Bout a month ago, Madonna turned 50 years old. Outside of politicians or sports coaches, 50 is a difficult age to retain influence, much less relevance. Madonna has never been much for rules, however, and thus it's no surprise that she still exists within the mainstream of popular culture; hell, she had a top 5 hit over the summer without it being an ironic, Cliff Richards wink. Quick aside: Madonna actually invented the "mainstream" we talk about today, committing so many vile and outrageous acts in the 1980s and 1990s that eventually her critics became numb, and her fans became this generations acolytes and copycats. American Pie puts jizz in a beer and engages in pastral intercourse? Shrug, yawn, M. Louise Ciccone mouthsexed a water bottle a decade earlier. Ellen Degeneres comes out of the closet and confronts the nation? The Material Girl and Sandra Bernhard were canoodling in public before Ellen was a glint in Jerry Seinfeld's eye. Tom Cruise and Scientology? Kaballah and a big black Jesus, anyone? Tony Romo and Jessica Simpson, meet beau Dennis Rodman. And Britney, sweet Britney, whose last six years or so seem almost an experiment in idol worship and destruction? She's young enough to be Madonna's daughter. God knows she's close enough.
Also, I lover her music. God knows her voice has been lambasted enough ("as plastic as Ziplock without the tightness" are the words of just one critic I made up), but to diss her music because her voice isn't classical is akin to complain about gas mileage on a Lamborghini. You're not driving the car to admire the efficiency. Her glitz, televised worldwide, set the curve for a solid twenty years, her sound always stayed one step ahead of it; we've heard everything from disco to trip-hop to Lloyd Webber.
So why leave her as a gift to one gender? Last time I checked my y chromosome didn't prevent me from working ears. As such, here are about a baker's dozen of songs that get my ass off the couch and dance. Sadly, they've never sparked an interest in S&M or fake British accents.
In no particular order
1) Don't Tell Me (Music, single eleased 2001)
It's the second single from the album, and as fun as it is to shimmy to the title track, a dentist drill electronica with staccato beeps presumably from an old Atari, Don't Tell Me is just a better song, a little twang hook, and drum machine, and spare strings when needed. Unlike so much of her late 90s candy, the song doesn't start at 11 and pulse higher. I don't need to drop E tablets and hump a lamp, pacifier in my mouth. I just want to enjoy the sound. Don't Tell Me's just a tossed off poppy time. (<---------CONCLUSION SENTENCE) Plus the video has gay cowboys, four years before Brokeback! (<---------NOT CONCLUSION SENTENCE)
2) Into The Groove (Angel maxi-single, released 1985)
"You can dance....for inspiration....come on!" The call to arms. Starts with the chorus, doesn't let go, a gem about the night, and the music, and the love. Probably caused countless cases of the clap. The little piano in the bridge? Phenomenal; she manages to boost the production while convincing no one that actual instruments matter to her. The little pregnant pause between "touch" and "my body" adds too. Maybe the one song that makes me want to buy hot pants. You know, more pairs.
3) Crazy For You (Vision Quest soundtrack [!], released 1985)
The very definition of an 80s ballad. Berlin would have made this song 8 minutes long. Even her slow songs give the impression they're about to explode just around the corner. Towards the end of the song, she sings the title a few times, and then goes right into the low-voiced spoken "crazy for you", like she was joking around in a karaoke bar. Somehow this song is good, you must listen to me.
4) Secret (Bedtime Stories, released 1994)
Maybe the song that revitalized her career, coming after the borderline awful Erotica album. Featuring a video chock full of her love of skinny androgynous black men with piercings, Secret actually sounds like several of the instruments are real, and builds a vocal and string tension. Also, any chorus with an "mmm...mmm..." always gets points from me. I like to vacuum with this song on. I have no idea what that means in terms of the actual "secret" from the song. The vocal is just whisper-sung enough to get everyone up and moving. According to wikipedia, this song was promoted on the internets in nineteen ninety friggin four. What?
5) Justify My Love (The Immaculate Collection, released 1990)
Those two whirling siren notes at the beginning of the song...the moaning backing vocal...the vague sense that Prince is singing somewhere...the sexually pained but ultimately nonthreatening laundry list vocal ("I wanna kiss you in Paris/I wanna hold your hand in Rome/I wanna run naked in a rainstorm"...oh noes!): it's all Super Great. As far as I know, it's the first all-whisper vocal she ever tried, which made it fresh then. I was about 5 years old, and I think it's best I did not know about this song then, as it would have led to early-onset puberty and would have killed my mother as well. I wonder if she knows whether Madonna exists.
6) Human Nature (Bedtime Stories, released 1995)
It's her most nasally vocal. She uses the lyric "I'm not your bitch/Don't hang your shit on me". It sounds like a mix of the synth from Thriller and early G-Funk. I'm about 90% confident she's trying to channel Snoop Dogg on this track. Scuse me, Snoop Doggy Dogg. Whose fucking idea was it to put "Doggy" between Snoop and Dogg 18 years ago? Terrible idea, unless it was Suge Knight. Then, great idea! Anyway, the song begins to end with a little gnarl guitar, which makes it worth the price of admission. Wait...youtube is free...what a deal!!! Minus points for the use of snapping; no good song resorts to the snap.
7) Holiday (Madonna, released 1983)
What the hell the beeping sound effects are between every line in the song, I will never know. They sound like electronic gerbils. For all I know, they are. Kudos to the lo-fi "live" music video, perfected by Rock With Me. That cost Jacko about $82.75. Holiday, to its credit, is a better song, sung fairly impressively--she does her own backing vocals and occasionally double-tracks them--and projects fun more than almost any of her later "serious" works. This ain't no pop song calculation, this is pure. I swerve around the highway when this song is playing. I'm the one driving the sand colored Buick across 93, yelling "oh yeah, oh yeah". Not like the Kool-Aid man.
8) Rain (Erotica, single released 2003)
Just kidding. No one likes Rain.
8) Vogue (I'm Breathless: Music from and Inspired by the film Dick Tracy, no, I'm not kidding, that's the whole silly title, released 1990)
Ladies with an attitude
Fellows that were in the mood
Don't just stand there, let's get to it
Strike a pose, there's nothing to it.
9) Papa Don't Preach (True Blue, released 1986)
Kicking off with Big Important Strings, Madonna's first Big Important Message dealt with teen pregnancy, and the controversy was over the kid would be adopted or raised in the family. Abortion shows up nowhere, and yet it was protested by about 90 organizations, one of which involved Tipper Gore, so it automatically gets my approval for pissing her off. How in the world did Madonna get away with playing Eva Peron? The tune itself is surprisingly gentle for such a life-or-death epic (my words), with a series of Christmasy chimes, little egg shakers, and a Spanish guitar interlude. Whatever you want, that's fine.
10) Ray Of Light (Ray of Light, released 1998)
About 15 seconds in, this song goes nuts. It remains that way for the next five minutes, briefly increasing into I believe liquid. I hate to be douche-y and use words like "most liberated vocal", so let me just say I'm guessing it was easy for her to sing this. Probably the first song where everyone listening thought to themselves, "Damn, she's had a really good career", likely because she had gone about 2 and half years by this time without publicly blowing anyone or mounting anything. The chorus and instrumental are the most danceable she ever was, early 80s moustache disco be damned. I once cleaned my basement to this tune, sped up when the song did, and smashed my knee on a table. These are not proud confessions, dear reader.
11) I'll Remember (With Honors soundtrack, released 1994)
I grew up listening to 92 PRO-FM, a pop station in Providence, Rhode Island. Nowadays nothing less R&B than say Rihanna is allowed on the air, but back in the day it was the place for hot music. I knew nothing of a rock guitar at this time in my life. I don't think it was til about age 12 that I knew Kurt Cobain was dead, and not until about 1998 til I knew that was important. As such, this is what I grew up with, and this is why like 11 people remember this song. I think the music on this song was made on a Mac. There's great emotion in her vocal, which is of course a lie as most all her music is made explicitly to convince people there's great emotion, which then means that perhaps there is real emotion...you just made my head explode, Ciccone. Well played. Also, this continues her trend of very good singles in movies while she herself only appears in terrible films. I'll give you a nice kitten, and make you watch Body of Evidence, Desperately Seeking Susan, and Dangerous Game. You make it through those three without strangling the cat, and I'll give you $75. That's right: in my world, cats' lives are worth less than a Dell battery.
12) Beautiful Stranger (Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me soundtrack, released 1999)
Has any movie aged worse than that one? I was going to put "Take a Bow" here but it's too maudlin, was going to put "4 Minutes" here but it's too new (who knew 8 years ago that of Madonna and Justin Timberlake, liking Madonna would make you seem more gay?), was going to put "American Pie" but I hate it and she ruined the original, and so settled on this. It's clear enough to me that Madonna wanted to live in the 60s and instead, because she became famous in the 80s, had to constantly battle the socially conservative attitudes of the Reagan/Falwell/Thatcher era, rather than live her life fucking around and doing what she wanted beyond squeamish public reproach. (Of course, those tsk-tskers were the people that made her so stratospherically popular in the first place, but that's a story for another time.) She herself said the first song to make an impression on her was Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Were Made For Walking". Thus it follows that her 60s homage here kicked ass, from the opening kicks to the psychedelic fife type thing to close the tune. Da-da-da-dum da-dum da-dum da da da-da dum.
13) Like A Prayer (Like A Prayer, released 1989)
Let's just get this out of the way: gospel choirs make every song better. Without gospel choirs, Under The Bridge would be a weak B-side to Give It Away rather than the only song to battle Everlong for the title of "What do you mean you don't like that song? Everyone likes that song." Without gospel choirs, Paul Simon would probably be remembered as the shorter hippie without the Jew fro, instead of the architect of Graceland and the destroyer of apartheid. Yes, we're stretching here (Lady Black Mambazo technically isn't a gospel group and Nelson Mandela was important politically too), but you get the point. And without gospel choirs, Madonna wouldn't have blown a $5 million Pepsi contract, wouldn't have pissed off the Right to the point where she could do literally anything from that day onward, and most importantly wouldn't have released this pop opus...actually, let's combine that to the funny looking popopus. There! Another Big Serious Subject somehow is built entirely within a bright, sunny love ditty. One minute, you're dancing, the next you're clapping your hands in that awkward White Man At Choir Way (you look like John Kerry), the next minute, a little more dancing, and then you remember you are defiling Jesus and will assuredly will burn in the Lake of Fire. Not many people you can turn to help from at that point. God?
Well, this turned out longer than I thought. And yet you're still reading. Who's girly now?
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