Madonna

by Lucy O'Brien

  After two nights in Philadelphia, Madonna performed five hysteria-surrounded dates at Madison Square Garden. By early August, the strain was beginning to show, as one of her New Jersey nights was canceled due to laryngitis. She took a few precious days off before returning to the fray. As the tour snaked across the United States, the Madonna publicity machine was in full swing, whether to announce her plans to do a remake of Lina Wertmüller’s 1974 film Swept Away with Guy, or the Sotheby’s online auction of her memorabilia, with the beaded Dolce & Gabbana bra from The Girlie Show fetching a record $23,850. Then the festivities came to a complete stop. “The end of the tour usually builds up to a big party,” remembers Price. “But this ended on a very somber note.”

  On September 11, terrorists hijacked two passenger jet airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers in New York. A third plane smashed into the Pentagon, and another, retaken by the passengers, went down in Pennsylvania. Nearly three thousand people died in these attacks. Madonna postponed her concert that night at Los Angeles’s Staples Center, and pledged all proceeds from her final three dates to the victims and their families. “There was a moment’s silence every night,” recalls Price. “It was a poignant end to the tour.” Dancer Jull Weber said that Madonna turned the final shows into a “commemorative event. She talked in all the concerts about the tragedy that happened. We weren’t just continuing our tour, we were performing to celebrate joy and happiness, especially in that time of difficulty.”

  On the closing night of September 15, Madonna wore an American flag for a skirt, instead of a kilt, and led the crowd in prayer, encouraging President Bush to practice restraint. “Violence begets violence,” she told the twenty-thousand-strong audience. “What happened was horrible, but I’d like to think of it as a wake-up call. There’s terrorism every day all over the world…” The crowd obliged her request for a moment of silence, but then some fans began frantically chanting, “U-S-A!”

  “OK, USA—but start looking at the whole world. If you want to change the world, change yourself,” she countered, the heat of the moment making her unusually candid. “We’re not doing this show because we want to forget, but because we want people to remember how precious life is.” With that, “Holiday,” extraordinarily, became a call for world peace.

  AFTER THE Drowned World tour had ended, the receipts were counted. According to the Amusement Business database, Madonna’s Drowned World was the number-three grossing concert tour in the United States in 2001. Her stint at Madison Square Garden alone, for instance, earned her over $9 million. But, claims Stuart Price, it’s not just about business. “When someone goes through that financial barrier, they don’t do it to be rich, they have a desire to be exceptional. The lady isn’t just a businesswoman, she has a deep ingrained musical sense.”

  In February of the following year, at America’s prestigious Orville H. Gibson Guitar Awards, Madonna was nominated for Most Promising Up-and-Coming Guitarist. There were a few raised eyebrows, but for the ever-ambitious Madonna, this must have been the best payback of all.

  THE WORLD Trade Center attack threw a pall over the next few years. The cultural mood was one of bleak soul-searching and paranoia. After the high hopes and global parties of the beginning of the millennium, a raw truth seared through Europe and America that there was a price to be paid for free-market domination, that Western beliefs were not unassailable, nor were they perfect. Terrorism had been a blight on the political landscape in Europe for several decades, but in the United States, that expression of hatred took many citizens by surprise. “But what’s not to love?” many asked about their culture and the American Dream, which for so many had been a long-lasting ideal.

  In her next album, American Life, Madonna questioned those values, and questioned herself. Hers was an appropriate response to the 9/11 disaster and the ensuing Iraq War. Although she didn’t address those issues directly, the confusion, disorientation, and anger they created seeped into the grooves of each song. Recording started late in 2001, then was put on hold while she filmed Swept Away in Malta and starred in the West End play Up for Grabs. Then Madonna returned to the studio in the summer of 2002, just as the debate about America’s planned invasion of Iraq was heating up. At one level, there is no separation between political and personal life, and her record expressed that. She would later mutter about Mirwais’s downbeat existentialism and the long discussions they had into the night, but the French producer only brought out a sense of anxiety that existed deep within her. At first, the proposed album title was Ein Sof, a Hebrew word meaning “endlessness.” It was rumored to be Madonna’s religious record, but as the months went on, it became more a meditation on the difficulty of leading a spiritual life in the A-list bubble, and the album title was changed to American Life. “It’s a reflection of my state of mind and a view of the world right now,” she said.

  She was forty-four years old and experiencing what amounted to a midlife crisis. If Like a Prayer was her “divorce” album, American Life is her psychoanalysis. She even references Sigmund Freud, and throws out countless questions: Who am I? Where am I going? What does it all mean? Much of the album is suffused with sarcasm: right from the disaffected ennui of the title track to the belligerence of “Nobody Knows Me,” Madonna is kicking against the claustrophobic effect of celebrity worship. As movie star Brad Pitt once said: “Celebrity is bestial. It is the worst type of karma, because of the huge solitude it brings. You are like a gazelle that finds itself straying from the flock. And soon your path is cut off by lions.” His statement is a little self-pitying—most people would give their eyeteeth to have his money and power—but there’s truth in the weirdly antisocial nature of fame and materialism.

  The cult of celebrity fosters social division, the sense of separation into “us and them.” According to cultural theorist Terry Eagleton: “There is an erotic enticement in the idea of being able to do anything you like, just as there is phantasmal fulfillment in the idea of resources that can never be spent. Celebrities are the postmodern version of the horn of plenty, the Land of Cockayne, the fairy-tale purse that can never be empty. In a world running out of both oil and elbow room, this vision has its allure.” He adds that in a “drably unheroic” world, the “magic has to be artificially manufactured.” Madonna called this “the allure of the beautiful life. Look like this, you’re gonna be happy. Drive this car, you’re gonna be popular. Wear these clothes, and people are gonna want to fuck you. It’s a very powerful illusion, and people are caught up in it, including myself. Or I was.”

  Her friend, the director James Foley, saw the impact that fame had on Madonna. As quoted earlier: “She gets home, takes off her coat, and takes off her personality. Her accent even changes from fake Brit to native Detroit. I’m fascinated by fame—what a radical experience it must be for someone like her. We all have a perception of the world outside of us, but to have that world looking back at you—it’s bizarre. You can’t turn it off. It’s amusing for a while, then it becomes claustrophobic, a horrible trap.”

  Madonna has had her celebrity moments. There was the time in the late 80s when she was introduced to Billy Steinberg, writer of her “Like a Virgin” hit, at a party. “It was a bit comical really,” Steinberg recalls. “I was sitting on the terrace with Steve Bray when she walked toward us with Warren Beatty. Steve said, ‘Madonna, this is Billy Steinberg who wrote ‘Like a Virgin.’ Warren starts to laugh. I say, ‘Gee, I’ve wanted to meet you for so long.’ She snapped, ‘Well, now you did,’ and walked away. I was crestfallen. She must be slightly resentful she didn’t write her signature song.”

  Her Hollywood actor friend Rupert Everett recalled a night during the Truth or Dare years, when he invited Madonna to dinner and she ignored his guests. “Madonna was approaching the dizzy pinnacle of fame, and at those heights you don’t bother to disguise your feelings. If she was bored, she let you know. Manners were something she had discarded at base camp,” Everett said. There was also the New Year�
�s Eve when Madonna went with Sean Penn to Helena’s, an exclusive club in Los Angeles. Sean didn’t dance, so she brought her choreographer along just in case she wanted to hit the floor. The only snag was, he had to leave his gay lover outside. Witness to this event was Dennis Fanning, a no-nonsense policeman who was helping Sean with research for his role as a cop in Colors. Fanning went to the door and pulled the man in, telling security he was with Madonna’s party. “I sit his ass down next to his boyfriend, turn to [Madonna], and go, ‘C’mon, you want to dance with him? Dance. But why should his boyfriend be outside on New Year’s Eve? The fuck is that all about?’ She’s looking at me like she hasn’t been talked to like that in years.”

  Manners were in short supply in later years too, when Kabbalah was meant to have tempered Madonna’s ego. One evening in L.A., her former makeup artist Sharon Gault saw Madonna at a Kabbalah meeting. She said hello, and the star apparently looked straight through her. “As if she doesn’t know her, as if she’d never seen her in her life,” recalls Niki Haris (whom Gault related the story to). “Yet Sharon did her makeup for years.” The “beautiful life” was still very alluring to Madonna. “The line between the haves and have-nots was wider. The superstardom became out of hand. She was so inaccessible,” says Niki. “After the Kabbalah thing, I’d go to her house and there’d be Jewish men sitting by her pool, and answering her phone. It was off-putting. It went from her being a super-close friend to me having no access to my friend.”

  Though Madonna was politicized and penitent in public, Niki had yet to see her newly compassionate side. “In 2003, just before I gave birth to my daughter Jordan, Madonna threw a baby shower for me. I was touched, because things had been strained between us since the Drowned World tour,” she says. “But after that she never contacted me again. Phone calls weren’t returned, she changed her e-mail address. I had witnessed this with Madonna for years. In a way, we were all employees, pure cattle. A friend said, ‘You’re not that important to her.’ I realized then it was all over.”

  Other friends of Madonna, though, attest that her pattern of severing ties is justifiable. “I don’t think she enjoys or intends to hurt anybody,” maintains Tony Shimkin, her friend and cowriter from Erotica days. “So many people who work with her want to keep in contact and get more and more out of her. She lets people get close, but not for too long. When I sensed it might be an issue, I ceased to call. She has to protect herself.”

  And many see her as nothing but loyal. Her former dancer Carlton Wilborn, for instance, recalls her lending him her Hollywood chateau for a few months when he was “between work and having a hard time. She was out of town a lot. She brought me in, taught me the security system, and let me have the run of it. I will always be indebted to her. She could’ve dropped me $10,000, but she did this for how I needed to feel. There was me and the security guard and that was it. She trusted me and that was fantastic.”

  Niki Haris went on to have a successful solo career, making seven jazz records, supporting Gay Pride events worldwide, and singing for the Dalai Lama in Tibet. She is happy with her lot, and asserts that she is grateful for the time she had with Madonna. “When she’s being the best she can be, she’s amazing—loving, giving, and charitable,” she says. “But due to her inaccessibility to me now, I have a stinging feeling in my heart and questions that were never answered.”

  At one level, Madonna was well aware of the corrosive effects of stardom. Celebrity has an ugly side, and she wasn’t afraid to ridicule that. On the song “American Life,” she sends herself up, rapping (rather badly) about having a jet pilot, a private Pilates teacher, and three nannies, yet still feeling unsatisfied. It is a frank, contradictory critique of the culture that spawned her. Although Madonna has benefited immeasurably from the American Dream, she knows its pitfalls and feels qualified to draw attention to them. “I’m saying celebrity is bullshit. And who knows better than me?” she declared. Disruption is a feature of this record. On her previous album, Music, Mirwais’s stops, starts, and electronic glitches symbolized the force and fun of hedonism, whereas here, they just signal discomfort. His twitchiness perfectly suited her mood. “The music has to jar my brains in terms of lyrics,” she said. “Different things inspire me to write. I could be having a guitar lesson and something will just come to me. Or Mirwais will send me over music—rough stuff that doesn’t have an arrangement, basic chord progressions. American Life itself came about like that.”

  The next track, “Hollywood” is old-school Madonna in the way her voice glides over sumptuous pop beats. You could almost be in the car with the top down, cruising Sunset Boulevard, smelling the magnolias, sensing promise, looking to be noticed, looking for that lucky break. But the song’s breezy momentum is rudely interrupted at the end by Madonna chanting in a distorted, robotic voice. She sings with wry sensuality, capturing that illusive sense of sunshine, freedom, and desperation that so characterizes Los Angeles.

  Then, on the track “I’m So Stupid,” Madonna reclaims the geek inside. Though she writes with pithy dexterity, sometimes her lyrics seem to be aimed squarely at the audience for whom English is a second language. This song is a case in point—a confession almost idiotic in its simplicity. But then maybe it’s the voice of the teenage Midwestern girl hell-bent on making it. The dazed-sounding track “Nobody Knows Me” also has a sense of childlike defiance, dismissing critics who have no knowledge of her jealously guarded inner self.

  The concept at the knotty heart of this album is “nothing.” It is there in the titles—“Nobody Knows Me,” “Nothing Fails”—it’s there in the repetition of “no” in the song “Love Profusion.” With her strong use of the words “no” and “nothing,” Madonna is sarcastic about people’s assumptions about her and emphatic about what she knows. That romantic love is her lodestone, her source of power. As a hymn of devotion, “Nothing Fails” is the most majestic song on the album.

  It began as a humble track that musician/producer Guy Sigsworth wrote for his wife. “I never write love songs, but I was moved to write one for her,” he says. “I’ve never had a problematic relationship with her, there’s not been a lot of drama. But I wanted to write something naive and honest.” Sigsworth developed it with female artist Gem Archer to come up with something understated yet moving in its simplicity. In demo form, it sounds like an offbeat folk song. They decided to send it to Madonna. She loved it, and asked if she could rewrite it a little. What is interesting is how she changed the melody line on the chorus to make it more instantly pop. Her version adds to the original, giving it a melodic lift. This, coupled with Mirwais’s generous production, lends it a dramatic, theatrical air. “It was very different sonically from our demo, but I was happy with what they did,” says Sigsworth.

  Complete with London Community Gospel choir and strings, the song becomes revelatory and ecstatic, honoring the transforming power of love. “They were a bunch of great singers giving it loudly,” recalls the strings engineer Geoff Foster. Madonna’s mysticism seeps through, with her references to the Kabbalistic “tree of life.” Orthodox rabbis were infuriated with the way she played fast and loose with the name Yahweh, but, misguided or not, her thirst for spiritual sustenance led to the creation of a ballad, awe-inspiring in its beauty.

  In its wake come the acoustic guitars and quiet reflection of “Intervention” and “X-Static Process,” tracks with the bell-like clarity of a 1960s Joan Baez folk song. The warm, rudimentary guitar sounds symbolize a private sanctuary that’s distinct from the techno clutter of other tracks. These “songs for Guy” then lead into her equivalent of Ray of Light’s “Mer Girl,” the song on the album most striking for its autobiographical intimacy. Propelled by pneumatic disco pop, “Mother and Father” is another paean to the mother she lost. Detailing the hurt and neglect in her family, Madonna moves from nursery-rhyme singsong to frantic rap to sounding like a demented twelve-year-old Bessie Smith. It’s a triumph, both as pop psychoanalysis and as a piece of mangled, innovative dance m
usic.

  “That song is a way of letting go of the sadness and moving on,” she said later. Much of her life she has felt surrounded by death, with the death of her mother, close relatives, and her beloved friends in New York. “I’ve always been aware of my own mortality. I’ve always had that feeling of, What is the point of living and life?” That altered when she had children and realized that “we’re here to share, to give, to love,” and death wasn’t necessarily an end in itself.

  Disrupting this reverie is “Die Another Day,” which Elton John later lambasted as “the worst Bond tune of all time.” With its stabbing techno strings and disembodied voice, it was almost an anti-Bond theme. The fact that she won a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actress in the Bond movie didn’t help. “They wanted something big and brash and in yer face,” recalls Geoff Foster. “Mirwais didn’t want strings in the traditional sense, with that big bed of lushness. She’d done that with ‘Frozen’ and moved on. There’s something sacrosanct about having an orchestra, so it’s vaguely blasphemous to take it and cut it up and mess with it. The original arrangement was more complete and flowing, and Mirwais totally cut it up. Which is fine—that’s part of the process!”