Fluxblog 381: all Madonna edition
I wrote about six Madonna classics including "Like A Prayer" and "Borderline"
I decided to switch things up this week and write a series of posts about Madonna, with an emphasis on the emotional content of her work. I really love writing about Madonna, she’s endlessly fascinating to me and there’s so much to chew on in her work beyond the aspects of it people are more likely to write about. If you like these posts, I suggest checking these old entries about “Crazy for You” and “Express Yourself.” They’re two of my all-time favorite posts.
Before we get into the posts I’d just like to call attention to the fact that you can support Fluxblog through a monthly Patreon subscription or with a one-time donation on Ko-Fi. I don’t bring this up too often here because I’m Gen X cusp enough to feel weird about it but I greatly appreciate this kind of support as I do an enormous amount of work on the blog posts, the playlists, the podcast, and everything else connected to Fluxblog every week and this is the only way I monetize any of it. Maybe I should mention I’m between jobs now too? Maybe I should also mention it’s my birthday as I write this to you? Anyway…. it’s Madonna time.
Say Your Lines, But Do You Feel Them?
Madonna “Take A Bow”
Madonna has been a pop star for four decades and at every point in her history it has been common for people to casually dismiss her vocals on the basis that she does not possess a powerful big belter voice rooted in either rock power balladry or R&B/gospel music. It’s always a very smug take and comes from people who are too self-satisfied to consider for a moment that it’s like saying that Whitney Houston sucks because she couldn’t do a good John Lydon sneer or that Dolly Parton is a weak vocalist because she can’t rap as well as anyone in the Wu-Tang Clan. Madonna’s music may frequently draw upon disco and R&B influences but she never presented herself as a run-happy diva. Her comfort zone has always been an intriguing middle ground between spunky new wave rock and musical theater, two very different styles that nevertheless share an emphasis on melody, clarity, and attitude.
And when I say “musical theater,” for the most part I mean the kind that come from Hollywood, not Broadway. Madonna is a cinephile to her core and her love of the movies has guided her music as well as her visual presentation, most often in her taste for wistful melodramatic balladry well suited to the big screen. “Take A Bow” is her greatest song in this mode, and so innately theatrical in its swelling strings and grand yearning that Madonna went and made the lyrics about a failed love affair between two actors.
Co-written with Babyface at his mid-90s pinnacle, “Take A Bow” may be the most elegantly composed track in the entire Madonna discography. The song highlights two of Babyface’s greatest skills as a songwriter – he’s great at making his harmonic sophistication seem totally natural and unfussy, and in writing songs that burn with intense passion but maintain a cool composure. When Babyface worked with R&B singers like Boyz II Men or Toni Braxton that usually worked as a contrast with their big hot voices, but with Madonna it only emphasizes the cinematic quality of the song in the sense that screen actors are meant to perform with small gestures intended for the camera, whereas a stage actor has to err on the side of bigger, bolder decisions that play to a live audience. Madonna inhabits “Take A Bow” like a screen actor; she hits her marks for the melodramatic peak of the bridge but the most devastating moments are in the quieter, more nuances lines.
“Take A Bow” is a song that absolutely luxuriates in sadness, and invites you to join it as though it’s some kind of elaborate gala of loneliness and misery. But of course it is! This is a song sung from the perspective of an actor, and a song that’s essentially a tribute to the grandiose melancholy of classic Hollywood. Madonna lifts her central metaphor from Shakespeare (“all the world’s a stage”) but playing roles and living out a performance in this context is more tragic than pithy. She’s singing as someone who felt something earnest and true – “I’ve always been in love with you…” – and is finding out it’s always just been playing out a script, stock roles in a clichéd plot. Above all else, she’s disappointed to find out that she hasn’t been living out the movie she had in mind.
Just Try To Understand
Madonna “Borderline”
“Borderline” was written by Reggie Lucas, a guitarist who’d played with Billy Paul, Miles Davis, and Roberta Flack through the 1970s before shifting over to songwriting and production for Warner Bros in the early 80s. Most of Madonna’s early collaborators, like Jellybean Benitez and Stephen Bray, were people from her social circles, but Lucas was selected to work on her debut record in a work-for-hire capacity. He was basically a steady professional brought in to work with a green talent, and while he provided excellent raw material as a songwriter his aesthetics didn’t quite match up with what the fashion-forward Madonna was looking for, and so Benitez reworked several of the song including “Borderline” after he left the project. A messy situation, but one that worked out very well in that “Borderline” could have the musical sophistication of a composer steeped in jazz and R&B as well as the synth-heavy strut of early ‘80s NYC club music.
Like a lot of synthpop and freestyle classics, the keyboard-heavy surface gloss of “Borderline” somewhat obscures a composition firmly rooted in Motown song structures. As far as I can tell from what I’ve read, “Borderline” was not written specifically for Madonna, but was rather just a song Lucas was working on at the time he was tapped for the project. She took an immediate liking to the song – how could anyone with a pop instinct and good taste not? – and essentially worked with Lucas to tailor the song to her strengths. To run with this metaphor, Lucas’ fit was a little baggy and he insisted on a few too many accessories, and Benitez styled it to make it work. Madonna’s role was essentially similar to that of an actor – she inhabits the character written by Lucas and makes it all feel urgent and real.
Madonna has a bunch of songs about unrequited or thwarted love, but the perspective of “Borderline” doesn’t feel like one that would naturally be hers. If anything the lyrics come across like someone singing about someone like her at the time, a fascinating force of nature burning through the affections of a lot of different people who want more from her than she had time to give. But that’s conjecture, and the raw sentiment of Lucas’ lyrics would be relatable to most anyone with some dating experience or even if they’ve ever felt powerless to a crush. The lyrics are very plainly written but one thing I really like about them is how the protagonist can’t really articulate why they’re so attracted to and enthralled by this other person, it’s just this mysterious gravitational pull. The lyrics plead with the other person to take control of this, to either commit to the situation or cut her loose as an act of mercy, but she’s mistaken. She’s the one whose fixation has made this an unbreakable trap, and she’s the only one who can free herself from it.
But the prisons we make for ourselves are always so cozy, aren’t they? “Borderline” feels bright and loose, and its many keyboard hooks move with an elegance that doesn’t sound remotely oppressive. It’s not a “luxuriate in sadness” song like “Take A Bow,” it’s more like existing in a very lovely limbo that’s pleasant enough until you realize you’re stuck there. She’s just trying to talk her way out of it, the song is basically a negotiation. And as such, it’s not exactly an accident that the song’s most indelible vocal hook is “just try to understand, I’ve given all I can.”
Some Things Cannot Be Bought
Madonna “Drowned World / Substitute for Love”
What do you do when you pour every bit of your life into seeking fame, fortune, artistic achievement, romantic possibilities, and you get all of it but still feel like something essential is missing? “Drowned World/Substitute for Love” is a song about course correcting from this point, of attempting to reorient one’s desires towards deeper connections – family, faith, intimacy, placing an emphasis on giving love over receiving it. This could easily be a song about renouncing one way of being to embrace another path, but it’s more complicated and interesting than that. She openly acknowledges the excitement and pleasures she’s experienced and how much happiness she can feel in the spotlight. She’s not a person who is telling you all of that was totally empty and worthless, she’s telling you she wants all of that and something more. This is a woman who 20 years from writing this song would write another in which she sings the words “finally, enough love” with a bit of a wink to the audience. There is never enough love for Madonna.
“Drowned World/Substitute for Love” was composed with William Orbit, a British musician who by this point in his career had established himself as a sort of musical shape-shifter fluent in various strains of dance music, ambient compositions, and electronic-adjacent folk rock in his production work with Beth Orton and Caroline Lavelle. Those two records in retrospect seem like a dry run for what he did with Madonna on Ray of Light, particularly on this song which despite its atmospheric and extremely late 90s arrangement is an acoustic ballad at its core.
Madonna would perform the song as such 8 years later on her Confessions tour, but while that version is quite lovely it simply doesn’t match the drama of Orbit’s arrangement. The album version moves through moments of zoned-out calm, gentle sentimentality, and pangs of regret before arriving at a more emphatic feelings of rejecting loneliness, redefining desires, reclaiming the self, and finally accepting some measure of peace. It’s an emotional journey that sets the stage for the rest of the Ray of Light record, in which she can digger deeper into some of the themes or simply express joy in connecting with something bigger than herself, or at least in finding some new facet of her identity.
Just Something That We Do
Madonna “Don’t Tell Me”
“Don’t Tell Me” is the result of three waves of creativity from wildly different perspectives – an initial burst of inspiration in Joe Henry’s original demo recording, Madonna applying her pop instincts to refine that into a tighter and more immediately potent tune, and French electronic producer Mirwais pushing the arrangement far beyond a singer-songwriter milieu to create an odd hybrid of spliced-up guitar and jittery beats that still sounds fresh and futuristic 22 years after its release. The songwriting is strong enough that the song works well in any presentation – Madonna playing it as a fully acoustic ballad, Henry’s own recording of the song as tango by way of Tom Waits – but the studio recording stands out as something special because it triangulates these aesthetics so seamlessly into a song that sounds both timeless in its structure and sentiment and novel in its textures and rhythms.
The lyrics, mostly written by Henry, are about someone trying to negotiate their way through a relationship that feels fraught with tensions around boundaries and limitations. It’s easy to see why the notoriously strong-willed Madonna resonated with what Henry wrote here – so much of this song is basically saying “you can’t control me, you can’t reshape me” while also presenting a vulnerability and willingness to meet them halfway out of true affection and respect. It’s a very adult and grounded love song, but it’s not at all cynical. The most powerful bit of the song – “don’t tell me love isn’t true, it’s just something that we do” – fully rejects this pessimistic and unromantic thought. Joe Henry’s version of the song plays those lyrics very casually but Madonna makes it a major hook and focus point of “Don’t Tell Me,” with Mirwais essentially moving other sounds out of the way to put a musical spotlight on the line. Her voice, presented plainly in the recording and mix, sounds weary in this moment. She’s not angry enough to project a “how dare you feel that way” feeling, but she does sound like someone who is losing her patience with trying to argue against a cold and pragmatic notion of love.
Life Is A Mystery
Madonna “Like A Prayer”
A lot of art about growing up Catholic tends to be about related trauma or being indoctrinated into a culture of guilt so young that it becomes unshakeable whether you stick with the Church or not. You can find some of that in the subtext of “Like A Prayer” but the lyrical focus of the song is more on how aspects of Catholicism can imprint on you in a way that leads to interpreting all kinds of heavy emotional experiences through its profound iconography and mysticism. You can take the song to be a love song to a man or a love song to God, I hear both at the same time. She transubstantiates this man through her lust, she’s experiencing communion through sex. She’s allowing herself to feel everything on a deeper and more profound level by exalting him and submitting to his will. To paraphrase another brilliant pop provocateur a few years down the line – her whole existence is flawed but he brings her closer to God.
Madonna wrote “Like A Prayer” with Patrick Leonard, one of her all-time best collaborators. Leonard, a jazz and prog guy when left to his own devices, came to work with Madonna on a work-for-hire songwriter. They were a bit of an odd couple but had an incredible chemistry as a songwriting duo, their respective tastes and tendencies resulting in very accessible but subtly sophisticated songwriting. Leonard’s taste for interesting chords and complex harmony made songs like “Live to Tell,” “La Isla Bonita,” and “Cherish” sound totally unlike anything else on the radio at the time, and even if people weren’t consciously registering the elegance of his compositions people could intuit a certain prestige in this music which indicated that Madonna was a cut above her direct competition.
The structural genius of “Like A Prayer” is that it moves between verses rooted in the dour musicality of Catholic psalms and choruses in the tradition of ecstatic Black gospel music, both parts rendered with the rich tones of jazz chords. The melding of two very different approaches to Christian church music makes the song wildly dynamic and thematically dense, opening up discourse on the differences between these expressions of faith while allowing Madonna to indulge in the best of both worlds. The Catholic parts of the song are full of loneliness and melancholic longing, the gospel parts emphasize joy and connection with others. It’s a continuum of feeling, a personal emotional and intellectual journey leading to a collective catharsis.
A Man Can Tell A Thousand Lies
Madonna “Live to Tell”
I was a child in the 1980s and as I gradually came to understand pop music through the radio Madonna was like a fact of life, a pillar of existence, a figure whose domination was respected but not questioned. It’s funny to think of this now, as by the time I would have this awareness Madonna would only have been around for at most three or four years. But I was a kid without a sense of chronology, and my memory of this is so blurry that I can as an adult be totally surprised to learn that “Live to Tell” was the first single from True Blue in 1986.
This was a crazy gamble at the time and you can hear the song’s composer Patrick Leonard get into that in this interview – sure, “Crazy for You” was a big hit, but at this time Madonna was known for her danceable smashes like “Into the Groove,” “Material Girl,” and “Like A Virgin.” But it wasn’t just that “Live to Tell” was a ballad, it was a very harmonically ambitious one with a peculiar structure. Leonard originally wrote the music to be an instrumental for a soundtrack and that certainly accounts for its atmosphere and busy melodies that don’t quite necessitate a vocal lead. Madonna wrote a vocal melody and lyrics as a favor to Leonard and it was immediately clear that they’d made something quite special. Something so special Madonna would lobby for it to open her comeback campaign and get her way. (It all worked out well, as the song is incredible and Madonna was an unquestioned dominating presence in pop.)
“Live to Tell” really got to me as a kid. It’s a song I clearly remember bumming me out in the backseat of my mom’s car, Leonard’s dramatic keyboard harmonies evoking some grand cosmic sadness I couldn’t imagine but could feel. Madonna sings the song with a solemnity that made lines like “a man can tell a thousand lies” and “hope I live to tell the secret I have learned, til then it will burn inside of me” register as the most important things ever sung. These secrets and lies, these intense vows! There’s no context to any of this, no implication of what the secret could be but that only makes the song seem darker. Why would you hold on to something and feel this deeply about it unless it would cause chaos and destruction? It’s specific enough to be a recognizable drama but vague enough to fit it into whatever story you need it to be, and I suspect for a lot of people it gets very bleak and traumatic.
