'Girls
can wear jeans and cut their hair short, wear shorts and boots, it's okay
to be a a boy but for a boy to look like a girl is degrading because you
think being a girl is degrading but secretly you'd love to know what it's
like, wouldn't you - what it feels like for a girl!'
I've
always liked the odd Madonna song, but when I saw Sonic Youth do a live
version of her 80s tune Into the Groove I realised
just just how musically subversive Madonna was. Later on, I got to read
Camille Paglia's impressions of her, and from then I really began to pay
more attention to her music; especially from around the time of Justify
my love, her voice seemed to almost evoke the black shining
latex she was often photographed wearing. She seemed just at home in the
shadowy eternal night of the S&M scene as on MTV. Even before that album,
there were intimations of what would be more fully realised by Ray
Of Light and Music in the defiant
Live to tell. A perfect counter foil to the bubblegum optimism
of Cherish. The black and white video of threshing mermen
on the shore situating the music perfectly. If there were any doubts about
Madonna's views on hegemony they were dispelled by the haunting Oh
Father(1989).
'You can't
hurt me now I got away from you, I never thought I would You can't make
me cry, you once had the power I never felt so good about myself'.It
revisits the powerlessness of childhood and was released with another powerful
black and white video that lent a gothic air to the lyrical lament to ideological
dominance.
Ray of Light marked a point at which
Madonna seemed to be doing her best to overturn the fixity of the 'material
girl' label in favour of the more
enlightened 'spiritual girl'. Motherhood too seems to have had a big influence
on Madonna - which predictably is in keeping with the trajectory of her
image.The album itself is an intertexual convergence: shot through with
dance beats fuelling raga influenced phrasing.
This
kind of ethnic influence is not new for Madonna, as a brief look back to
her Latin phase of La
Isla Bonita
from True
Blue
(1986)
shows. In this way it can be seen that Madonna constitutes a form
of 'transculturation (Shuker 308)', which is the globalisation
and centralisation of media; and in a sense, is akin to 'cultural imperialism'
but without the homogeneity or predictability. However a better term to
use might be 'cultural synchronisation', which unlike cultural imperialism
lacks connotations of force. Madonna's music is 'internationalized' (Robinson
21) to be sure, but not in the same sense as Robinson et al. It crosses
cultural boundries as easily as it does demographics. Ironic in that the
universal appeal of Madonna seems at times almost at odds with the her outspoken
celebriteness.
'I
get so much bad press. People associate a girl who’s successful with being
a bimbo or an airhead. Sexy boys never get bad press'.
But
while Madonna is savvy to trends within popular music, she is careful not
to be too influenced by them, as Ray of Light
shows. While it has a dance floor feel, it leans toward, and has definite
signifiers of, Drum & Bass interwoven thoughout it. 'From
a historical perspective the practices of music production have always been
political and dialectical in a broad sense. Dominant forms are continually
challenged; new forms, entrenched and challenged in turn' (Robinson
22).This is exactly the case with Drum & Bass, which is quickly becoming
more entrenched within the commercial mainstream - this is no less of a
reason to enjoy it musically, but really points more toward the problems
inherent to incorporating such sliding signifiers within the production
of music. If, as Robinson et al. suggest, 'all music is political in nature'
(Robinson 22),then what are Madonna's audience and
fans decoding and takeing from her music. I think, and here, I am referring
particularly to Madonna's female audience, that the artist's music provides
gaps within hegemony where patriarchal dominance can be negotiated, accepted,
or flatout rejected. The music and Madonna's image utilise ideological,
or more specifically patriarchal, signifiers but in a way that subverts
them to a cause that says 'You
put this in me, so now what, so now what'?(Justify
my love). As John Fiske points out, in his excellent
deconstruction of the 'Madonna look
(Fiske 96)',
'Her image becomes, then, not a model of meaning for young girls in patriarchy,
but a site of semiotic struggle between the forces of patriarchal control
and feminine resistance, of capitalism and the subordinate, of the adult
and the young'(Fiske 97). In this way the 'Material
girl' has taken one of capitalism's own weapons against resistance and turned
it on itself - capitalism will often co-opt a thing itself if it is a threat
to its own ideological dominance. I find this one of the most interesting
and commendable aspects of Madonna as celebrity as image. In the end it
is extremely difficult to disengage Madonna's music from her image, as there
is a symbiotic balance between the two. I also find it extremely hard to
describe what it is aesthetically I like about Madonna's music.And with
each new incarnation comes a new sound, a new influence, the only real constant
seems to be an ideological one. But as was said earlier, I do prefer her
later material from The Immaculate Collection
(1990) onward. There is a definite dance feel to her
later work that is heightened by the strong use of percussion as a driving
force. When it comes down to the nuts and bolts of it, the music is what
counts. Madonna maybe many things to many people, but her contribution to
popular music, and her back catalogue of films, will be a site of continued
contention for sometime to come. The Dictionary Of World Biography
says rather blandly and myopically, 'Her fame depended on shock appeal rather
than talent' (Jones 469).But contrast this with The
Faber Book of Pop, 'Although she seems to be in the mould of the typical
blonde female singer, she's certainly not dumb' (Kureishi
571).Madonna has consistently flaunted her distaste for convention
and the restrictive morality of orthodoxy more ardently than some musicians
who now seem merely reactionary. It's a commercial dream all right, but
not as patriarchy knows it.
"Poor
is the man Whose pleasures depend On the permission of another Love me,
that's right, love me I wanna be your baby."
Madonna's
Discography
Madonna,
(1983) Like A Virgin, (1984) True Blue, (1986) Who's That Girl, (1987)
You Can Dance, (1987) Like A Prayer, (1989)I'm Breathless, (1990) The
Immaculate Collection, (1990) Erotica, (1992) Bedtime Stories, (1994)
Something To Remember, (1995) Evita, (1996) Ray of Light, (1998) Music,
(2000)
References
Fiske,
J. (1989). Madonna, Reading the Popular. Boston: Hyman, chapter 5a Jones,
Barry. (1994) Dictionary Of World Biography Melbourne: Australian Print
Group Kureishi, H & Savage, J (1995) The Faber Book of Pop London: Faber
& Faber Robinson, Deanna. et. al. (1991) Music at the Margins. Sage,n
Newbury Park, chapter 1: Popular Music Meanings. Shuker, Roy. (1998) Key
Concepts in Popular Music New York: Routledge
