I didn't want to like Madonna's new record Hard Candy. As a rule of being a rock snob, I avoid all association with Justin Timberlake. “What-what” and “uh-uh”s are never things I like singing along to.
“Damn that Justin Timberlake,” I protested, fists waving in the air. “How old is he? And why does he get to work with Madonna?? His songs are just Michael Jackson rip offs anyway. Am I just jealous, or is he really lame? I can't wait until he gets fat.”
“Oh, relax. Within two months you'll be saying, 'but you know the way they do that particular drum beat in that one part of that one song is pretty cool.'” My sweetheart knows my ability argue my way into liking anything I want to like all too well.
Despite the well-drawn facades I keep up about being a rock and roller, and a deep academically minded thinker about music, the truth is, when Madonna came popping out of a cake wearing a wedding dress and began to roll around on the floor at the inaugural MTV Awards in way back in 1984, it enraptured me in such a way that I still find myself reeling from its spell.
Since about the age of 13, however, pop music has rarely been able to hold my interest. And so, my unyielding commitment to Madonna is the glaring anomaly in my otherwise peaked interest in grungy guitars and mosh pits. But I make a lot of grand claims about how she's really quite punk-rock with her no-nonsense attitude, and so can easily make the logical jump from screamy indie-rockers who want to take the man down, to Madonna, who wants to be the man.
But people's tastes in music are probably no psychologically different than sexual fetishes. Music that fits a psychologically satisfying set of standards to the personality, a certain place or time, are bound to have an effect akin to how your body and brain make connections to arousal and esteem. I make allowances for Madonna's music because I want to. It's deeply satisfying to hear her voice, it is comforting and almost womb-like.
One day while having the song “Candy Shop” from the new record stuck in my head, I realized I was really into the way the chorus has a call-and-response structure, where each line has a chance to repeat, “I'll be your one stop (one stop) / Candy shop (candy shop)”. It was a good gimmick to have in a song, and made the choruses kind of special, something to look forward to. It reminded me of the way there is a lot of space in the verses of Pink Floyd's “Us and Them” giving each line an extended echo, “Us...us...us...us...us and them...them...them...them...” I wondered if any of my songs had that kind of architecture. I don’t think so, but I’m sure it’ll be in the back of my mind when playing with new riffs. And Ben was totally right, I dismissed my dismissal of the song based on some random beat structure I happened to like.
I'm also already addicted to the way she sounds live singing “My sugar is raw!” just from having searched on You Tube for videos from her recent promotional gigs celebrating the new album's release. It reminds me of how her voice feels when it vibrates through an arena and strikes your body, completely captivating you.
“My sugar is raw!” she screams out over the music, her live voice definable over the pre-recorded one she typically sings on top of. It's like, she's really there. She's really on stage dancing her little heart out and trying to keep up with the singing. It's like the first time I ever saw her on that MTV awards stage, chubby thighs exposed, yelling “can you feel my heart beat...” slamming her lace covered palms against the mic twice in a row. She's alive and actively trying to expose some part of herself, and not just a studio gimmick or media headline. She's really THERE.
“She can't even sing!” My mom always hated the way Madonna sang, but I never quite understood why. In light of everything she seemed to stand for, her actual singing ability was immaterial. What I was responding to was the freedom in the spirit she presented; the unapologetic attitude she carried in light of her singing abilities. That has always been the point, and I've never seen her waiver from that.
Her voice has become so distinctive to me, it's hard to imagine a world without having ever heard it. I get that she may not have the prettiest singing voice, but there are qualities in it that I might compare to fine wines, flavors that I swill around and let percolate through every sense while radiating throughout my body. She is like a rare bird perched out on a limb. I just want to bask in the glory of her song and beautiful presence. I want to hear it and feel it blanket all over me.
In many ways, I have two mommies.
I know my real mom would cringe to hear this. But in the category of strong women who you've been listening to all your life who you love unconditionally, both my mom and Madonna fit the bill.
Dare I say it, but sometimes I feel like she's singing just to me. The familiarity of her husky yet sweet croon feels like a hot tea warming the body. I don't even recognize that cone braziers and disco-ball-crucifixes as controversial or odd, but just like, “well, how else would she get her point across?” When I see her image all over magazines and TV and product, it's not like “Oh wow, let me buy this!”, instead, it's more like traffic lights at intersections... “ah yes, this is where I'm supposed to be, all is safe in the world, Madonna is here.”
Now, on the other hand, my mom is flesh and bone, she is alive and I can call her up and talk to her. She'll send me money when I need it, and throw herself in front of a speeding train to save me. She set the stage on which I dance. My gratitude for that doesn't literally extend to someone I've never met and only know about through mass media. As much as I sometimes like to wish I could be Rocco (Madonna's eight year old son), I like to think I have a handle on where reality ends and fantasy begins.
And in the fantasy of life, there is an incredible parallel between the way my mom has lived her life in front of me, and the way Madonna has expressed herself through her career, which has been about the span of my whole life. Every time my mom has been there to say “Don't worry about what anybody else says, do what's in your heart,” Madonna has been there with “This is who I am, you can like it or not.”
So it makes sense to me that her voice, image, face, ability to put out records and put on shows is just as endearing to me as my mom's quest to keep journeying from the inside out.
But perhaps my mom felt Madonna's presence in my universe as competition. There was the time she “accidentally” left my Like A Virgin record in the trunk of the car along side the sandy beach towels. The record came loose from the sleeve and scratched itself to an unplayable condition. But I did force my parents to rent “The Virgin Tour '84” on VHS every time we'd go to the video store. I eventually memorized the entire concert, a feat I would later transfer to the art of bootleg collecting.
Or perhaps she saw the rough road a queeny Madonna-boy would have in the red-neck country of our family, and hoped I would find milder interests to grow as fond of. When Madonna had an HBO broadcast of her “Blonde Ambition” show in 1990, my mom and I sat together and watched the whole thing even though she never liked the way Madonna gyrated her body or haphazardly sung along to her tunes. During the portion of the show where gay men massaged their golden-cone braziers while Madonna fained masturbation on a bed, my dad was outside smoking cigarettes probably thinking of the fifty dollars he spent on getting a cable box and subscribing to HBO for a month and “oh my god my son is a homosexual!”
And that is the part of having Madonna in such an auspicious place in your life that accounts for my total dumping of her in my teenage years. High school was a chance to be cool. The “alternative” market hit at the exact same time I hit high school, which meant there was an opportunity to, among pecking orders, still be on the fringe and be totally acceptable. But at this stage, Madonna was that anti-fringe, and so Bjork was there to fill her place. In fact, in 1995, Bjork wrote the title track to Madonna's Bedtime Stories album.
Grunge rock for a budding homosexual teenager meant that I learned a lot about transmuting isolation into a loud ruckus, and learned a lot about art aesthetic. Suddenly I realized that an album was something you could listen to from start to finish, where the songs were all written by the people who performed them. This was a novel approach, and pretty much left everything in my Madonna collection unlistenable. For years, I listened only from afar, and pretended I wasn't paying attention, I was too cool to still like “Lucky Star” for heaven's sake. The Madonna denial years lasted well into the new millennium, as grunge rockers found indie rock, which was even more removed from anything mainstream.
Indie-rock never quite settled in well with me, with its highly self conscious and stylized approach to irony, it always seemed more like a club for the witty, rather than a way to fully express yourself unapologetically. And so, the search for music which did speak to that sense of just being who you are and celebrating that to its nth degree began. Who was out there touting that your own search for freedom and independence is the only one that matters? Who raises a storm for fierce personal expression? Who says “Music makes the people come together, yeah” ?
I am willing to bet there are plenty of artists out there who fit that description. But only one of them started singing their little song to me when I was four by popping out of a cake asking “Will you marry me?”
Like the adult child coming back to his parents after the teenage rebellion, I realized Madonna had been there all the time, keeping the house warm, filling it with children and still doing all the things that made it possible for me to have all these conclusions to begin with. None of my grunge rock pals were doing that. Only Madonna was still hitting me over the head with “turn to stone, lose my faith, I'll be gone before that happens.”
But is it art? How do I allow myself access to Madonna now that I see albums as works of art, and not hit makers plus filler? How do I stand behind the most mainstream of successes and hold tight to my independent ideals?
When being presented with Hard Candy, it might appear that none of those things could be possible. By choosing to work with the most mainstream and popular producers of the day, rather than continuing her previous trends of working with modestly underground DJs, it would appear that the drive behind the album was sure-fire hits. And with multi-multi million dollar deals presenting themselves to basically sell her name off to the highest bidder, it would appear desperation and guaranteed mainstream success are the true motives behind such cash crops.
So how do I frame it? How do I accept that I want to like “Come on into my store, I've got candy galore,” when under no circumstances would I like that coming from any one else.
I frame it by saying that if I were a Rolling Stone reviewer, I would give the album the coveted and rarely given accolade of five out of five stars, and say it is the most vigorously self-expressive piece of art she has put out, and fully presents the idea of Madonna as she has drawn it. She never second-guesses herself, and never shies from attacking exactly what she wants, and what she wants is what's excitement to her, not stopping to prove herself to anybody.
If you consider Norma Jean the artist of Marylin Monroe, where Marylin Monroe is a symbol that will never die, an icon of a century, an image that enraptured many people on a world-wide scale, then you can appreciate how brilliant the whole production was. She was able to live on as an image, despite the fact the artist had perished. Madonna has been making that her craft from the beginning, and has even fully copied Monroe's image on more than a few occasions.
Over the course of her career, and having children, she's learned that one doesn't have to burn out the way Norma Jean did in order to keep their image intact. In fact, over the course of her last several records, she has gone on to prove that the only person who can satisfy the shoes of her image, is herself.
Her song “Nobody Knows Me” on American Life adequately describes that process, “It's no good when you're misunderstood / so why should I care what the world thinks of me / won't let a stranger give me a social disease.” Norma Jean did not have that presence of mind. She had barbiturates instead.
Nothing of Hard Candy's facade comes off as inauthentic from this perspective. It is as if Madonna has drawn her most perfect vision of herself and created a record that exhibits exactly that.
When Billy Corgan gets pressed on the question “Why would you put forty guitar tracks on a song?” (as is the myth for some of the songs on the landmark record Siamese Dream.), he says, “well, if you have a vision, why not make the product the most perfect version of that vision possible?”
And so I can excuse the bubble gum choice of producers, because clearly, she wants to make the most perfect version of her vision possible, and her vision is to do what makes her feel the best and the freest. There's nothing on Hard Candy that comes off as “this is Madonna doing something she's not into.”
I extend the same kind of acceptance to Bjork in this respect. Honestly, I haven't enjoyed a Bjork album as thoroughly as 1995's Post since its release, and I would love to see her put something out that rivaled its sweetness and song-writing tenacity. But it's hard to put down her recent records because they are so full of herself, and that is what I found myself falling in love with on Post. You can tell that every sound in her sonic experiments are ones that she wants to hear. They create a bubble in which she is allowed to interact with the outside world. It is a gorgeous gift to be given, and I savor all of them, even if they're not exactly my tastes. Through it all, she never stops yelling out “Declare independence, don't let them do that to you!”
Hard Candy is exactly like this. While it's not the way I would have engineered a record for her, it is so clearly full of what she wants, you can't deny that as being a fully integrated piece of art. Luckily I found the Justin Timberlake songs to be completely unlistenable, which is fine and doesn't take away from the strength of the album. The fact is, you never hear Madonna lose her sense of intuition while singing them, even if I personally don't care to ever hear them again.
This left the songs produced by Pharell, which I found myself coming back to over and over.
I had never heard of this person before listening to this record, and already his writing and production style are very evident. It's easy to pick out which songs he wrote, as they are the ones that seem to dive off into their own club-remixes half way through the song. Both “Incredible” and “She's Not Me,” strike out into three different songs not unlike Queen's “Bohemian Rhapsody.” His lyrical rhymes are more complex than what we're used to from Madonna's style of consistently shifting rhyme schemes. In “Heartbeat” she rhymes “for me it's just usual” with “makes me feel beautiful” across two different verses separated by a chorus, much too forward thinking for Madonna's typical style of prose.
Her mid-western roots do shine through when she awkwardly churns out “You always have the biggest heart, when we're six-thousand miles apart.” The hard “ar” in her voice gives her away as not being a London lady at all. In fact the whole record sounds like “so a girl from Detroit walks into a club...”.
That's the quality in her voice I find so endearing. So much of her music is penned with awkward rhymes and even more awkward ways of pronouncing words to try to make the rhymes work. The song “American Life,” from the album of the same name, for instance, has the chorus “American life / I live the American dream / you are the best thing I've seen / you are not just a dream.”
In it she tries to stuff three words, “I live the,” into one syllable, and never bothers to rhyme “life” with anything, even though she uses the word “dream” to rhyme with itself.
That quality is still present in Hard Candy, making it even more endearing to me. For as strong as her self image is, with nearly every song being some kind of declaration of “I can do anything I set my mind to,” and “don't you wish you were me,” there is still room to be as silly as “Mucho gusto means, I'm welcome to you!” from the song literally titled “Spanish Lesson.” And if you're looking for “classic” Madonna on the new record, “Spanish Lesson” does come the closest, complete with awkward rhyming schemes and a sweet “Can you hear me call your name” chorus that hits melodies recalling “Like A Prayer,” which itself had lines about “when you call my name...”
The completeness of her self image on record also has very visible connections to her PR campaigns, which only serve to keep Madonna's name in the press and in our heads, and as a part of the social fabric. This furthers Madonna's quest in creating the Marylin Monroe image that will never die, despite who or what the real Madonna may be. Having a song about a jilted lover called “She's Not Me” on her new record combined with another song about the anxieties of celebrities being in love and too busy with their own egos to simmer down (“Miles Away”), she paved the way for all the controversy surrounding her record release with rumors of affairs, going to public events sans wedding ring, etc, etc. And the public responded exactly how she expected, by keeping her name and image visible in the mainstream while helping her sell tickets for an upcoming tour, and inking deals to guarantee her spot in the cultural entertainment domain.
It is all very engineered in a way that suggests, this is exactly what Madonna wants. She's done enough soul searching to discover that she can create the reality she wants to exist in, and she won't let anyone tell her differently.
That, in and of itself, renders Hard Candy as the best of her career.
The album says, “Well, this is music as I wish to make it, and if you have a problem with it, well that is just a lack of imagination on your part.”
And indeed, the use of drum samples in “Give It 2 Me,” are so sticky and sweet, I look forward to them every time the song comes on, despite hating song titles with the number “2” used as word.
