Madonna. You write her off at your peril. Her career tenacity is startling, staggering.
Pop music’s iconic entities not only have fallow periods; they use them to bounce back, forged by adversity. Think Prince. But don’t think Madonna. Her peaks and troughs are peaks and peaks. Even the poorest selling of her albums, American Life (2003),
shifted four million copies.
As a rare chink in the armour, it occasioned ill-considered press predictions of career slide, but she who once declared, “I have the same goal I’ve had ever since I was a girl: I want to rule the world” set about doing just that.
She embarked on a Re-Invention World Tour, which was the biggest grossing outing of 2004, earning almost $200 million dollars (the highest take by a female artist).
Then, as if to show her contempt for the naysayers, she delivered a 10th album, Confessions On A Dance Floor, that debuted at number one and yielded four hits, one of which, Hung Up, reached the chart summit in a record-breaking 45 countries.
That year, she equalled Elvis Presley’s record of 36 Top 10 hits, the most for any artist in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 charts.
Perhaps because reporting on Madonna’s success has become so commonplace – and for so long enthusiastically acquiescent
– the media have lately barely disguised an eagerness to chronicle a collapse. But combined assaults that would cut the legs out from under a lesser star – such as the reviews for her film-directing debut on Filth and Wisdom or the cynical and sometimes savage reaction to her adoption of an African child – leave her largely unscathed.
There is too much of her – her impact, her image, her achievements – to tackle or tumble.
“She has begun to resemble Mount Rushmore,” recently observed Joe Queenan in The Guardian.
“Because she has been re-inventing herself from the beginning – pop star, dominatrix, ingenue, fallen-away Catholic, matinee idol, children’s book author, philosopher, Kabbalah devotee, political activist,
Michigan suburbanite with phoney British accent – Madonna has never had
to compete with a single youthful image that is frozen in her fans’ minds, in the
way the Rolling Stones or Sinead O’Connor or even Britney Spears has had to. There have been so many Madonnas that at this point one more incarnation isn’t going to make much difference. Nor can there be any denying that by constantly shifting the target she has made a little go a long way. She is a guerilla chanteuse who always makes sure the battle is fought on her turf.”
And that may be the essence of it.
Of all the things that can be laid at her feet with regards to career milestones, from the time she spent six weeks at number one in the US with her fourth hit, Like A Virgin, the most remarkable and certainly the most important is she rewrote the victim rule for femme singers.
Inherent in the rise and appeal of luminous ladies – Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf, Janis Joplin and so many others – has been a sense of tortured tragedy. The great women were all done wrong – by their men, their managers, themselves. They wailed about the great injustice of it all, about their impotence in a male-dominated world.
Now, like Madonna’s music or not
– and certainly some do hear in her voice a scratchy, fingernails-on-blackboard sound – you have to give her credit for the inescapable fact that she has set her own agenda, worked to her own rules and conceived her own strategies. There is no hand up the back of her exterior underwear, no pimp exploiting her talent and taking advantage of her insecurities. There is not a sniff of victim about her and, though that can be said of a number of contemporary femme powerhouses, ask yourself how many arose in the wake of Ms Ciccone.
Her flinty determination is evident in her oft-quoted utterances, which have ranged from “I’m tough, I’m ambitious and I know exactly what I want and if that makes me a bitch – OK,” to “I won’t be happy until I’m as famous as God,” to “Better to live one year as a tiger than 100 as a sheep,” to “I want to be like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jnr – but I want to stay alive,” to her credo, “Be strong, believe in freedom and in God, love yourself, understand your sexuality, have a sense of humour…don’t judge people by their religion, colour or sexual habits, and love life and your family”.
And that determination has been in place since the world outside her family (a tough father and five full and two half-siblings) became aware of her, since she went out on the road as a dancer with Eurodisco one-hit wonder Patrick “Born To Be Alive” Hernandez in 1979, then sang and played drums and guitar in the band the Breakfast Club in the Big Apple and wrote and produced dance songs with her then boyfriend Stephen Bray in Emmy shortly after.
Seymour Stein, the music industry veteran who started working in the business in New York more than 50 years ago at age 13, has an array of accomplishments to his credit, including the discovery of the Ramones and Talking Heads and the formation of the pivotal Sire Records.
But he has become accustomed to being summarised as “the man who discovered Madonna” by those who plainly see it as being all the credit that one man could require.
He’d been alerted to her burgeoning talents by producer Mark Kamins and had been impressed by the demos he’d requested. When news of that and the possibility of a recording contract reached Madonna, she made a beeline for the mogul, indifferent to the fact that he was wired up in a hospital bed, recovering from heart surgery complications.
“I thought she was special when I first saw her,” Stein says, with a wry smile of recollection, whenever asked, be it by the New York Times or a delegate at a music industry seminar.
“I especially remember when she came to see me at the hospital. I was in those pyjamas that open at the back; hadn’t shaved, hadn’t washed. When I heard she was coming, I at least had my barber come up and give me a haircut and I got the good pyjamas. She didn’t even notice; she couldn’t have cared less. If
I were lying in a coffin, she would have waved the papers in front of me. The determination, the drive, the zeal, the ruthlessness! I remember saying to myself when she left, ‘Boy, if the shortest way home is through a cemetery at midnight, she’s taking it;
this girl’s really in a rush.’”
Madonna and Stein remained close friends and in 1992 he helped her establish her own record label, Maverick. One of the imprint’s
first signings, Canadian singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette, recorded the most successful debut album in world history, the 30-million-selling Jagged Little Pill. Madonna’s instincts were again flawless.
“Let’s be honest, she’s just great,” said Stein. “I didn’t create her. Madonna created herself. I just happened to see her first.”
What the Sire boss saw, heard and responded to continues to evolve and enchant.
Madonna’s musical imagination is still bearing fruit, as evidenced by her edgy new album, Hard Candy. That she is still capable of being excited by collaborations and combinations bodes well for a recording career now more than a quarter-century long. That excitement was on show when she gushed to Interview magazine’s Ingrid Sischy, “I really enjoy writing with Justin Timberlake.
He’s open and he’s got talent – he’s a songwriter and I haven’t worked with a lot of songwriters where I’m instantly connected and start riffing and playing with the rhythm of the words.”
At almost 50, the greatest challenge for Madonna is how best to use the fame, power and wealth that is unprecedented for a female performer, how to maintain the impact of carefully cultivated controversy and, at the same time, how to juggle the demands of a family life that keeps a good Catholic girl (with Jewish wanderings) grounded.
In a revealing interview
with Meredith Vieira of NBC News, Madonna spoke of how her children and film director husband, Guy Ritchie, felt the strain of the career demands on her. She was fresh from having daughter Lourdes grumble, “Ah! I can’t wait till this is over and we can
have you back” and son Rocco plead, “How much longer is this gonna go on for? I mean, when are you gonna just be home?”
Nonetheless, as she told Vieira, “Well I obviously have things I want to say and accomplish…just staying home and looking after my children and being a wife and mother is not what I want. I want more. If you want to effect change in the world, you have to have a platform to stand on. And in order to have that platform, you have to keep doing your job. So
I guess that’s why I’m still juggling.
“I have a reputation for being provocative. I thought, I need to stir things up, wake people up, be anti-establishment, just for the sake of it. But it’s kind of a waste of time to provoke just for the sake of provocation. You have to have a reason for it. I wouldn’t say I wanna conquer the world any more. But I want to be part of making the world a better place. I want to inspire people and I want to be part of the solution.”
