Critic-at-large - Madonna’s Confessions II

Madonna’s dance music has always been social. This might sound obvious; isn’t all dance music social?; aren’t dance floors literally composed of a mass of people? But if you’ve been to a techno or trance gig recently you might be able to hear the difference. (And see the difference, too; as in, a disconcertingly large number of promising young lads slumped over in a K-hole.) Some dance floors are focussed on a self-pleasure kind of hedonism, where the dissolution of oneself into the larger substrate of the floor is a big part of the floor’s—and indeed the music’s—object. These experiences have their own deep meaning, absolutely—it strikes me that precisely the behaviours people use to “forget their woes,” “shake off their working weeks,” and “lose themselves” (or whatever other redundant things people want to say about dance cultures) are embodied behaviours. Taking drugs, dancing, staying up late, having sex, feeling anonymous in the dark... The things that might appear to promise escape are in many ways actually reminders of the inescapability of our embodiedness. What appears as an exit from personality is instead a way that personality enters with what it stubbornly would like to think is its antonym: the body, which is temporary, and which, like any high or sexual pleasure, we know cannot last forever.

Enter Madonna, who, from her first ever single, “Everybody”, with its happy-go-lucky chorus (“Everybody, c’mon, dance and sing / Everybody, get up and do your thing”!) has been working in a post-disco idiom that recaptures the social goodwill and excess of that brief but influential era. Madonna’s dance music, because it is good and popular dance music, does what I’ve described above with respect to trance and techno—but it complicates the picture I’ve painted. Take “Get Together,” the extremely brilliant sleeper from her 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor, as an example. Flitting between major and minor tonal centres and never quite resolving, the music’s bottled-up hopefulness is reflected in its lyrics, which are often subjunctive in tense, asking questions, probing possibilities, and seeking a resolution they can’t attain just yet: “Find the secret”; “Turn your head around”; “Do you believe in love at first sight?”; “Can we get together?” The song anticipates something—namely, erotic unity—that lies just beyond its reach, it being, after all, a song. Like the bodies it inspires to movement, the music seeks to surpass its very medium but cannot. The artfulness in Madonna’s dance music is involved in how it skewers the private and the social, and in how it does this by marking out the formal boundaries of songs themselves. In doing that, it captures something too of the body’s mortality, which, as I’m arguing, is one of the major subjects of night life. 

“People think that dance music is superficial / But they've got it all wrong / The dance floor is not just a place, it's a threshold / A ritualistic space where movement replaces language”—so comes one of Madonna’s spoken-word breaks on her new track “One Step Away.” Billed as a sequel to her 2005 album, Confessions II follows in its predecessor’s musical language and its structure, being mixed as a continuous DJ set. Its opener, “I Feel So Free,” was rightly chosen as the album’s lead single: an improvisatory riff on Lil Louis’ 1989 track “French Kiss,” it displays Madonna in a new directness as a kind of dance philosopher or disco sage, thinking out loud about what it means to be part of a dance culture. As in “One Step Away,” the spoken-word passages are where all pretense falls away: “Honestly, I wish I could be like other people / And just not care / But out here on the dance floor / I feel so free.” Still, even in this direct and speechy setting, Madonna retains her genius for everyday poetry, making refrains (and T-shirts!) out of such generic phrases as “Don’t be a vibe kill.” Everything ordinary is, in a Madonna lyric, raised to a higher level of focus, evocation, and intensity. Her collaborator both on this record and back in 2005 is the excellent Stuart Price, who brings to his heady production on this track a Donna Summer interpolation set off against a needling acid line buzzing through the haze. Price proves himself across this record as king of the low-pass filter, playing his fader like it’s an instrument all of its own—and it's a thrill each time he does, in the same way that a thunderous Beethoven coda is always a thrill, even though (or precisely because) you know where it’s headed. You’re tempted to call it IDM, but really it’s just bloody well done. 

Blood indeed is the emphasis of the album’s first nine tracks, which uniformly are strong and some of the best since 2005. “Danceteria” is a particular—and particularly, delightfully naff—highlight. It remembers the singer’s time at the eponymous nightclub where she first got her break; and remembers, too, the star-studded generation of artists she came up alongside. “I got something I wanna talk about” is the vocal line, looped from the previous track, “Bring Your Love,” that melts us into “Danceteria” in the continuous mix of the album—and so Madonna proceeds to tell us what’s on her mind. Her personal memories collide with the chorus, dissolving into the kinds of aphoristic commands Madonna specialises in—“Everybody get up and dance / Everyone here is a work of art”—but the chorus’ aphorisms double as an echo of her own earlier work (see “Everybody”). There’s that social element: together we become beautiful and brief, a work of art. It’s compounded by the lovely later track “Love Sensation,” whose chorus speaks limerence to its fruition: “Baby, come and get with me / There's something that I gotta do / Baby, when you're here with me / There's nothing that we cannot do.”

But in some ways, Confessions II can’t be what it sets out to be, largely because house music itself is no longer what it set out to be. Originally the domain of queer, black artists making what they could of the dregs of disco and setting it hard against the emergence of drum machine tech, house music today has become so mainstream that you’ll hear it at a coffee shop on a Sunday morning—thanks in large part to the adoption of its idioms by superstars like Madonna. As a further point, it’s worth noting here that a large part of the “cringe” surrounding Madonna is due to how she’s seen as a cultural magpie who skims or scalps whatever happens to take her eye. Tim Perlich’s review for NOW Magazine of her 1998 masterwork Ray of Light sums things up curtly: “The predatory shakedown of gifted fringe artists by pop-music synthesists like Madonna is too often hailed as groundbreaking innovation when, in fact, it's merely lowest-common-denominator homogenization.” Unfortunately for this postmodern loser, Ray of Light is good—it’s that one thing that critics of the late 20th-century have had a hard time dealing with—and the real difficulty in Madonna indeed is that she’s quite good at this whole music thing. The question of how you square ethics with aesthetics is not only one that permeates the discourse surrounding her work, it’s also one of her pet subjects: “We all learn from what’s outside / But love from within” (“Love Without Words”).

Confessions II is changed also because Madonna has changed, grown older and wiser, and is reading closely the melancholies that come with her achievement, fame, and age. From the tenth track onwards, the album takes a noticeably darker turn, and a spattering of conversation poems close out (or close in?), taking heavy inspiration from the trip-hop eclecticism of Ray of Light. “Bizzare” remembers her marriage to Sean Penn; “Fragile” her increasingly-fraught relationship with her late brother Christopher; “The Test” her relationship with her eldest daughter, thrust into the spotlight before she could choose it for herself; and “L.E.S. Girl” her time before fame, living in New York’s Lower East Side. This memoiristic tendency links to the earlier track “Danceteria” and plays off remarkably well against the intellectual fervor of tracks like “I Feel So Free,” “One Step Away,” and “Love Without Words,” among others, because the dance floor both destabilises and centralises personhood; throws the former into counterpoint with the latter. The generic, proverbial, and aphoristic come into contact with the specific, the individual—in other words, the body is in dance. And it turns again to what all dancers know is to come in the album’s final pronouncement: “Everything fades away.”