Why turn every private moment, including motherhood, into commerce and publicity? (This was then-boyfriend Warren Beatty's complaint about her in "Truth or Dare.") And why does every artistic venture have to be crushed by streamrolling promotional gimmickry (like the depressingly literalist linkage of "Hung Up" to a cellphone company)?
At a recent party in New York celebrating Salon's 10th anniversary, the formidable Cintra Wilson said mordantly to me (I scribbled all this down on a cocktail napkin at the bar), "Madonna is the Robo-Celebrity, calcified with discipline -- religiously saintly, physically superhuman, in all ways faultless. She represents the unspoken desires of America -- to be good at everything!"
Even allowing for the fact that she must strenuously maintain her hipness for a busy husband 10 years her junior, Madonna is starting to morph into the mature Joan Crawford of "Torch Song," still ferociously dancing but with her fascist willpower signaled by brute, staring eyes and fixed jawline. In cannibalizing her disco diva days, Madonna runs the risk of turning into a pasty powdered crumpet like the aging Bette Davis in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" Will she become a whooping Charo shaking her geriatric hoochie-coochie hips on TV talk shows? Or should we expect a sudden, grisly collapse from glowing beauty to dust, like Ursula Andress as the 2000-year-old femme fatale in "She"? Too hungry to connect to the youth market, Madonna goes on childishly using naughty words and flipping the finger (as onstage at Live 8 last summer). Marlene Dietrich, her supreme precursor, knew how to preserve her dignity and glamour.
We live in a period of declining stars. Few celebrities these days (aside from the smoldering Angelina Jolie) seem to have complex psychic lives. Hence we should probably be grateful for the Ritchies, our new Burtons with their baronial pretensions and nouveau riche excesses. (I have already tartly commented in the U.K. on Madonna's equine misadventure.)
But I still long for songs of artistic weight -- which the abundantly gifted Madonna is quite capable of. As a lyricist, she is becoming too blatant, as in the too pushy "Push," with its awkward marital revelations. She is confusing her banal, real-life personality with her higher, artistic self. She needs more generalizing obliqueness. A spectacular 1983 rock song, "Middle of the Road" by the Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde (another American expatriate and mother), shows how to combine rueful autobiography with searing social commentary.
And Madonna's complaints about "success" and "fame" on "Confessions" ("Was it all worth it?") are simply tiresome. She sings in "How High" (with typically slack locutions), "It's funny -- I spent my whole life wanting to be talked about. I did it -- just about everything to see my name in lights." Here she capitulates to her most uninformed critics and slanders her own creative drive -- which is one of the wonders of modern show business. The music videos she produced from the mid-'80s to the early '90s were true objets d'art -- in my judgment superior to anything coming from the fine arts in the same period. But we have yet to see signs that Madonna's powers are ripening toward, let us say, Judy Garland's supreme expressiveness and acute responsiveness to a live audience in her marathon 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall.
Now that she has taken up residence in England, Madonna should beware of the unhappy precedent of Diana, who also became addicted to the flash of paparazzi cameras. As a major contemporary composer, Madonna should not let the eye dictate to the ear. She has treated the dance idiom cavalierly on "Confessions." Few of its songs are as distinctive or poetic as any number of dance hits of recent years -- Amber's "Sexual," Deborah Cox's "Mr. Lonely," Sunshine Anderson's "Easy" (Groove Armada), Aubrey's "Stand Still," Billy Ray Martin's "Systems of Silence" (the remix), Motorcycle's "As the Rush Comes," Ciara and Ludacris' "Oh," or even Annie's "Heartbeat" (by a Norwegian woman DJ).
And when we replay the truly great classics of the high disco era, "Confessions on a Dance Floor" fades fast. Try Jackie Moore's "This Time, Baby," Sylvester's "Stars," Donna Summer's "Queen for a Day," E.G. Daily's "Love in the Shadows," Stephanie Mills' "Pilot Error," or Chaka Khan's phenomenal "Ain't Nobody" -- which I would argue is an art song that bears comparison to Schubert's famous "Serenade." Specially for Salon readers, I have gone through my vinyl collection to create a master list of my personal all-time favorite disco songs, leading up to the rise of Madonna. This is Madonna's artistic genealogy -- a vibrant tradition that deserves more attention and respect.
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