Madonna

After seeing the concert last night, now seems a good time to comment on Camille Paglia's essay from last December, 'Dancing As Fast As She Can,' about Madonna's new album 'Confessions On The Dance Floor.' I agree with much that Paglia wrote, but at the end, disapprove of Paglia's censoriousness. Nevertheless, I think Paglia might agree with me is that, in a way, Madonna is playing it safe. Even though Madonna can see that dance music needs a rejuvenation, she needs to get more creative in order to be that revolutionary agent.

It appears clear that Madonna will leave her mark as a pop singer and dancer, and not, as she evidently hoped, as a film actress. Madonna is too self-willed and emotionally-armored to be a very good actress, except when playing others of her type (e.g., Evita). Her shrewd examination of pop culture shows that dance culture is most in need of a revival, and, having succeeded before there, she could well succeed again. But she's not going far enough.

Camille Paglia delves into Madonna's current album and her past:

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. ... 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).

As an example of not going far enough, Madonna's appropriated ABBA's work for 'Hung Up.' The first instant I ever heard the song, my very first reaction, even before I knew it was Madonna, was 'damn, this must be a major artist, because who else could afford the rights to this song?' That should NEVER be one's first emotional reaction to a path-breaking song! Outrank anger is a better reaction than cynicism towards a new song - at least anger is honest, and indeed, is usually the first indication that something new has entered the world. Indeed, I remember how, when 'Lucky Star' and 'Borderline' were first heard on the airwaves in the early 80's, how I agreed for a short time with my college roommate that Madonna was terrible, and we should shun her. After a while, I realized my error, and that my anger was anger towards the new (anger towards the new that many expressed again in 1997 and 1998 when Britney Spears was first becoming popular).

Apparently Paglia agrees, at least about the part regarding the ABBA ripoff:

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.

Indeed, Paglia feels the album is badly-made:

I was shocked at how the reviews had failed to note its tinny shrillness, sonic cliches, 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.

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.

I haven't heard the album fully myself, and a concert is usually a bad place to do so, given the arena echo that muddies even the best work. [Update: Having listened now to the album, I disagree with Paglia about the disco segues. Seamless segues are part-and-parcel of modern discotheque music, but not on orginal albums, when discrete breaks between songs are usually desirable.]

I did like that Madona is beginning to incorporate Yemenite rhythms into her work. Yemeni music distills the very soul and essence of excellent dance music:

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."

Paglia is willing to give Madonna a break:

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?).

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.

Then Paglia takes the break away, and even becomes insulting:

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.

Madonna's seemingly-belligerent refusal to care what people think of her is overdone in a number of songs: 'the lady doth protest too much.' She is quite worried, I believe, about her reputation. Paglia gets cruel here. I know what Madonna would say. Hell, Paglia knows what Madonna would say (lyrics from 'Like It Or Not' which is on her new album):

You can call me a sinner
But you can’t call me a saint
Celebrate me for who I am
Dislike me for what I ain’t
Put me up on a pedestal
Or drag me down in the dirt
Sticks and stones will break my bones
But your names will never hurt

I’ll be the garden, you’ll be the snake
All of my fruit is yours to take
Better the devil that you know
Your love for me will grow
Because

This is who I am
You can like it or not
You can love me or leave me
Cause I’m never gonna stop, no no

Cleopatra had her way
Matahari too
Whether they were good or bad
Is strictly up to you

Life is a paradox
And it doesn’t make much sense
You can't have the femme without the fatale
Please don’t take offense

Don’t let the fruit rot under the vine
Fill up your cup and let’s drink the wine
Better the devil that you know
Your love for me will grow
Because

This is who I am
You can like it or not
You can love me or leave me
Cause I’m never gonna stop, no no, you know
This is who I am
You can like it or not
You can love me or leave me
Cause I’m never gonna stop, no no, you know

No no, you know
No no, you know
No no, you know
No no, you know

I’ll be the garden, you’ll be the snake
All of my fruit is yours to take
Better the devil that you know
Your love for me will grow
Because

This is who I am
You can like it or not
You can love me or leave me
Cause I’m never gonna stop, no no, you know
This is who I am
You can like it or not
You can love me or leave me
Cause I’m never gonna stop, no no, you know

No no, you know
No no, you know
No no, you know
No no, you know

I'm more lenient than Paglia. Madonna has done amazing things, and she might still do amazing things. At the end of last night's concert, the chorus line from 'Hung Up' echoed over and over, and whatever Kabbalah might involve, this is Madonna's true mantra:

Time goes by, so slowly
Time goes by, so slowly
Time goes by, so slowly
Time goes by, so slowly

So slowly...

There's still plenty of time!