Bateman Blog 003: 'I'm Currently Fucking Jesus' - The Pap's Smear Madonna

As a pre-cursor to the landing of their second album 'Back To The Future' we've invited one of STA's finest wordsmiths Bateman of The Young Playthings to contribute some of his life episodes to the blog. The brief is open-ended and editorial control out the window, - we hope you find his insights contentious, illuminating, scintillating and titillating!

Years ago I bought this book called ‘The Madonna Companion’. It’s a collection of reviews, interviews, articles and academic essays about her. It’s not very good, but possibly as was intended and as the title suggests, I’ve kept it around and every so often, when I’m eating lunch on a Sunday or taking a crap, I pick it up and read a few pages.

It’s funny reading the ‘serious’ press articles about Madonna in the 80s. 1985 was a particularly weird year. It was a key time, because it was before the world realised that she would be with us forever (even in death, like Mao or Hitler) but it was clear by the mid 80s that she was so much more than a piece of pop fluff who’d disappear into the thin air of which she was believed to be made, leaving ‘real’ artists like Cyndi Lauper (who?) to carry the torch for progressive pop cultural feminism. Music journalism, considering it’s about the most pointless thing in the world, is incredibly pompous. It also dates really quickly. All these articles from 1985 can’t work out what to make of Madonna. They don’t know whether to revile her or admire her (music journalism is too clinical for anything as passionate as love or hate). All the male writers are stuck on the apparent contradiction in her ability to move so unconflictedly between Rolling Stones-like raunch and early Beatles-esque innocence and all the female writers can’t work out if she’s a whore erasing the advancements made by feminism from popular memory or if she’s a modern day saint, sent from heaven to stick it to chauvinism with a conical strap-on dildo.

Funnily enough, I love all these conservative articles. The only thing more tedious than the fact that Madonna keeps reinventing herself is the press that keeps telling us this. The world seems like a more exciting place when you remember how Madonna once truly offended. All the ‘boy toy’ stuff and the ‘Madonna wannabes’ phenomenon (such a patronising and quaintly uninventive term!). I love Madonna - well, I particularly love old skool Madonna. I think Vogue was the last truly brilliant thing she did and that was nearly twenty years ago, but since then she’s always popped out a decent tune here and there and justifed our love for her. I even liked Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, and I’m not gay. I was too young to be a Madonna wannabe but not too young to turn my younger brother onto her - I remember him being about 6 years old and taking his portable tape player to the toilet so he could listen to Like A Virgin while he took a baby crap. So, as a salute to the exciting Madonna times I’ve indulged in some good old-fashioned music journalism and taken a trip down memory lane with Madge’s four albums of the 80s.

Madonna
On her first record it really seemed like Madonna wouldn’t be around for very long. Not because the music was throwaway but because the front cover looks like a photo from the portrait gallery of a serial killer’s victim list. You know how when you see photos of a serial killer’s victims they look vaguely deformed, or rubbed out, not quite real? It’s like they were always just photos - you can't imagine them as real people. Of course, most serial killers were pre DNA testing, pre mass CCTV coverage, pre the internet - and pre digital cameras, so the thumbnails of these young women are actually real life passport photos, wrecked by light and too much photocopying for print reproduction. But in the poor quality there’s a latent qualification that these were lives not lived to the full, that burnt out in a climax of unimaginable horror. Forgotten except by creepy serial killer buffs and the odd film or magazine article about what is now a fairly antiquated phenomenon - the square-bespectacled, moustachioed, redneck-genius white serial killer.
I don't think the first Madonna record is throwaway. ‘Holiday’ and ‘Lucky Star’ are great pop songs and ‘Borderline’, ‘Burning Up’ and ‘Everybody’ are all pretty good. Her voice is only as rubbish as Bob Dylan’s or Liam Gallagher’s are; technically crap but, in their rawest form, much better than when they try to sound more practiced. Of course, if Madonna had been killed by a serial killer after making this record, musos would probably herald this as the greatest pop album of all time. Which it isn't.

Like A Virgin
The ‘greatest pop album of all time’ could possibly be bestowed on Like A Virgin. At least, it’s my favourite Madonna album. It has this Nightmare Before Christmas quality to it - talking about adult things (that adults can never bring themselves to talk about) in a format for children. If she weren’t so fit and cutely cartoonish the front cover would be horrific - more Linda Blair in the Exorcist than Sally Skellington. That sultry sepia tone is very well calculated - and the supreme art of calculation is what we’ve come to expect from her. There’s no point in talking about the songs - it does them a disservice. Just go and listen to it.

True Blue
Does anyone remember Shellac? Thought not. Shellac were the shit brainchild of king shithead Steve Albini. An outlet for his moronic pomposity, he envisioned them as sounding ‘machinelike’ - probably as a statement against manufactured pop music. The brilliant thing about True Blue is that it sounds more machinelike than anything Shellac ever did. More menacing; more punk rock. True Blue is the audio epitome of what academix call ‘postmodernism’ - shiny surfaces, smoke and mirrors, narcissism, no true self. The bass does not sound like bass is supposed to sound; rather, it sounds like some metallic snake weaving through the songs, emitting a vile, clinking low frequency. You could poke eyes out with the crystalline guitar stabs. Mash someone’s head into nothingness like two giant slabs of ice (like in Saw V) with the ‘drums’. Strangle and part decapitate someone with the wire that is the keyboard lines. The only thing heart warming about the record is Madonna’s voice, strengthened but still something of an adolescent whine (though she was 30 when she made it). In terms of songs I rate it a shade off Like A Virgin - up there, but not quite as good. The cover, however, is by far her best ever.

Like A Prayer
It took me a long time to work out what part of M’s body the cover to Like A Prayer shows - her neck and breast area or her belly. This confusion extends to the music. While it features her best ever song (‘Like A Prayer’), two of her other best ever songs (‘Cherish’ and ‘Dear Jessie’) and the tour de force ‘Express Yourself’, in amongst these gems there are some serious weeds. The Prince collaboration, ‘Love Song’ does admittedly get better with more listens, but not that much better (Prince started collaborating when he ran out of his own good ideas). I can’t even remember half of the other songs. At the time of its release it was heralded as Madonna ‘growing up’ – no longer playing dress up and wearing her heart well and truly on her sleeve. Shows what the press knows.