FEATURE:
Three Years on From Madame X…
What Next for Madonna?
__________
ON 14th June…
IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna onstage during the 2019 Billboard Music Awards at MGM Grand Garden Arena on 1st May, 2019 in Las Vegas/PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for dcp
it will be three years since Madonna released her latest and fourteenth studio album, Madame X. This year is not exactly going to be quiet for her! I think the biopic she is directing is moving along. As I suspected, Julia Garner has been offered the titular role. Erotica turns fifty later in the year, and I suspect that Madonna will be involved in some anniversary commemoration of a reissue of the album. 50 Number Ones is the new remix album. There is a lot going on in her world. Also later this year, her debut single, Everybody, turns forty. Even though there are no immediate plans to follow Madame X, I think fans will be looking the way of new music. Madonna did tour the album before the pandemic, but she suffered from injury and setbacks. Whether she is going to look more to live work rather than new music, I am not too sure. Madame X was an album that put Madonna back on the critical radar. Not that her previous albums were poorly received but, since 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, her albums have got mixed reaction. Madame X was a lot more positively received. Madame X, an alter-ego her album is named after, is also the title of a 1908 play written by Alexandre Bisson. It was great seeing Madonna embody another alter ego. Like Erotica and Mistress Dita, this was a chance for her to make a more conceptual album. Featuring some of her best modern-day singles – Crave and I Rise among them -, I get the sense that we may hear more from her soon.
There was definitely a lot of love from fans when Madame X came out in 2019. Madonna was sixty when the album was released. It is testament to her endurance and sense of reinvention that she managed to put out an album that showed that she was still one of the greatest Pop artists in the world. This is what AllMusic said in their review:
“Madame X is the rare album from a veteran artist that puts earlier records in a different light. Ever since the 1980s, the conventional wisdom about Madonna claimed she brought trends from the musical underground for the purpose of pop hits, but Madame X -- a defiantly dense album that has little to do with pop, at least in the standard American sense -- emphasizes the artistic instincts behind these moves. The shift in perception stems from Madonna embracing a world outside of the United States. While she's been an international superstar since the dawn of her career, Madonna relocated to Lisbon, Portugal in 2017, a move that occurred two years after Rebel Heart -- an ambitious record balanced between revivals of old styles and new sounds -- failed to burn up any Billboard chart outside of Dance singles. These two developments fuel Madame X, an album that treats America as a secondary concern at best. Madonna may address the political and social unrest that's swept across the globe during the latter years of the 2010s, but her commentary is purposely broad. Perhaps Madonna errs on the side of being a little bit too broad -- on "Killers Who Are Partying," she paints herself as a martyr for every oppressed voice in the world -- yet this instinct to look outside of her experience leads her to ground Madame X in various strains of Latinx sounds, trap, and art-pop, music that not only doesn't sound much like the American pop charts in 2019, but requires focused attention in a manner that makes the songs not especially friendly to playlisting.
Madame X has its share of colorful neo-disco numbers and shimmering chill-out tracks, but they're painted in dark hues, and they're surrounded by songs so closely cloistered, they can play like mini-suites. Case in point is "Dark Ballet," an ominous number that descends into a sinister, robotic rendition of Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Reed Flutes" section from The Nutcracker -- an allusion that recalls not the future, but the dystopian horror show of A Clockwork Orange. Such darkness hangs heavy over Madame X, surfacing fiercely in the clenched-mouth phrasing on "God Control," but present even on the bobbing reggae of "Future." The murk does lift on occasion -- "Come Alive" gains levity from its clustered polyrhythms -- but the somber tenor when combined with fearless exploration does mean Madame X can be demanding listening. The rhythms are immediate but the songs aren't, nor are the opaque productions. While this thick, heady confluence of cultures and sounds may demand concentration, Madame X not only amply rewards such close listening, but its daring embrace of the world outside the U.S. underscores how Madonna has been an advocate and ally for left-of-mainstream sounds and ideas throughout her career”.
Before coming to a bit of a round-up, I want to source some of SLANT’s review of Madame X. A terrific release from Madonna, this was an artist with a new lease of life, taking her undeniably great music to new places:
“Of course, Madonna has never been your average pop star. Though her music has deep roots in R&B and disco, she is, at heart, a rock auteur, with all of the inclinations toward upending the status quo and expressing a singular vision that designation implies. Her last album, 2015’s Rebel Heart, was designed by committee, while its predecessor, MDNA, was recorded during a period when she seemed more interested in directing movies and extending her brand than making music. So it makes sense that when she decided to forgo songwriting camps and aspirations of a late-career radio hit for her 14th album, Madame X, Madonna turned to French producer Mirwais, her primary collaborator on American Life.
In other words, Madame X sounds like the work of an artist reawakened, and one who’s got something to say. It’s a development reportedly inspired by her time in Lisbon, where she was surrounded by musicians and art in a way she hadn’t been since her pre-fame days in the East Village. The influence of Lisbon’s multicultural history can be heard on tracks like the fado-meets-Motown “Crazy”—co-produced by Mike Dean, the album’s other principal knob-twirler—and the polyrhythmic “Batuka,” featuring Afro-Portuguese group Orquestra de Batukadeiras.
Madame X plays like a musical memoir, sometimes literally: “I came from the Midwest/Then I went to the Far East/I tried to discover my own identity,” Madonna sings on the Eastern-inflected “Extreme Occident,” referencing her rise to fame and spiritual awakening, famously documented on her 1998 album Ray of Light. A multi-part suite that shifts abruptly from electro-pop dirge to classical ballet and back again, “Dark Ballet” is a Kafkaesque treatise on faith and her lifelong crusade against the patriarchal forces of religion, gender, and celebrity—an existential battle echoed in the Jean-Paul Sartre-quoting closing track “I Rise.”
The album’s autobiography is also conveyed sonically: It’s a thrill to hear Madonna singing over a ‘90s house beat on the smoldering “I Don’t Search I Find.” But despite its ballroom strings, finger-snaps, and throaty spoken-word bridge, comparing it to “Vogue” or “Erotica” would be too easy. This isn’t a song so much as a mood. It’s downstairs music, the distant bassline rumbling beneath your feet as you slip into a bathroom stall for a quick bump or fuck.
Madonna has a reputation for being a trendsetter, but her true talent lies in bending those trends to her will, twisting them around until they’re barely recognizable, and creating something entirely new. The album’s pièce de résistance, at least in that regard, is the six-minute “God Control,” which begins with Madonna conjuring the spirit and disaffected monotone of Kurt Cobain—“I think I understand why people get a gun/I think I understand why we all give up,” she sings through clenched teeth—before the whole thing implodes into a euphoric, densely layered samba-disco-gospel mash-up. Throughout the song, Madonna’s vocals alternate between Auto-Tuned belting, urgent whispers, and Tom Tom Club-style rapping as she takes on the gaslight industrial complex and so-called political reformers. On paper, it might sound like the ingredients for a musical Hindenburg, but—somewhere around the midpoint, when she declares, “It’s a con, it’s a hustle, it’s a weird kind of energy!”—it all coheres into the most exhilaratingly batshit thing she’s done in years.
If, metaphorically, Madame X represents Madonna’s rediscovery of her voice as an artist, then it also highlights the literal loss of it. Over the years, the soft edges of her voice have grown sharper, and the album’s pervasive vocal effects—most gratuitous on the electro-ragga “Future” and, to a lesser degree, the haunting “Looking for Mercy”—have a distancing effect. The heavy Auto-Tune on Music and American Life was deployed in service of larger conceptual themes like imperfection (“Nobody’s Perfect”) and anonymity (“Nobody Knows Me”), contrasted by the bare performances of more confessional songs like “Easy Ride.” Here, filters are indiscriminately thrown on nearly every song, which only serves to obscure Madonna’s humanity. On “Medéllin,” for example, her admission that “For once, I didn’t have to hide myself” is pointlessly cloaked in Auto-Tune, keeping us at a remove”.
Even though the rest of 2022 is going to be busy, I feel there is this swell of curiosity and demand for new Madonna music. There have been remixes and hook-ups since 2019, though not a lot in terms of solo material that indicates where she might head next. Maybe she will return to her 1980s and 1990s sound and release an album that sounds like Erotica (1992), Ray of Light (1998), Like a Prayer (1989) or True Blue (1986). It would be interesting hearing a blend of those albums, rather than something that sounds like Madame X. As good an album as it is, it is very modern. I think that a combination of current and throwback would be a good next step. Madonna is at her peak when making these innovative Pop songs that stick in your head. One of the issues with Madame X was the processed vocals. There were quite a lot of producers and writers in the mix. Hearing an album more streamlined and personal, I feel, would make for even stronger music. Whatever comes next, it is going to court a lot of attention. Three years since her latest studio album, Madonna still keeps people guessing. Someone who is always reinventing themselves and ensuring the music is fresh and evolved, it is hard to predict what her fifteenth studio album will sound like. When it comes to Madonna…
YOU never can tell.