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    Chosen time
    What I love most about Madonna as a lyricist is her inventiveness with language, the way she's constantly stretching her idiolect to accommodate new contours in her idiosyncratic inner world.

    For example, this is the chorus to "I Love New York" from the new album:

    Other cities always make me mad
    Other places always make me sad
    No other city ever made me glad
    Except New York
    I love New York


    It's like you're privy to her most private thoughts, huh?

    Okay, enough with the deadpanning. WTF? I could have written that. In fact, I think I did write it--in first grade when Miss Cramer gave us an assignment that was, like, "Write a poem describing where you'll live after you grow up and decide you're too fabulous for the Lehigh Valley." Maybe Lourdes was helping Mommy at work that day?

    Madonna's intelligence is generally, uh, of the non-verbal variety, and that's okay--she's a musician and dancer primarily. Her lyrics are almost never graceful--she likes clunky metaphors and lines that scan dicily--but when she's at her best, they're punchy and immediate. Frequently (as above), she's at both her best and her worst in the space of the same song. Of course, maddeningly enough, I love "I Love New York" to death. It's just, I swear I can feel that chorus making me dumber every time I hear it.

    Related Posts (on one page):

    1. Every little thing that you say or do
    2. West End Girl
    3. Chosen time
    Posted by Sean on 2005-11-22 09:25:18 | 5 Comments | The White Peril 白禍 » Page not found
     

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    Trackbacks >>>>>>> Categories: gay, poetry
    West End Girl
    If you (1) majored in poetry and (2) are a Madonna fan, life can be very cruel. It's not just that she sometimes produces lines that could have been written while she was waiting for a bus. (Imagine Madonna waiting for a bus! I'll wait for your peals of laughter to die down.) I actually don't mind the sort of time-honored placeholders that rhyme "burning fire" with "my desire" and the like. They've become conventions, and every art or craft form needs conventions.

    Thing with Madge is, she's often ten times worse when she actually seems to want to say something of importance. I think my favorite thing on the new album is "Jump," which is one of her always-charming songs about navigating through life with pluck and determination. There's one on every Madonna album somewhere, and she always pours feeling into it.

    This is the second verse of this year's model:

    We learned our lesson from the start
    My sisters and me
    The only thing you can depend on
    Is your family
    Life's gonna drop you down
    Like the limbs of a tree
    It sways and it swings and it bends
    until it makes you see


    The top four lines are fine. Unimaginative, but sincere-sounding.

    The bottom four? I just...I don't...I have this thing, okay? I can't read a poem or listen to lyrics without trying to interpret them, and I am getting a serious cognitive short circuit here. It sounds as if "life" is what's supposed to be parallel with "the limbs of a tree," but it could be "you" instead. Is she comparing you to dead limbs being dropped by the tree? Dead leaves? The latter would be nicely seasonal, but they don't have a whole lot of the life force she's obviously trying to project. Maybe she's telling her fans we're all fruits (as if we didn't already know)?

    Or maybe we're supposed to be kitty cats who have climed up the tree and have to take the risk of jumping off even though the...uh...wind is blowing? That would make sense given the chorus--but what would the tree be making you see by swaying, of all things? Does swaying make trees more instructive, somehow? You'd think that would have stuck in the memory during life science class in eighth grade. And how much bending around does the poor tree have to do until you see whatever it is you're supposed to see? I guess the other possibility is that the verse is supposed to work as a whole, so it's a family tree we're dealing with. Do family trees sway? I thought she just said family was the only thing that was stable.

    This song is going to be so much easier to handle in a disco while surrounded by cute boys, fueled by a vodka or two, and moving it under seizure-inducing colored lights.

    Related Posts (on one page):

    1. Every little thing that you say or do
    2. West End Girl
    3. Chosen time
    Posted by Sean on 2005-11-25 06:32:23 | 8 Comments | The White Peril 白禍 » Page not found
     

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    Every little thing that you say or do
    I was going to post about the Nikkei's acid editorial on the latest developments in the "trinity reforms," but then I came across Camille's Salon review of the new Madonna album. The restructuring of the Japanese government can wait.

    Paglia's paradoxical reaction is funny--in effect: "This CD is such a trivial non-event that it's moved me to write three pages and reexamine my entire collection of dance records on vinyl." I've certainly expended energy over the last few weeks listening to Madonna's hokey lyrics and her producers' ripped-off rhythm tracks and thinking, This song should really be annoying me. Why am I not annoyed? Why am I SINGING ALONG? I don't know that I'd go in the direction Paglia does in this climactic passage, though:

    Last summer, Madonna described her forthcoming CD as "future disco" — which raised the hopes of all die-hard disco fans that "Confessions on a Dance Floor" would be a masterpiece, a return to roots but also a visionary breakthrough.

    That's not what we got — though you'd never know it from the gushing reviews, which applauded the CD for achieving Madonna's purported aim of making people dance. My blood boiled at this insulting reduction of dance music to gymnastics — mere recreational aerobics. I for one do not dance to dance music; disco for me is a lofty metaphysical mode that induces contemplation. (Of course, this may partly descend from my Agnes Gooch marginalization in the old bar scene, where I was — as Nora Ephron would say — a wallflower at the orgy.) Giorgio Moroder's albums, which I listened to obsessively on headphones, were an enormous inspiration to me throughout the writing of "Sexual Personae" in the 1970s and '80s. Disco at its best is a neurological event, a shamanistic vehicle of space-time travel.


    I'm not sure what Agnes is doing in that paragraph. Her issue was that she needed to pull herself together and stop being a wrung-out ninny. Not a problem I can ever imagine Camille's having. Anyway, maybe it's because I've never felt marginalized at bars, but I don't see why dancing at a club is to be dismissed as "mere recreational aerobics" because Camille couldn't get a date thirty years ago.

    I wish Confessions on a Dance Floor had had more songs that are good just to listen to, too, the way Madonna's un-remixed classic singles are. Straight-ahead pop melodies do come up, but only in the second half; the album is front-loaded with songs in which the choruses are connected by lots of chopped-up phrases instead of real verses. But whatever. Surely, having done all she's done for dance pop, Madonna's entitled to devote one album to giving the fags something to dance to, even if it's not another Lasting Contribution to art. At least here in Tokyo, "Hung Up," for all its flaws, is the first song since Kylie's "Can't Get You out of My Head" that makes all the guys of every age in a bar look up and react when it comes on. Some of the reactions, granted, are on the order of "This bitch never could sing and I wish she'd finally GO AWAY!" (Kylie got that, too.) But no one's indifferent. There's something very winning about Madonna's sheer ability to keep convincing you you have to listen and watch.

    A few minor points: by the time Teena Marie made "Lover Girl," her collaboration with Rick James was long over. And in her rush to credit Giorgio Moroder for everything good that Confessions on a Dance Floor rips off, Paglia seems completely unaware of the half-dozen early New Order rhythm tracks that Price has nicked. I can easily imagine her dismissing New Order as not warm and sensual and "visceral" enough to be truly Dionysian, or what have you, but the fact is that they've had just about as much influence on dance music over the last twenty years as Madonna has. (Not that they were always original themselves. The drum break at the beginning of "Blue Monday" is stolen directly from Donna Summer's "Our Love.") Given all the arm-windmilling Paglia does about Madonna's lazily snagging ideas from obvious sources, you'd have thought NO would come up somewhere.

    Added on 3 December: Ann Althouse posted about the above passage, too; as always, some of her commenters are hilarious.

    Related Posts (on one page):

    1. Every little thing that you say or do
    2. West End Girl
    3. Chosen time
    Posted by Sean on 2005-12-02 05:04:40 | 7 Comments | The White Peril 白禍 » Page not found
     

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