The Rebirth of Madonna

A couple weeks before delivering her second baby Rocco, Madonna found herself in a "pre-partum" depression: "I get to the end of my day sometimes, and I think, 'OK, I'm pregnant. I'm fat. I can't exercise. I can't wear cool clothes. I don't feel like dancing. And there's absolutely nothing remotely cool or cutting-edge about me right now. I've become a domesticated cow. Sometimes I burst into tears just thinking about it.'"

Some of us fear heights. Some of us fear death. But do any of us fear being uncool? That incessant dread of suddenly being dismissed as irrelevant, that haunting possibility of becoming "domesticated" drives Madonna to be so desperately ambitious, impossibly brilliant and acutely self-aware. Madonna knows the impact of her own revolutionary spirit--the world has become incredibly small to her, if you think about it--and that has brought her both gargantuan fame and the stigma of arrogance. There is no question that Madonna has developed into somewhat of a pretentious personality. She clings to a smarmy British accent, bashes Britney Spears and the other teen pop stars even though her early music was just as packaged and diluted, complains about the "sucky" scripts being sent to her even though she can't act her way out of a paper bag, and even carps about the nudity in the British tabloids--this from the woman who posed lasciviously with animals in Sex!

But accusing Madonna of hypocrisy is not only futile, but nave. She is evolution. She exists on the momentum of contradictions, on the trajectory of postmodern appropriation. Always on the lookout for new material, Madonna is an artistic migrant--she moves from subject to subject, from body to body, to claim (or reclaim) a plot of the cultural landscape. Whether it's S&M, Indian yoga, geisha fashion, or now ruby slippers and cowboy gear, Madonna inhabits each new specter so effortlessly and completely that we have to believe her. Sure, she can't act onscreen but the reason is so painfully obvious: Madonna's entire career relies on our ability to accept each of her new incarnations as genuine. Not only is she baffled by how to differentiate her acting onscreen from her public posturing, but how can we accept the "constructed" persona for two hours on a movie screen when we entrust our society's "coolness," all our most valuable fads and fashions, to the "real" Madonna?

Somewhere in all of this postmodern muddle lies the reason that Madonna is, in fact, still relevant. The music. Now pay attention to this next sentence, because it's a bold statement, but it's absolutely indisputable. No other artist in music history has taken as many risks as Madonna, as many unnecessary risks simply for the sake of art. Sure, you can point to someone like Bjork or musicians on the fringe, but Madonna's case is singular. She never needed to change, she never needed to evolve. Every Mariah Carey record is the same. Every Whitney Houston record is the same. Every Britney Spears record will be the same. But Madonna cannot stand repetition. Repetition is boring, repetition engenders complacency, complacency ensures the rule of "kiddie pop" and bands like 98 Degrees. Madonna abhors these bubblegum pop queens simply because she hates their laziness and their casual desecration of all the values she's held sacred in her musical career--after all, Britney and Christina Aguilera say that Madonna "inspired" them. But to Madonna, inspiration equals risk. Every new record will not only sound completely different from everything you've produced before, but from anything and everything languishing in the current musical landscape.

The title track of Music didn't really inspire much of a frenzy when it first hit Napster and the radio air waves. If I recall correctly, nobody particularly liked it. The kids of Total Request Live never voted for it, it wasn't on heavy radio rotation, it wasn't cracking the Billboard charts. I heard it for the first time in July, thought it sounded like bad Venga Boys and forgot all about it. Well, tried to at least. The opening beats of the song--the duh duh thwack duh duh thwack--just lodged in my brain and I couldn't shake them. Well, apparently, neither could anybody else. With each successive listen, people suddenly caught onto Music and its giddy chorus about the "bourgeoisie" and the "rebel" and almost two months after it first hit airwaves, it rocketed to number one on the Billboard charts. And it won't come down. And why should it? Every time you listen to it, it's discovery squared.

Thankfully, there's more Music. Listen to the CD once and you'll be intrigued--confused , but intrigued. Listen to it again, you'll start to hear the beats. A third time and it's over. You're hooked.

Madonna collaborates with French electronic producer Mirwais on the new record--and he's much edgier than William Orbit, her Ray of Light producer, who's more commercial, more wedded to the harmonious melding of synthesizer and voice. Mirwais isn't a big believer in coherence--he wants sounds you've never heard before, Music with a capital M. But it's not completely unfamiliar. Listen and you'll hear the cool, chilly beats of Erotica, mixed with the warm melodies of Bedtime Stories, tinged with the gurgles and blips of Ray of Light; all stirred together into a rich, layered cocktail of such electronic bliss that it's positively space age. If they're listening to anything on Mars, it's got to be something like this.

My favorite song on the CD is Impressive Instant simply because it's the most explosive dance track Madonna has ever produced. Remember that giddy scream at the end of "Ray of Light"? "Instant" is four minutes of that kind of energy--a cosmic frenzy that interweaves melodies and distorts Madonna's voice so unrecognizably that the song seems to fracture in four at one point. If "Impressive Instant" could be written out on a page as poetry, it would look something like this:

Cosmic systems intertwine (kiss me) I like to singy singy singy

Astral bodies drip like wiine (kiss me) (I'm in a trance) like a bird on a

All of nature ebbs and flows (Spinning) (I'm in a trance) I like to rhumba, rhumba, rhumba,

Let's do a samba samba samba

Perhaps that's why Madonna didn't include the lyrics in the CD book this time.

"Impressive Instant" will get even the stodgiest of boys on the dance floor and "Runaway Lover" takes the momentum and spins another crisp (if slightly repetitive) club tune. William Orbit returns to contribute "Amazing," an even more souped up variation on the melody of "Beautiful Stranger."

There's also a lot of electronica ballads on the CD--and it's in the context of these ballads that Madonna has made the most progress. Her weakness has traditionally been shallow lyrics; regardless of what emotions she tries to conjure, Madonna always comes off as slightly pretentious, coolly arrogant, and almost never genuine or warm. But Mirwais solves this problem by eliminating the electric contortions on these slower tracks and leaving Madonna's voice naked and credible against the synthesizers.

Another song I can't seem to shake is the number eight track, "What It Feels Like for a Girl," which comes off as a lyrical counterpoint to Christina Aguilera's "What a Girl Wants." In the latter, of course, the blond teen queen sings of boys who can please their girls by "knowing exactly" what they want. Madonna doesn't sympathize: "Good little girls they never show it / When you open up your mouth to speak / Could you be a little weak? / Do you know what it feels like for a girl?

Who knows where Madonna goes from here? Who cares? She's been so successful, so consistent, so spectacular with her risk-taking that we never have to doubt the quality or the thought put into each one of her ventures. Critics, of course, have made a career out of predicting her doomsday. And she's made a career out of proving them wrong.

I, of course, merely ask the naysayers, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"