MADONNA MAY2019
$11
HAS OUR QUEEN MADE A MISTEP ?
HAS OUR QUEEN MADE A MISTEP? ALBUM SALES AND CHARTS SAY NO FANS TELL A DIFFERENT STORY
M
adonna says this album freed her and wasn’t something she expected to create. There is a case to be made for classifying Madonna, in 2019, as an underdog. Granted, it requires overlooking the superstar’s grotesque wealth and enduring ability to command some sort of an audience with every public move. But her status as a pop star has degraded considerably in the last 15 years. Whereas they once inspired awe, or at least controversy, her live televised appearances of late tend to yield mockery. Her days of hit-making seem long behind her. Her last album, 2015’s Rebel Heart, was a mess with more tracks and less to say than any Madonna record that preceded it. Apathy ensued. It seems that Madonna, once queen of pop and enforcer of the regimentation that comes with that, is no longer controlling her narrative. This was never more evident than in her denouncement of a recent New York Times Magazine profile by journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis, who Madonna dragged in an Instagram post for focusing on “trivial and superficial matters” such as her age. “It makes me feel raped,” wrote Madonna, echoing a contentious comment she made to Grigoriadis about her reaction to several Rebel Heart tracks leaking months before she had completed the album. The magazine perhaps leaned too heavily into the age thing—the article, after all, was titled “Madonna at Sixty.” But of course Madonna’s age is relevant to her current story because it reminds us that her career path has always been one of uncharted territory. Today, the question is what does a veteran who redefined pop stardom for decades do in her 60s? Even she doesn’t seem sure on her muddled 14th album, Madame X. Convoluted in sound and concept, it is intended as a means for both dissociation and the reaffirmation of Madonna’s multitudes. “Madame X” was a nickname given to her at 19 by her dance instructor, the legendary Martha Graham. “That was in the beginning of my career when I didn’t think about who I should be or what I should be,” Madonna told Billboard in May. In recent press, her wariness of public scrutiny after almost four decades of stardom is palpable: “I preferred life before phone,” she told Grigoriadis regarding the internet’s consistently shabby treatment of her. You can see why she yearns for a clean slate. Hear her pining in the opening lines of Madame X’s first single, “Medellín”: “I took a pill and had a dream/I went back to my 17th year.” At the same time, Madame X is a secret agent, a dancer, a professor, a head of state, a nun, a housekeeper, and several other things, according to Madonna’s video announcement of the album. Later, she clarified: “I embody all of those people but then I also use those people to the extreme in the form of Madame X as a disguise to do my work.” Excepting the specific eccentricities here (such as referring to Madame X in the third person on Twitter and the fashion eye patch), the Madame X concept is the most recent example of a marketing trope in which divas use real nick- and middle names to thematically signal that they are revealing more sides of themselves than they previously allowed (see: Mariah Carey’s Mimi, Janet Jackson’s Damita Jo, and Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce). Needless to say, these exercises are rarely illuminating even when the accompanying music is good. It’s a lot of puffery for business as usual—so much that it’s tempting to give Madonna a pass for trying. Madonna and her collaborators (chiefly Mirwais who co-helmed much of 2000’s Music and 2003’s underrated American Life) recorded in several different countries, marrying genres as disparate as Portuguese fado, baile funk, Cape Verdean batuque, and good old American trap to make a literal, at times clinical, rendering of world music. Madonna’s astonishing work ethic is written all over her voice: she raps, she sing-raps, she sings (in English, Spanish, and Portuguese). She has crafted a motif of did-they-or-didn’t-they sexual intrigue to accompany two collaborations with hunky Colombian superstar Maluma. Madonna and company have produced the shit out of virtually every notion here. But blatant ambition has an unfortunate way of accentuating failure. In what could be most charitably described as delirious exuberance, many of Madame X’s songs trip all over themselves to change course and offer something new every few seconds for the attention-span deficient. Consequently, they often fall flat as an adolescent’s self-conscious contrivances of weirdness—the 808 gloom of “Dark Ballet” gives way to an interpolation of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker Suite”