by Lucy O'Brien
When it came to shooting the video, Gutierez and Camacho set up most of the authentic “Vogue” steps, while choreographer Vincent Paterson embellished them. At first, not everyone was convinced. “I’d just finished ballet school, and this was my second video,” recalls Salim. “I remember David [Fincher] said, ‘Put him in this tuxedo jacket.’ So I wore that, and they put me on some steps, and I was doing some poses, and it took like fifteen minutes, and I was like, ‘OK, is that it?’ I thought, This is not a good beginning. But then when the ‘Vogue’ video came out, I was like, ‘Ah, OK! Now I get it!’”
“Vogue” became the number one hit of that summer, played in clubs across the globe, from London to New York to Bali. It rode the crest of the newly emerging dance craze, where club culture, house music, and techno met the mainstream. “Vogue” reflected the new hedonism: positive, upbeat, and totally inclusive. “Madonna was very much inspired by dance music. She liked our remixes for the Immaculate Collection, and she wanted to explore the club music from an original standpoint,” recalls Tony Shimkin, who worked on the song with producer Shep Pettibone. Before it was recorded, they sent her a music track, “and on the flight to New York from her home in L.A., she composed the rap section. That song came about very quickly. I was impressed with the content of the lyrics. I’d heard rap over and over again, but it never told a story in that classy way, bringing you a visual picture of an era. And the video played a huge role in the song’s success.”
The seven male dancers in the video made such a dynamic team that Madonna later went on to use them for her Blond Ambition tour. Their ebullience leaped off the screen. Salim remembers that they all had a rapport from the start. “We used all the underground gay expressions, and Madonna learned them too. Like we’d say, ‘Give face.’ It’s like giving good face, it means your skin is flawless and everything is on display. (This phrase was used in the ‘Vogue’ rap.) Another word we liked was ‘ovah’—an expression for when something is so over the top but really good, it’s like ‘Ovah!’”
Emboldened by the success of “Vogue,” Madonna chose to explore more “adult” territory for her next offering. The video for “Justify My Love” was filmed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino in an anonymous hotel in black-and-white, harking back to the breathy possibilities of European art cinema and the shimmering decadence of La Dolce Vita. Madonna is featured as a sex fantasist, exploring the erotic through leather, transvestism, and overtones of 1930s Berlin cabaret. Rapping with whispered intensity to a pared-down backbeat, she voiced the deep, private nature of female desire. Teetering between tension and sensuality, “Justify My Love” was dance ballad as art form. Recurring throughout the video were images of cross-dressing and camp, themes that reverberated in the work of her idols Marlene Dietrich and Mae West.
Many hailed Madonna for taking a bold new direction. Only she wasn’t the sole author of this transformation. In the late 80s, a beautiful young Mexican-American woman named Ingrid Chavez was working on an album of spoken word tracks with her one-time boyfriend Prince. They were also shooting the film Graffiti Bridge in Minneapolis when Ingrid met funk rock hero Lenny Kravitz, and the two of them began an intense relationship. Kravitz invited Ingrid into the studio one day, when he was laying tracks with hip-hop auteur Andre Betts.
“They asked me if I wanted to lay something down, and the only thing I had on me was a letter to Lenny. I like letter-writing more than any other form. Beautiful books have been created from correspondence between two people. That’s my way of expressing myself, in that intimate way,” Ingrid said to me. “I did it in one take, and went back to Minneapolis.”
The track they laid down that day was the original of “Justify My Love.” Anxious to get a record company interested, Kravitz took a master copy of the song to Virgin. Meanwhile, the relationship between Ingrid and Kravitz petered out, and she changed her phone number. She heard nothing more from Kravitz until the day of the Graffiti Bridge premiere. “He came to my hotel room and said, ‘Madonna’s doing “Justify My Love.” He asked me to sign a document saying that I’d get twelve and a half percent publishing, but no credit.” Feeling strong-armed, Ingrid signed the paper.
She was then invited to the studio to meet Madonna while they did final mixes on the track. Ingrid was shocked by what she heard. “She did an amazing job of copying my vocals. I couldn’t even tell the difference between my voice and hers. It was exactly like the demo. She got the honesty of the song, the intense emotion, and the real strong desire. Smart move on her part, she’s always been smart. She’s always just taken that thing that was unique, that would take her to another place musically.”
Ingrid, however, felt uneasy in her “ghost writer” role, and sensed “weird vibes” from Madonna. “She said ‘hi,’ and then didn’t speak to me. She watched me in a strange kind of way. Lenny told me that she had a thing for him, and that’s why she was acting weird. That might have been his ego, I don’t know. It was her birthday and there were about five of us hanging out in a room off the studio. She came in and said, ‘Lenny,’ and another person. She called out the two people who could have cake, and left the rest of us sitting there saying, ‘OK! I guess we’re not allowed to have a piece of that cake.’ It’s so odd to me. Maybe she just felt like she didn’t want another woman to take credit for the creative style of the vocal…Madonna’s voice when she speaks is not that voice on that song. She’s copying the rhythm and the way I speak and the quality of my voice, which is probably my greatest gift.”
Ingrid’s speaking voice does have a captivating quality. Soft and quietly hypnotic, it was her signature tone on 19th May 1992, the album she had recorded with Prince, which was yet to come out. And that posed another problem. “After ‘Justify My Love’ was on the radio, Prince called me up and said, ‘Ingrid. What is up with Madonna’s new song ‘Justify My Love’? And I was like, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘That’s you, I know it’s you, Ingrid. What is going on?’ So I told him and he said, ‘Are you a fool? You have a record coming out and everybody’s going to think that you copied Madonna and nobody knows that you wrote that song?’ I was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’”
A local Minneapolis journalist then asked Ingrid point-blank if “Justify My Love” was her song. Feeling hurt and betrayed, Ingrid admitted she wrote it, and the story became widely reported. Although Madonna was criticized (Chicago-Sun Times rock writer Jim Derogatis later wrote that “‘Justify My Love’ represented a new low point in thievery”), she claimed that she was unaware of any deliberate copying. The “musical thief” accusation is one that has cropped up once or twice with Madonna. Eyebrows were raised when, a year after the Malcolm McLaren single “Elements of Vogue,” Madonna’s “Vogue” came out. And “Justify My Love” contained a beat sampled from the Public Enemy track “Security of the First World.” In response, producer Hank Shocklee made the indignant answer record “To My Donna” with The Young Black Teenagers. In the same way that she once copied a girl’s hairstyle at the Danceteria, Madonna absorbs her influences with an aplomb that some found worrying. With “Justify My Love,” Ingrid ended up suing and reaching an out-of-court settlement, whereby she got twelve and a half percent of disc royalties and her name on the next pressing. Even now, though, her name doesn’t always appear on compilations containing the song.
“Basically, I think Lenny wanted to say it was him who wrote the song and she interpreted it. I don’t regret Madonna doing it,” argues Ingrid. “I just felt betrayed, especially when it was a song so intimate. It wasn’t her dreams, it wasn’t her desire.” Ingrid went on to release the album she’d recorded with Prince, and then retreated to New Hampshire. She married the musician David Sylvian, raised three children, and, more than ten years later, began to write and make music again. It took a long time for Ingrid to find her way back, on her own terms. “I consider myself a muse,” she says—and a generous one at that.
“JUSTIFY MY Love” was the lead single from the Immaculate Col lection, Madonna’s first greatest hits
package. An astutely assembled set of remixes, it was her second biggest album in the United States after Like a Virgin. A seamless marriage of high-octane pop and dance, it was the ultimate party record. It also established the tradition for dance remixes of all her future singles. The Immaculate Collection went on selling throughout the decade, and by the late 90s entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the highest-selling greatest hits album by a female artist.
“Justify My Love” also opened up a new creative avenue for Madonna, as she moved into more “adult” territory. She was photographed by Steven Meisel for Rolling Stone magazine, dressed in a suit, with her blond hair cropped short and slicked back 1920s-style, dancing and squeezing a flapper girl’s behind. The pictures were directly inspired by the photographer Brassaï, who documented the gay clubs, brothels, and opium dens of Paris in the 20s and 30s. Then, because of its risqué nature, the “Justify My Love” video was banned by MTV. Outraged at American censoriousness, Madonna appeared on the ABC TV show Nightline and gave a defensive interview to the anchor Forrest Sawyer. But when the video became available in stores, it was a bestseller, and in Saudi Arabia, it was reputed to have been sold for large sums as black-market porn. At a time when female pop artists were expected to be sunny and straightforward, Madonna was pushing boundaries with her erotic cabaret style.
Both “Vogue” and “Justify My Love” were number one hits, while “Hanky Panky,” her paen to spanking, did very well in uptight Britain. To her delight, Madonna was touching on taboo subjects and getting a positive response. Emboldened by this, she set about making her next tour the most memorable yet. With Who’s That Girl, she began exploring conceptual musical theater, but it was on Blond Ambition that art, spectacle, and dance first really came together. According to tour choreographer Vincent Paterson (who’d previously worked with Michael Jackson), Madonna’s intention was to “break every rule we can. She wanted to make statements about sexuality, cross-sexuality, the Church. But the biggest thing we tried to do was change the shape of concerts. Instead of just presenting songs, we wanted to combine fashion, Broadway, rock, and the performance arts.”
The most iconic image from the show is Madonna’s shiny, pink conical bra. This admirable piece of fashion engineering was the foundation on which the rest of the show was built. A comic masterpiece, it was designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier as both a parody and celebration of her voluptuous 34C bust. Once described by stylist Anna Piaggi as “a landscape gardener, an architect, and a technician all rolled into one,” the French designer brought all his skills to play in making this garment. It was a labor of love; Gaultier remembers that period as one of intense stress, claiming to have gotten through 350 aspirins and 1,500 sketches before Madonna approved the costumes. “My clothes have always been in the same spirit as Madonna,” he said, “…a tough outer shell protects hidden vulnerability.” Or, as backup singer Niki Haris succinctly put it: “Cone bras, bustiers, platforms…anything she could do to make it bad, she went for it.”
The bra was part of a corset that emphasized her newly sculpted, sinewy body. Although this physique had been on display on the Who’s That Girl tour, here it was crafted anew, with strong muscle definition accentuated on the first leg of the tour by her hair in a scraped-back ponytail. The look was sensuous, severe, and immediately striking. The corset was invented in the late Renaissance to create a stiffened and upright carriage. As it prevented women from performing manual labor, it was meant to be a symbol of good breeding and wealth. By Victorian times, it had transmuted into the impossible hourglass shape that caused so many female fainting spells. The suffragettes of the early twentieth century rejected the corset in favor of freedom of movement, but it gradually crept back into favor as a way of flaunting female sexuality. Fashion historian Sarah Cheang told me: “The modern fashion corset is a strategy that will make women feel feminine, because it plays with the concept of a submissive body and mind.”
For Madonna, the association with sadomasochism and fetish cultures was irresistible, and, in the same way she has always played with double meanings, her Blond Ambition corset signaled both submissiveness and strength. “When she pulled on that JPG corset and showed the world her newly sculpted muscles, her combination of body-toning and body-taming combined all senses of the notion of discipline,” says Cheang. “She was presenting a body that had been subjected to a rigorous regime of self-discipline—an active body produced by exercise, but also a passive body that was contained, controlled, and disciplined by the pink corset.” Hey presto, fifteen years before the “new burlesque” of Dita von Teese, Madonna colonized the concept of ultra-femininity and control. Ironically, von Teese came from the same small town as Madonna (Rochester, Michigan), and took her name from Dita Parlo, the same German silent-movie star that Madonna later adopted as her alter ego.
The Blond Ambition look wasn’t one of relaxation. According to her U.K. trainer Jamie Addicoat, in order to achieve this improbable body, her fitness routines had become almost manic. “Madonna was in danger of burning out completely,” he said. “She was doing five hours physical workout every day (two hours running, one hour in the gym, and two hours on stage)—more than most professional athletes. It built up to the point where her percentage of body fat had dropped way below what is healthy for a woman.”
For Madonna, this was a small price to pay for a spectacle that she controlled from start to finish. Blond Ambition was entirely her concept. “Several months prior to the tour she showed me a legal pad filled with notes and sketches of her own. She had conceptualized the whole thing,” recalls her lighting director Peter Morse. “The show was a living representation of what was on that legal pad.” He admitted it was a challenge, because “the scenes were incredibly removed from each other. You’d go from an old city factory look to a beautiful grand staircase to real pillars coming out of the ground looking like a cathedral. Nothing got used twice. It was a challenge getting a lighting system that would cover everything.”
Such extravaganzas are now commonplace, but in 1990, nothing like this had ever been attempted before for a pop concert. “This was a big change for the general concertgoer. She created a direction and path for herself that hadn’t been done before,” says Morse. Madonna’s journey from darkness to light opened at the Makuhari Stadium in Japan that April. From the outset, people were agog.
The show divided into four main segments, with Madonna moving through a series of characters—from sex siren to sinner to showgirl and dance diva. For the opening number, “Express Yourself,” there was a Metropolis-style set that echoed the video with its industrial pumps, machine-like cogs, explosions, steam, and male dancers half-naked in chains. “‘Express Yourself’ was insane,” recalls dancer Carlton Wilborn. “It was wild. I’d never had that experience before, the blast from the crowd. You couldn’t hear the downbeats it was so loud, so you had to count inside your head and hope you’d got it right. You could feel the energy coming out from everyone around you.” In this scene, Madonna is the androgynous dominatrix in satin corset and baggy trousers, doing an update of Liza Minelli’s turn in Cabaret with the chair. She’s also the leader of a girl gang, clowning around and sending up macho posturing with her homegirls Donna DeLory and Niki Haris.
The logical conclusion of this female bravado is a restyling of her song “Like a Virgin.” Two male dancers in protruding conical bras dance a eunuch-like amalgam of classical Indian dance and vogueing while she rubs herself into a masturbatory frenzy on a crimson couch. It is beautifully bawdy. Gone is the white wedding dress and coy sexual references. Here is a woman in her early thirties celebrating the art of self-satisfaction and female desire. “I was very inspired by her,” recalls Peter Morse. “For that number, it got frenetic near the end. She was simulating a climax, so I decided to help her along a bit (not that she needed any!). The scene could’ve been lit by one light, but I had fun with it and did strobe lighting. In rehearsals she gets a dancer to stand in for her while she looks and makes no
tes. You never get applauded by her. She’d say, ‘OK, let’s move on,’ and that was her seal of approval. But when we rehearsed this song and I did the lights, she laughed and smiled at me. With her, you can try anything.”
After her risqué version of “Like a Virgin,” the lights dramatically go down, and we see Madonna in the spotlight as the penitent sinner, her head covered in a black veil, kneeling in a church nave while incense wafts around her. She sings for redemption and salvation, praying to a black-frocked priest (Carlton Wilborn) in a sober song cycle that moves from “Like a Prayer” through to “Live to Tell,” “Oh Father,” and “Papa Don’t Preach.” Wilborn recalls this section required “a lot of private rehearsal time.” Its message was delicately balanced. “It’s about her trying to find her way with religion. A side [of her] knew she needed it, another side was resistant, and our dance represented that battle inside,” he says. “At the end, I push her head down and snatch it back up again—as the priest, I was trying to wake her up to the importance of it. I feel her open up to it and then decide to go her own way.”
This dance is a battle of wills—he offers her strength, and she resists his dogma. He tries to enfold her, she walks away, looking back. From the black Puritan-style coats to the strongly grounded gestures, this section of the show has all the spareness and symbolism of her modern dance idol Martha Graham. The latter often explored mythical or religious themes, like El Penitente (1940), where she played a peasant madonna, a tempting Magdalene, and a saintly Veronica. With the same transformational energy as Graham, Madonna dances amid the dourly dressed men like a blond-haired sprite. She is the trickster figure, the sin-eater. In this confrontation with religious patriarchy, Madonna makes clear that there is a cost to her display of female sexuality.