I grew up in the 80s. I remember the first time I heard (and ‘saw’) Madonna's “Borderline” on MTV in or about 1983 and I thought it was one of the best songs by someone new to me that I’d ever heard. And the video was a real story, unlike some of the more abstract, arty, somewhat phantasmagoric videos of my favorite artists of the time like Duran Duran and Talking Heads and New Order. About the time of Like a Virgin the album two years later, she was so popular that in my increasingly alt rock sensibility I’d become too cool to for it. By 1985, her music and her videos and her name were so ubiquitous in the culture that you didn’t have to admit you liked Madonna or not. It was like liking or not liking the weather. When she performed “Holiday” at Live Aid that year, many of my family members were watching and thought she was covering someone else’s song – someone Black. A lot of older Black people I knew had thought that it was a Black artist who made “Holiday.” It was the rare song by a non-Black artist that played fairly regularly on Detroit’s iconic FM 98 WJLB and it segued perfectly with Aretha and Anita and Luther and Prince and Michael on that radio station at the salon where my mother worked, and where I was a sweeper and shampoo boy for my entire adolescence. She was just that much of a part of the atmosphere. She crossed cultures easily and without affect. It wasn’t a statement. It was just her music. (And she was a Detroit girl, from Rochester, a suburb of the Motor City not far from the one I grew up in.) Tthat would go on through the rest of the decade and a half through Ray of Light, which I think of as her iconic years.
For the next 13 years, I respected her as an artist, but I wasn’t what I would call a fan. Every now and then a track would catch my attention (“Oh, Father” and “Vogue”) but I was too into the Smiths and the Cure and Depeche Mode and New Order and the like to really indulge. (Or, more accurately, admit I indulged.) There was her Marilyn Monroe stage, her Evita stage, her sexual exploitation phase. She was fascinating as hell, but to me her persona eclipsed anything she was putting out, despite its continuing chart-topping ubiquity.
Then “Deeper and Deeper” came out – and so, coincidently at the same time, did I. My latent love of, well, a lot of things, revealed to me a love of disco, and my integration into house and techno was a perfect trifecta for a new pledge in the fraternity of gay life, back then a truly marginalized community, but one with the hubris of the talented outlier than the victim. Being gay in 1994 was dangerous, mysterious, controversial – but also intriguing and chic. Sexy. Stylish. It was Versace and South Beach, Miami and all that. Marriage wasn’t the battle – staying alive and avoiding “the virus” was. But it still didn’t make me a fan, but rather an adjacent admirer of her come-up-from-nothing-Detroit girl achievement as a global icon. A great performer with a determined finger on the cultural barometer. Her music was easily integrated into the house music Zeitgeist of the time and her look and attitude was co-opted by gay culture – or was it the other way around? That, probably, is more like it – and she had become such a supernova by the time I’d moved to New York City in the middle-late 90s that, when Ray of Light came out, she seemed to will herself into less mainstream accessibility with that album because it fit so perfectly with the times for a certain downtown demimonde in a track list with outfits like Massive Attack, Air, Portishead, and Kruder and Dorfmeister that were, for a certain type of young person in a major city, the soundtrack of life itself. The other side of the 90s from the people who watched shows like “Friends”. She wasn’t just famous or sexy – she’d become cool in a way that attracted people who had been too cool to like Madonna. Or, more realistically, to admit they did. Ray of Light soared and, for a long time, she plateaued there.
Hence, after that ablum I stopped paying attention. She slipped into the background for me as I became more immersed in electronic music as, ironically, she seemed to try desperately to insert herself into that milieu. But I never really got her Mirwais period. It didn’t sound like I thought she wanted her music to sound. I imagined I knew what she was going for (louche raves in London) but it didn’t fit. Madonna, despite herself, seemed simply too big and not nuanced enough as an artist to belong in electronica’s eclectic, understated atmosphere.
And then “Confessions on the Dancefloor” came out and I was tuned in and turned out. “Hung Up” was and still is one of her best bangers. “Sorry” was an unnecessary apology – it was just fine. But “Get Together” was – and still is to me – the best track she’d come out with since 1993’s“Deeper and Deeper.”
And now here I am listening to “Confessions II,” which warrants all the hype it’s getting. It’s the kind of album I know – because I know my reaction to music I love – that will sound better and better with more listens, like the sex with a casual lover you aren’t prepared to fall in love with but whose unnameable, irresistible idiosyncrasy just sneaks up on you and rocks your world.
I can’t break down what songs I like most or like least yet. It’s all one song to me right now. Right now, it reminds me of two albums that excited me on first listen (the Beatles’ Abbey Road and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique) but that I couldn’t put my finger on where or what in the giant sauce made it taste so good. Sorry for the mixed metaphor, but for me a mixed metaphor seems appropriate for this album for a lot of reasons. One, it’s Abbey Road and Paul’s Boutique comparison might seem as odd as comparing those two in the first place. But these were albums that had great singles but, truly, to be appreciated, had to be heard from start to finish. They had a narrative and the more familiar one became with the narrative, the more you could hear the next song about to start if you were only hearing one track. (I have to add the Smiths’ Louder Than Bombs to that as well, but that was more of a later compilation, a sister to Hateful of the Hallow.) When these kinds of – increasingly rare– albums are finished for the first time it feels like finishing a novel. You miss it, you want to read it again, you need to unpack what you just experienced.
Abbey Road was the Beatles’ last recording (although released just before their last album, Let It Be). I hope this isn’t Madonna’s because I don’t think she can live without making music and I want her to live a long life. But if she decided to lay this down as the final page of her musical legacy, what a story has been told – and lived – by this incredible human being. I’m so glad I grew up with her.
