The arena was completely quiet. I settled on a row 150 feet away from center stage and stood beside the aisle seat. My stomach was doing cartwheels, and my lunch begged me to let it out. I looked around, desperately searching for co-workers, a familiar face, or anyone who looked as excited as I was, but the only other people around were
some production guys in tool belts and clunky work boots, setting things up, taping down cables, and carrying heavy equipment.
They began to sound check, and the arena filled with the opening notes of Madonna’s “Hung Up,” which replayed over and over until they had the levels right. Chills ran down my spine; this was real. Each time the music started my heart rose, and when it stopped, my heart collapsed. I was so anxious, my nerves had nerves, and I tightly gripped the chair, hoping it might, by osmosis, absorb some of my anxiety. My eyes glazed over as the stage crew adjusted the lights. I felt lucky and innocent and young. What circumstances in my life had offered me this moment, this perfect moment?
My legs shook; my palms grew sweaty, and then I heard an unenthusiastic voice announce “Clear for full run.”
It was time. Would it be everything I’d hoped for? Had I built up this moment so that it could never be enough? My heartbeat escalated so fast, I was sure it would combust, and then . . .
The computer-generated stage was set for the Gorillaz, who would open the number and appear onstage in their cartoon personas. Really? This? Now? I had to watch cartoons?
I inhaled. Fine. You can’t just jump right into something this big. This was the calm-down period. This was my prom date putting me at ease, rubbing my knee, feeding me sweet talk and gentle kisses to alleviate the nerves. The Gorillaz song ended and a brief period of nothing but drum beats followed, then the familiar high notes of the synthesized opening to “Hung Up.” And then it happened, slowly, a delicate figure in a sparkly lavender leotard ascended from beneath the stage floor. I saw a head of perfectly feathered hair. I erupted.
“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” And in a deafening scream I declared to the empty arena, “It’s Madonna—oh my GOD!” I went apeshit. I spastically shuffled around my chair, looking all around me, trying to connect with someone who would share my exhilaration, but there was no one but those old production men who couldn’t care less. I shifted my attention back to the stage.
Madonna was dancing, and I watched, my mouth wide open, my heart stopped. Then she strolled sexily toward the animated characters still displayed onstage and began to interact with them. What? How was this possible? How could she walk
onto
their “virtual” set?
Then Madonna walked around Gorillaz and disappeared into thin air.
A couple of the production guys had stopped their work to laugh at me. A few more walked by and blew air through their teeth, embarrassed for me. As stupid as I felt, I turned to one of them and asked, breathlessly, “What just happened?”
Wearing a look of pity he answered “I hate to burst your bubble, but . . .”
The figure who had just mesmerized me wasn’t Madonna; it was an animated, computerized 3D holographic image of Madonna—a projection. Madonna wasn’t even there. For the real show, the animated Madonna would vanish, and the flesh and blood Madonna would appear with her dance crew, but that night they were rehearsing only the technical portion of the show. Everyone, it seemed, knew that but me.
“Sorry,” one of the guys said, condescendingly patting my back, pulling the pin out and deflating me like a gigantic Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon.
The rehearsal continued, playing and replaying the animated segments, over and over again, my disappointment growing with each take. I flipped over my all-access badge so no one would catch my name. This could not make it back to the office. I walked briskly up the empty bleachers, trying to ignore the snickering, giggling production guys.
Leave it to Madonna to remain, always, ahead of the times.
I ran outside, eager to get home to Google “3D holographic image.” I still had a lot to catch up on.
“Vogue”: Madonna’s Creative Zenith
Amanda Marcotte
“VOGUE” HAS THE dual distinction of being both the best song and the last great song Madonna ever released. (Okay, I like the song “Music,” but that was from an era when Madonna just bought other people’s production skills with her ample wealth, and I don’t think it counts as a Madonna Song in the way her ’80s catalog does.) She tried her hand repeatedly at sugary ballads, but high-energy dance songs are her best: “Like a Prayer,” “Material Girl,” “Holiday,” and “Like a Virgin.” Her light but strangely commanding voice is perfect for dance music; I’d go so far as to argue strenuously that she has one of the best dance-floor voices since the era when Donna Summer and Diana Ross made a killing in disco.
With this specific talent, it’s almost amazing that Madonna didn’t leap on the house-music trend before 1990, but Madonna was never one to get ahead of a trend (that’s a habit of innovators that tends to suppress record sales). House music’s time in the pop-music spotlight was brief, but it left a glorious track record at the top of the charts:
“Groove Is in the Heart” by Dee-Lite, “Pump up the Volume” by Marrs, and even “Freedom” by George Michael were early house hits. And lest the “house” term confuse you, the modern image of house music may be that crap played in cheeseball clubs on “Jersey Shore,” but when it was nascent, it was really different and more fun. The aforementioned group Dee-Lite identified as a house band—most of “Groove Is in the Heart” was composed by the DJ. Only the baseline and some of the vocals were contributed by live musicians; the rest was constructed of samples. One reason house is less fun than it used to be is that it’s pretty much illegal to construct a song out of fifty different samples, but you could get away with it in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
In “Vogue,” Madonna demonstrated her ability to take the current trends and remake them in her image. “Vogue” pulls in every trick that made late ’80s–early ’90s house so fun: the funky bass line, the drum machines and synthesizer creating complex layers, the steady hi-hat and regular hand claps, the prominent piano (with a brief solo, no less), and even a pseudo-rap that flirts with hip-hop without actually incorporating it. And, like a lot of less prominent house acts, the lyrics are pure fluff, about nothing more than the song itself, in this case calling you to do a kind of dance called “vogueing” that predated house and continues to be an underground phenomenon to this day.
“Vogue” brings everything both wonderful and regrettable about Madonna into a single, perfect package. As for her, Madonna is simultaneously the most overrated and underrated musical artist of the ’80s. Overrated, of course, by academics and overanalyzers who wish to rationalize their love of bubblegum pop as a secret subversion. Most Madonna defenders—many of whom reside in these pages—genuinely work hard on their analysis and coax interesting insights out of the material. Madonna is construed as a subversive figure, bringing queer and sex-positive feminist imagery into the mainstream, selling it to little girls in suburban malls, recruiting one future radical at a time.
She’s underrated, naturally, by the music-snob world, which has some overlap with the overanalyzer world, but tends to lean way more heavily male (sadly for me, since I consider myself in their numbers). Clinging to their Velvet Underground records, these snobs denounce Madonna as a hack, pointing out correctly that she stole all her aesthetics from actual subversives, mainly from the various New York subcultures of the late ’70s and ’80s.
Madonna’s defenders have their retort: Those people were in the underground! Madonna mainstreamed their subversions, making them available to teeny-boppers around the world, giving them permission to play with fashion, gender, and sexuality. She may not have been the great innovator, but she knew how to get on MTV.
This rejoinder has always felt hollow to me, because an honest assessment of the ’70s and ’80s reveals that it was actually quite an incendiary time in pop music. It was, after all, a time when a kooky art-rock band like Devo could have a number-one hit. Madonna can’t be given credit for mainstreaming the New York underground’s blending of disco and rock, since bands like Blondie beat her to it. The people who did it first and did it better than Madonna didn’t languish, beloved only by college radio DJs and the curators at Rhino Records—they made a lot of money at it.
And Madonna the fashion icon? Not so much. Cyndi Lauper’s take on funky, vintage fashion was more inspired and had a longer impact on hipster street fashion. David Bowie had a full decade on Madonna in the game of the constantly changing image. Madonna the gender-bender? Annie Lennox was doing the woman-in-a-man’s-suit thing years before Madonna, and let’s not forget that way before Madonna played with gender, it was the era of boys in eyeliner right there on TV. Surely, platinum-selling artists like The Cure, The Human League, and Culture Club were a more destabilizing force, gender-wise, with their eyeliner and lace, than Madonna could ever be just walking around looking kind of masculine sometimes. Madonna didn’t even really kick down the door of the “ladies doing it for
themselves” music club, since the Go-Go’s were the go-to band for that at the time. Even when Madonna entered the realm of borrowing Christian imagery for sexy purposes in “Like a Prayer,” she looked like she belonged in the video for any hair-metal band that had been doing the same thing for years.
I also never really bought the idea that Madonna’s in-your-face sexuality was earth-shatteringly subversive. “Like a Virgin” came out nearly a full decade after Donna Summer had a No. 2 Billboard hit with “Love to Love You,” a song in which she faked an orgasm, in lieu of singing, for the entire track.
Still, none of this should detract from Madonna’s importance as a pop icon. Madonna’s genius was—in the ’80s, at least—being derivative without being cheesy, which is much harder than it sounds. Should I sound like I’m damning her with faint praise, let me also say that music by people with this talent is sorely desired by record executives, who make lots of money off it, and more importantly, by DJs who need those perfect pop records to keep the party going. Picking music to play at a dance club is much harder than it sounds. The number of innovative artists you can play is restricted to those that are actually popular enough to get people dancing. Once you’re down to that pool, you don’t have enough music to fill up the time unless you play the same artists over and over again, and only hack DJs do that. What you need are knock-offs that are just different enough that it doesn’t feel repetitive.
I recently had this experience when I had the fortune to DJ a fundraiser that was billed as an ’80s dance party. My playlist was heavy with musicians I think of as the true innovators of the ’80s: Prince, Run DMC, the Talking Heads. But there comes a point in every ’80s dance party when you’d better go Madonna or go home. The song I chose was “Burning Up,” which I’ve always admired for having a gritty, sexy authenticity that slowly turned more performance-oriented later in Madonna’s career. The only reason I went there was that “Vogue” wasn’t an option, having come out in 1990, past the deadline for a proper ’80s party.
“Vogue” has captured some largely negative attention for being derivative, but not of house music—how can you really be derivative of a trend that’s sweeping not just the country but the planet?—but of vogueing. Most of America probably thinks of the dance, in which striking poses like a model is turned into a fluid form of movement, as something Madonna invented for this song. In reality, it’s rooted in dance styles developed in Harlem in the ’60s, and it really took off (and lives on) in gay-dominated underground dance communities (one all-queer dance crew named Vogue Evolution specialized in vogueing and gained national prominence on MTV’s “America’s Best Dance Crew” in 2009). Because of this, and because of the amount of money Madonna made from positioning vogueing as a one-off dance craze like the Achy-Breaky Heart, “Vogue” is usually held up as a prime example of appropriation.
Madonna may have appropriated pieces of black, Latino, and LGBT culture for “Vogue,” but that’s not what makes the song the apex of her career. It’s that, for the first time ever, she borrowed as much from herself (six years earlier) as from anyone else.
Sure, “Material Girl” doesn’t sound much like “Vogue,” the former being a New Wave–influenced pop song performed with traditional rock instruments, and the latter being pure house-for-the-masses. But with Madonna, image is half the game, and the video for “Material Girl” was about establishing Madonna as a Star by equating her with Marilyn Monroe, presumably because they’re both bottle blondes with big boobs. The video is based on Monroe’s famous performance of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in the movie
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, complete with the same dress, same set design, and similar choreography.
Unfortunately, the video for “Material Girl” isn’t half as fun, because the materialism is undercut by a side plot created to reassure us that real-life Madonna isn’t a gold digger, whereas Monroe’s character never apologizes for using her looks to squeeze rich men for their money in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
. But most people don’t remember the dopey side plot in “Material Girl,” just the images of
Madonna-as-Monroe—Madonna laying claim to the glamour of old Hollywood, similar to how David Bowie borrowed the weirdness of B-film sci-fi to shore up his glam-rock image.
And in “Vogue,” she does it again! Sure, the era of movies she harkens back to are the ’30s and ’40s (not the ’50s, when Monroe worked), but the idea is basically the same: Madonna with perfectly coiffed hair and clothes, Madonna comparing her own glamour to that of the Golden Era of Hollywood. And even though she had used that trick before, it works beautifully this time around—even better than it did the first time.