MADONNA – "Vogue"

Hurrah!

Greta Garbo died when this was number one

…and great to see Madge replace Kylie and JB

On the rap bit and the triple stresses: This might jump out at me more because I’m an Amurrican, but most of the time when Madonna is rapping she’s not exactly trying to sound like a rapper. She’s almost cheering–and she was a cheerleader in high school. You can hear that specific sort of cheer cadence in a lot of her talking-rhythmically-in-a-song moments; the one that sounds the most like a cheer is the bit in “Thief of Hearts.” I think that’s a big reason why she can sound so relaxed and authentic, because she’s not trying to sound like a b-girl; she’s just a suburban girl who made up a cheer for her squad to go in the middle of that song.

A fine return to form, Tom, after such a long layoff. And in her video, Madonna returns to the screen goddess territory she obviously craved after her Marylin pastiche. But those monochrome soft-focus face shots simply highlight her shortcomings in the wake of her less than illustrious movie outings. “Vogue”, however is a stunning piece of House/Pop. Those synth-horn stabs that punctuate the Housey piano phrasing are marvellous, even if in a ’90s context, they’re an ’80s cliche. They work here.

I get the sense, that even if everything she’s doing is carefully calculated, she can still cut loose and have fun on lines like “get on the dancefloor/that’s what it’s for! C’MON VOGUE…”. It’s a little less brash and visceral than “Into The Groove”, but she’s maturing and about to confront her most ardent fans with just what it means to be feminine and desired.

#2 Watch: Two weeks of Alannah Myles’ dreary smooth blues ‘Black Velvet’, then a week of Paula Abdul’s ‘Opposites Attract’

#10 The Immaculate Collection mix is a barely noticeable 20 seconds longer… as much as the music is a 10 for me, I wouldn’t blame you for finding it more compelling as a music video (which, mind you, isn’t an edit, either).

My reasoning for a 9 would be 10 for the rest of the record minus 1 for the rap, so it’s interesting how much people love the rap. Is one of the definitions of imperial phase “ability to combine a faded dance trend and house-by-numbers into a record that everyone will immediately recognize as a classic”? Because I remember being amazed at how great this was when it kinda had no right to be.

Her interesting move to me was taking vogueing away from fashion and saying it was about Hollywood. It bugged me at the time, like she didn’t understand, but I can see why people would think this was her way to say she was up there with the monuments. And I guess Madonna had better standing to steal black, gay culture than Malcolm McLaren ever did (speaking as a fan of both).

Rather impressive pop package this one… One important point about Vogue that no one else has made that I’m aware of goes as follows:

On one level, as Tom says it’s ‘Madonna’s attempt to join a pantheon of pop culture icons – “Grace Kelly, Harlow Jean….” and so on. No, not her attempt: her assertion that she is already part of this company by right.’ On another level, though, that assertion’s been there all along, just not made *completely* explicit. I think that M’s deepest insight from the beginning was that there was massive unmet demand in culture by the ’80s for female glamour: there had been no big new female stars out of Hollywood since the ’60s (and whole woman-centered genres from melodramas to the rom-com almost completely died off for almost 25 years from 1965-1990). Could pop-dance-music and vids be an alternative source of incredible glamour? Yes, M. established it could.

But, at the exact moment when M. was somewhat desperately trying to become a movie-star (understandable, but also somewhat betraying of her own best insight), and also making her original modus operandi very explicit in Vogue, things *finally* changed in Hollywood, altering the equation for M. in culture overall.

In early 1990 Pretty Woman comes out and suddenly glamorous Hollywood is suddenly all on again (and modern celebrity/tabloid journalism/cable tv explode in response to that and to the diva ‘supermodel’ wave hit). The great run of teen films from Fast Times, Risky Business, John Hughes to Heathers ends, and suddenly more adult-centered (at least 20 somethings) rom-coms and lots of wedding-based comedies are literally everywhere. Julia Roberts was the biggest female movie star since Audrey Hepburn (and the first female movie star of any serious magnitude for at least a decade) and the shift she produced across the whole industry was decisive. By the time you get things like 4 Weddings and Muriel’s Wedding in 1994 it was clear we were smack in the middle of something: the rotating stack of types, plots, tones that constitute the Julia Roberts/Hugh Grant screwball, or whatever it is. Anyhow, M. not only would have to beat a somewhat grumpy, chastened retreat from her Hollywood career throughout the ’90s, the culture had generally moved on so that pop-music absolutely didn’t have the female glamour field almost to itself any more. Pop-music wouldn’t own the female glamour business again until the mid ’00s, when esp. as roberts and grant aged out of the rom-com age-zone, that era and its tropes ran out of gas, and there were no freakishly ultra-charming stars* to replace them. Suddenly High school-centered comedy showed some serious signs of life, and suddenly too a gap in the marketplace for female glamour opened up again, which all the Beyonces and Gagas have duly filled.
Anyhow, Vogue and its vid. are definitely a high-water mark for M. and for the power of pop-dance music itself as a source of female glamour in the wider culture.

*Rom-coms esp. are inherently manipulative and predictable and irritating…. In my view, they tend to work only when there are a bunch of actors around (at least one woman and one man) who have off-the-charts level of charm, who make the whole thing bearable and then through repetition and familiarity allow us to see all the micro-differences in plotting and characterization that we otherwise would be invisible amid all the cloddish high-manipulativeness and heart-string-tugging etc. What made the ’30s/’40s stuff great was the large pool of freakish charmers, hepburn/grant/stanwyck/stewart/colbert/fonda/tracy. In most decades since there’s just been at most one solid pair (not necessarily working together all the time) anchoring the genre.

Frankie Knuckles was interviewed on the BBC’s Dancing In The Streets documentary in the mid 90s, and he said of Vogue that for him it was the moment where house music became “legit”. He wasn’t saying that in a dismissive way, he meant it as a validation. That’s quite in keeping with Mr Fingers’ Can You Feel It and that records pronouncements about house music being EVERYBODY’S music “if you’re black or white, jew or gentile” etc. Something about the mass popularity of Vogue is fitting with that everyone-welcomed ethos of Chicago house.

“What you lookin’ at?”

I’m looking at the end of the video for “Prince Charming” where successive Adams are standing, nearly motionless, dressed up as heroes for a centrespread and I nod my head in wonder that New Pop could permeate so much, so late.

“Strike the pose”

Even if Madonna merely studied post-punk and New Pop, took what she needed from it – in other words, the poses – and used it to advertise herself, implying that there was something to be advertised, such that Ari Up’s “I’m not a material girl” becomes, or is made to become “I am a material girl,” then she was the keenest and most astute of students. Certainly she must have listened to Waltz Darling, the 1989 album by Malcolm McLaren and the Bootzilla Orchestra which beat her to celebrating vogueing by a year…but few people outside the circle bought or heard that, and Madonna can hardly be blamed for wanting to drag it (in drag? “Marlon Brando, Jimmy Dean/On the cover of a magazine”) into pop (im)proper.

Opening on a flat plane of high string synth drones, Shep Pettibone’s aqueous electric piano and synthesiser land gracefully in the river of (dis)grace; as with the remixes he did for the Pet Shop Boys, there is an unhurried stateliness about his method of dance. The song revisits the “Into The Groove” territory of the dancefloor as escape (“You try everything you can to escape/The pain of life that you know”), but five years have passed and Madonna is no longer (was she ever?) ingenuous about her joy; there is a shadow looming over “Vogue” which cannot easily be displaced.

“When all else fails and you long to be/Something better than you are today”

The song appears over the end credits of Dick Tracy, a vogueing film if ever there were one; all primary colours, poses, living cartoons, queasy semi-reality. It fulfills the same function as the “Broadway Melody Ballet” does in Singin’ In The Rain; the hero wakes up from his dreams of a heroic past into an unforgiving modern world where doors are slammed in his face, mob henchmen toss coins threateningly at him, and yet he decides to continue surviving and thriving there (Cyd Charisse is there, and only there, precisely to “vogue”). Meanwhile, over the pleasingly ambiguous bassline, Madonna attempts to encourage a view of happiness, a guide to the thing if not the thing itself (“If the music’s pumping it will give you new life/You’re a superstar – YES! That’s what you are! You KNOW it!”) – but is she once again singing to her blackened but gradually brightening mirror? As the piano careers like a slalom of displaced chords through the chorus, like a labyrinth out of which she is trying to dance herself, there is a hint of desperation about her “come on”s and “hey, hey, hey”s; but then as the music rises in its bridge, via a nod to Bolan (“Not just where you bump and grind it”), Madonna rediscovers a soul, a purpose – the illuminated stairway to heaven which she ascends one step at a time (“musical,” “beautiful!,” “magical!!,” “LIFE’S A BALL!!!“) until she is at the summit, triumphant – “So GET UP ON THE DANCE FLOOR!!!!”

But then we descend again into the central spoken section – and there is a sudden blankness (“Beauty is where you find it” as if she hasn’t actually found it) to her cold, verging on frozen, incantation of idols of her past (“Picture of a beauty queen” – again, not the thing, or the human being, itself, or herself), with the odd wink (“Rita Hayworth gave good face”), a trace of earnestness (“Bette Davis…we love you”). “Ladies with an attitude, fellas that were in the mood” – the inference being that all of this illustrious history and art has led up to, culminated in, her…and was that all there is, as she rapidly descends the staircase with her death sentence:

“Don’t just stand there.
Let’s get to it.
Strike a pose.
There’s nothing to it.
Vogue.”

Madonna’s “There’s nothing to it” is one of the most terrifying chasms of emptiness in pop; she speaks it such that she means it literally. Look in the mirror, dance to the music – but glance behind that mirror, look below that dancefloor, and there is a ghastly void. The documentary In Bed With Madonna, which documented her Blonde Ambition tour, seems to exult in its own grumpy way that there is, indeed, nothing to what Madonna does, nothing to explain the presence of Warren Beatty or Kevin Costner – why are they there? Worse, why are we here, watching?

Her closing “oooohhh”s are her lifeline out of the dredged river of nothing – but again there is that stern proclamation of (or order to) “Vogue” at the end, following which the track echoes away into limbo, like a briefly snatched dream, now too distant to grasp. As though she could ever be “near.” “Don’t you ever, don’t you ever…”

I’d never even thought of it as a rap, just a handy list of references – “check these cats out”. More like the chorus of Dance Stance than the hysterical twins We Didn’t Start The Fire/It’s The End Of The World As We Know It.

Harlow Jean, though. Couldn’t she have spent another 30 seconds thinking about it and come up with “Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow” and “Grace Kelly, Norma Jean”? And the last couplet rhymes “to it” with “to it”.

“Grace Kelly, Howard Jones”.

We didn’t know where it was going, vinylscott — they’re not scripted.

#22: Who are “we”?

punctum #27 – i did begin listening to it in company, but ended up alone!

And it’s during the reign of this single that Rosie won a seat on the council of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, and thus became Councillor Rosie for the first time.

It was the year of shenanigans in local government elections, in which underhand tactics were tried in Tory marginal boroughs Westminster and Wandsworth (the same underhand tactics, involving registering empty properties with the connivance of estate agents, manipulating postal votes, and setting up spurious proxies, would be repeated more widely two years later in a general election). Reading John O’Farrell’s autobiography years later I was struck by how closely his life and mine had run in parallel up to this point, whereupon John lost a supposedly safe Labour seat in Wandsworth and I picked up a potentially iffy one in North Kensington with a big swing. John went on to be a successful writer while I had an unhappy time in politics and was eventually thoroughly shafted by the Blair enforcers. But that’s another story for later in the decade.

vinylscot: due to a podcasting error, you actually WERE hearing a Rhod Gilbert standup set. The feed has been fixed so please try redownloading.

#31 – Without wishing to defend Shirley Porter in any way, in the interests of fairness it should be pointed out that evil-doing in local government (particularly concerning allegations of postal vote fixing) has not been confined to one party, as subsequent events in Tower Hamlets demonstrated.

Vinylscot – You were rather reticent in your criticism of the radio show back there. Please clarify. Did you not care for it?

I have always regarded Lollards as a series of informal conversations/discussions that tend to take on a life of their own, and are not dictated by a rigid format where bullet points are ticked off as the discussions progress. I don’t always agree with what’s being said, but the podcasts have never been less than fascinating.

Sorry you didn’t like the show VS – I suspect and hope we’ll be doing more Slug of Pop formats but probably *not* actually tackling the very next track up on Popular, as it contributed somewhat to my demotivation in doing the entry! I felt I’d “done” Vogue when of course I hadn’t really.

#21: Certainly she must have listened to Waltz Darling, the 1989 album by Malcolm McLaren and the Bootzilla Orchestra

as you say, which was the first to “Vogue”..

Still, fairs fair, as The Clash had actually beat Malcolm McLaren to the scratching/hip-hop by a full year with “This is Radio Clash” .

re 42

I’d put LaP on the side of the angels and this on the other if forced to make that distinction.

Your last point is a great spot – a reflection of how Madonna fits into Tom’s own pop history rather than ‘the canon’ I would suggest.

Not only did “Vogue” rip off Malcolm McLaren’s “Deep In Vogue” from the previous year – she had actually watched McLaren perform this at a benefit concert she was involved at – but it’s actually kind of a mash-up composite of several songs and influences “Blue Monday”-style.

The opening verse is from the chorus of Inner City’s “Ain’t Nobody Better”, they complained about her thievery at the time. Most obviously the horns were taken from Salsoul Orchestra’s “Chicago Bus Stop” which Pettibone remixed. And the basic beat of the song is taken from another remix of his, Janet Jackson’s “Miss You Much”. The bassline is also the same as her own “Causing A Commotion”.

@loomer, 45. Thanks for those references. Even the Inner City track is new to me, so I guess I was part of the great unwashed mass who got to hear Madonna as effectively originating a lot of stuff that was actually in the air at the time if you were connected to the right scene. I think you’re being a little harsh calling the final item just a mash-up, but your excavations definitely help clarify the exact level at which Madonna and her producers are working, i.e., to streamline things and to impose her lyrics and characteristic obsessions and personality on some existing sound possibilities.

It’s interesting that after this M. *increasingly* looked to her producer du jour to very explicitly provide a lot of the underlying sound stuff and that they then get album co-writing credits for all. On that front at least Vogue feels transitional: Shep Pettibone is getting the co-writing credit but he isn’t really providing the sounds in the same way Willam Orbit or nellee Hooper or mirwais or stuart price/rhythmes digitales will later do. Rather all these other artists that Pettibone’s heard and/or remixed are providing the sounds, hence their prima facie pretty legit. gripes about thievery to the extent that, e.g., Inner city, aren’t given co-writing credits.

I recall Public Enemy going pretty ape-shit about not getting payed/credited for the massive sample from them (from ‘Security of the first world’ IIRC) that’s most of Justify My love. But there wasn’t a law-suit about it as far as I know, perhaps because PE lived in a glass house on that front. A messy period for attributions until the mid ’90s was my sense of things. Certainly by the time Daft punk get on the scene, full writing credit for major samples and various sorts of reverse engineerings seemed to be much more widely practised.

re 47: Public Enemy going off on one about Justify My Love is pretty amusing – for one thing Security Of The First World is one of only two tracks on “It Take A Nation Of Millions…” to be devoid of a sample; I think the other is Mind Terrorist. As you point out – glass houses and all that.

I love PE – both Millions and Fear of a Black Planet are high on my list of great rap albums (and I have a sneaking regard for Apocalypse ’91 too) but the main thing that is amusing about the hypocrisy of their stance on Justify is that quite a few of their lyrics are showing justified anger about the hypocrisy that surrounded them. I wonder if anyone pointed this out to Chuck and The Bomb Squad?