by Lucy O'Brien
Much easier on the ear is the final song, “Easy Ride.” Cowritten with Monte Pittman, this track is about the wayward Midwestern girl returning home, working for the good life with blood, sweat, and a few tears. Her priorities are warmth, security, earth, life, and family. Post-9/11, this seems fair enough. But over and above that soars the longing to live forever, to remain transcendent. Its filmic strings give the close of this album a sense of open space and cautious hope. We feel that Madonna’s spiritual journey is complete—for now.
IN LAUNCHING the album, Madonna opted for a radical image. As in 1989, with Like a Prayer, she dyed her hair dark brown to signify “serious.” On the album cover she resurrects the classic 1960s image of Che Guevara. Wearing a black beret and anarchist colors, she is Madonna the revolutionary. Some also saw a parallel between the album cover and an infamous 70s photo of kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. There are torn fragments of the U.S. Stars and Stripes, and two red stripes daubed like warrior paint on her face. The letters AMERICAN LIFE bleed blood-red, punk-rock style, and the parental-advisory sticker signals a very “adult” record. In the CD booklet, she totes an Uzi submachine gun, her body in various martial-arts poses spelling out the letters of her name. The photo shoot, photographed by Craig McDean and packaged by the French design team M/M Paris, cost a rumored $415,000.
Despite the introspective nature of the songs, Madonna still wanted American Life to be a hit album. “If she doesn’t shift units, she’s disappointed. Maverick is a multimillion dollar machine that has to be kept going,” says Foster. “During recording she was really focused, with a machine-like stamina. There was a sense of camaraderie, but you’ve got to make sure you’re on top of your game.”
MADONNA MADE sure she was up to the minute with the “American Life” video, an extension of the provocative artwork for the CD booklet. Here she plays a gun-toting resistance fighter, with her crack team shooting from the runway into the crowd at a fictional fashion show. She ends up throwing a grenade at a President Bush look-alike. It would have been more powerful had the target been more political than vacuous fashionistas, but it still caused a stir. “It is an antiwar statement,” she said. “But it’s not necessarily against [the Iraq] war. At any given moment, there’s at least thirty wars going on in this world and I’m against all of them.” The main problem with the video was the timing of its release.
Part of the fallout from the 9/11 disaster was the U.S. administration’s determination to invade Iraq. U.S. Congress gave President Bush authority to attack Iraq if Saddam Hussein didn’t give up weapons of mass destruction (WMD) he supposedly had. On February 15, 2003, 10 million people in over sixty countries in the world (including a million in the United Kingdom) demonstrated against the war. But the U.S.-led Operation Iraqi Freedom began on March 20, in defiance of the United Nations Security Council’s resolution. Although coalition troops included soldiers from the United Kingdom, many claimed that this was a violation of international law, breaking the UN Charter.
It was a sensitive time, as countries including France, Russia, and China signaled their opposition, and America and the United Kingdom were increasingly isolated. There was a McCarthy-like atmosphere of paranoia in the United States—only this time, the “reds under the bed” were Muslim terrorists or non-patriots. In this highly charged climate, many musicians and actors felt pressured to support the war or remain silent. All-female country band the Dixie Chicks became the focus of a hate campaign when their lead singer, Natalie Maines, spoke out against Bush, saying, “I feel the president is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world.”
As a result, the band received death threats, had their music banned by many radio stations, and lost a large section of their country audience. Branded “Dixie Sluts,” “Traitors,” and “Saddam’s Angels,” they were told to “shut up and sing.” Bruce Springsteen and Madonna came out in support of the right of the band to express their opinions—though, faced with the prospect of low sales and public condemnation, Madonna toned down her own political rhetoric. On April 1, she postponed the release of the “American Life” video, and then withdrew it, saying: “I have decided not to release my new video. It was filmed before the war started and I do not believe it is appropriate to air it at this time. Due to the volatile state of the world and out of sensitivity and respect for the armed forces, who I support and pray for, I do not want to risk offending anyone who might misinterpret the meaning of this video.”
Many fans saw this as Madonna copping out, fudging what could have been a radical artistic statement. Some even suggested it was just another carefully orchestrated publicity stunt. It would have been courageous of Madonna not to dilute her message, but, ever aware of her megastar status and the bottom dollar, she was nervous about a backlash.
As the months wore on, the campaign against the Dixie Chicks showed no signs of abating.
In May, a Colorado radio station suspended two DJs for playing the Dixie Chicks in violation of a ban on their music. There were boos at the Academy of Country Music (ACM) Awards in Las Vegas when the group’s nomination for Entertainer of the Year was announced. The academy gave the award to Toby Keith, an outspoken critic of the group. Then the U.S. Red Cross refused a $1 million donation from the band. Maines said at the time: “The entire country may disagree with me, but I don’t understand the necessity for patriotism. Why d’you have to be a patriot? About what? This land is our land? Why?”
Though the Dixie Chicks lost many fans, they gained a new audience. “I’d rather have a smaller following of really cool people who get it,” band member Martie Maguire said, “than people that have us in their five-disc changer with Reba McEntire and Toby Keith.”
As it was, Madonna lost out with both her mainstream and her hip audience. Withdrawing the video annoyed those against the war, while for others, she hadn’t gone far enough in support of Bush. Even though the album was more about fame versus love than an explicit antiwar statement, it was deemed unpatriotic. Reviews were mixed—“Madonna has absolutely nothing to say to us,” yawned the U.K. Sunday Times, while the Independent claimed she sounded like “some lady of the manor swanking it over the plebs.” In contrast, BBC Radio 1 praised the record as “brave and strong,” with “attitude and balls.” Many reviewers were perplexed by the contradictory nature of the title track—you detest the trap of fame and money, but love the American Dream? You hate the celebrity pecking order, but have to be top dog? What gives?
In the end, the beauty of her love songs got overlooked, and the acoustic rock tone didn’t appeal. Sales suffered. American Life has posted the lowest sales of any Madonna album to date, both in the United States and worldwide. It went to number one the first week of release, but then quickly fell down the charts. By mid-2006, it had reached 666,000 copies sold, compared to the 3 million of its predecessor,
Music. But it has grown as a cult favorite among fans, and became a huge remix success on the club scene. It was the only album in history to have seven top-ten hits on the U.S. Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart. Later, Madonna compared Mirwais to Jean-Paul Sartre, describing him as “very intellectual, very analytical, very cerebral, very existential, very philosophical.” On a slightly disparaging note, she added: “We both got sucked into the French existentialist vortex. We both decided we were against the war, and we both smoked Gauloises and wore berets, and we were against everything…. I was in a very angry mood, a mood to be political, very upset with George Bush.”
Although Madonna’s hardcore audience never abandoned her,
American Life marked a significant dip. Like a lot of her peers, she had been compromised as an artist. “There is an atmosphere of fear in America right now that is deadly,” said Sir Elton John. “Everyone is too career-conscious. They’re all too scared. In the 1960s, people like Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and Pete Seeger were constantly writing and talking about what was going on. Now hardly any are doing it.” But by mid-2004, it was apparen
t that Iraq’s WMDs were nonexistent, and the U.S. administration came under scrutiny. This, combined with the box-office-breaking success of Michael Moore’s antiwar film Fahrenheit 9/11, meant that artists felt able to nail their colors to the mast. The Dixie Chicks were joined by artists including Jon Bon Jovi, Dave Matthews, James Taylor, Wyclef Jean, Ozzy Osbourne, Mary J. Blige, and Pink in their condemnation of the war. And though Madonna was to steer well away from the subject for her next album, the controversy surfaced in her live tours instead.
By the beginning of 2004, she was eager to go out on the road again, if only to promote the hell out of American Life. Once again, she had to take on the younger stars snapping at her heels, and prove she was the best.
15
MOMMY POP STAR
IN AUGUST 2003 AT THE MTV VIDEO AWARDS, TWO young pop “virgins,” Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, appeared onstage dressed in wedding white, singing “Like a Virgin.” They were joined by Madonna, the bridegroom, dressed in vampiric black. The latter swooped in on Britney and gave her an emphatic French kiss, before launching into “Hollywood,” her caustic tale of Tinseltown. The crowd was ecstatic. “I kissed Britney Spears. I am the mommy pop star and she is the baby pop star,” Madonna said later. “And I am kissing her to pass my energy to her.”
At that point, Britney was her biggest rival. Her 1999 debut album Baby One More Time had sold over 27 million copies worldwide. With her pneumatic grace and Barbie-doll looks, Britney was the quintessential teen diva. There was something compulsive about her performance, about the way she attacked dance routines with vim, vigor, and a strange kind of pent-up anger. “I practiced so hard I was delirious,” she once said of a night rehearsing a video routine. Like Madonna in her early days, Spears was no skinny supermodel, but had a robust quality that appealed directly to her teenage girl audience. She combined sex and spirituality with the raunchy schoolgirl look. Coming from a devout Baptist background, she said that she intended to remain a virgin till marriage (hence the “Like a Virgin” joke). No wonder that “Britney naked” became the most popular request typed into Internet search engines.
Later that year, Madonna dueted with Britney on the latter’s single “Me Against the Music,” and the suggestive video had them dry-humping each other with a wall between them. The general verdict was that this was a rather desperate attempt at titillation. “It’s just the stupidest video either of them has ever made and they both know it,” says Dustin Robertson, editor of the promo. “Madonna almost took herself out of the edit, until I saved the performance with shots she signed off on. Didn’t love, but signed off on.” The two stars didn’t collaborate on anything else. Britney had a lot of Madonna’s moves (and even her interest in Kabbalah), but that is where the similarity ended. Coming from a poor background in Louisiana, Britney worked as an off-Broadway child actor and was a veteran of the Mickey Mouse Club at eleven. Groomed by producer Eric Foster and Swedish songwriting maestro Max Martin, she launched a pop career and was world-famous by her teens. Her success ushered in a new era of manufactured pop.
In the face of this, Madonna felt compelled to assert her position. “I arrived at a different time,” she said. “Before the time of Svengalis holding talent searches; finding a girl that looks right and can carry a tune, and then figuring a way to market her. I’m not saying those girls can’t grow into something, but…everything is so homogenized.”
But all was not as perfectly stage-managed as it seemed. It was inevitable that having been groomed so rigorously for stardom, Britney chose to rebel. And she differed from Madonna in the way she so publicly fell apart. By early 2007, after a failed marriage to dancer and aspiring rapper Kevin Federline, and a custody battle over their two baby boys, a troubled Britney got tattoos and went off on an alcohol-fueled bender. In a moment of disintegration, she roughly shaved her head in front of the paparazzi and ended up in rehab for alcohol and drug abuse. Unsurprisingly, Madonna distanced herself from the rather tarnished pop princess.
By 2004, Madonna was confronting her aging self. It was rumored that she told the producer of her Drowned World tour video to airbrush out any lines or wrinkles. By her own admission, it was taking longer and longer to get her image together. But at the age of forty-five, there was no question of growing old gracefully. Determined to seize time and trends and mold them to her wishes, Madonna simply devoured her prey. The Britney kiss brings to mind Roger Corman’s 1959 horror flick Wasp Woman, in which cosmetics magnate Susan Cabot develops a rejuvenating beauty cream derived from an enzyme secreted by wasps. It’s intended to make women look forever youthful. Obsessed with restoring her fading charms, Cabot insists on being the first test subject. The solution is at first remarkably effective, transforming her into a sultry, dark-haired vixen…until she begins to take on the predatory traits of a giant female wasp, setting out on a nocturnal killing spree. After she devours her victims, nothing—not even shoes, belts, or cardigans—is left.
By virtue of its sheer size and scale, and its dedication to her greatest hits, the ReInvention tour that summer was one way of gobbling up the competition. From the moment she started auditions, Madonna began filming the process with Jonas Akerlund, director of her “Ray of Light” and “Music” videos. By enlisting Akerlund for her tour film, she hoped to create a fiercely edited and fast-paced documentary that had some of the spirit of Truth or Dare, twelve years later. It was as if Madonna had one eye on posterity. At the same time, all her albums were reissued and remastered in acknowledgment of her considerable legacy. Once again, Jamie King was employed as artistic director of the tour. “Madonna came up with that name (ReInvention) because for years everyone has been always saying she reinvented herself,” he said. “And in typical Madonna fashion, she played on that and used it against…the users.”
As ever, Madonna had a clear idea of what she wanted from her new cast of dancers. “She’s really attracted to characters, people who can take on roles,” says Raistalla, a striking black female dancer who assumed many of ReInvention’s androgynous parts. “Her ideas for shows are so lavish and theatrical, as a dancer you have to know how to project yourself and portray something within that.” Born in Miami, Raistalla comes from a musical family, and started dancing at a young age. She wasn’t a personal fan of Madonna’s, but “my mom was a big fan. She had all her albums!” When it came to the audition, Raistalla thought that she didn’t have a chance. “Madonna’s dancing usually fits a certain criteria, with a lot of acrobatic and physical stuff. But once I got toward the end of the audition, I realized I did have a chance. I knew her energy, that it was competitive, so at the end, when I had to do ten one-handed push-ups, I was staring her dead in the eye, thinking, I’m this person you want me to be. I was giving it to the character, I pulled in everything I knew. What sold it to her was the way I did the tango, with lots of passion and emotion.”
From the opening scenes, ReInvention was a very passionate, sensual show. Filmmaker Chris Cunningham (who has made disturbing avant-garde videos for artists like the Prodigy and Aphex Twin) shot the introductory film The Beast Within, where Madonna writhes on a dirty old bed like a deranged demigoddess, being barked at by wolves and reciting from the Book of Revelations. The film was projected onto enormous screens, the biggest size available at the time. “We had them custom-made. It was outrageous,” said Jamie King. The effect was one of overwhelming the senses. “We were gobsmacked,” recalls Dan Holden, a fan who saw her London Wembley Arena show. “I was so floored that when Madonna first appeared doing her yoga moves, I couldn’t quite take it in.”
After the upside-down glory of “The Beast Within,” the show slipped into the song “Vogue,” which was set in a 3D-style Regency interior, with the dancers wearing minimalist Renaissance costumes. With its strong visual flair, Madonna likened the show to an art installation that slightly changed every night. She sang “Nobody Knows Me” as laser light words zipped around her. She dressed up in military garb and danced to simulated explosio
ns for “American Life.” Violent images of war and suffering were projected behind her as the dancers paraded in religious costumes: an Orthodox priest, a rabbi, a nun. “Religion breeds fragmentation. We’re taking off the things that separate people, so they can all be one,” Madonna said later, conveniently ignoring the fact that Kabbalah is a religious belief system. Raistalla remembers that song as a high point of the show. “I loved performing that one. I’m a militant person, I like projecting a strong, commanding presence. We were soldiers and we had to manifest issues of life in America. I had similar feelings to Madonna, and was able to express what I felt about the situation with Iraq—I was displaying that in my body.”
On the back-screen projection, a President Bush look-alike cozied up to a Saddam Hussein double. Madonna’s anger at the Iraq War was still raw and on display. The connection between religion and fashion was accentuated by a V-shaped catwalk that rose above the crowd.
It was an emotive spectacle, one that didn’t let up, as Madonna moved into a jazz/circus section. Cloud, one of her most gifted dancers, entered stage left as an acrobatic huckster in a top hat, dancing to a remixed version of “Hollywood.” Here we had icons of multiethnic U.S. culture—the tap dancer, the skateboarder, the fire-eater, the Hindu dancer. Madonna then turns this contemporary vaudeville into gothic horror as she sits and sings in an electric chair, wearing a Wild West costume made out of the stars and stripes. Every possible button is pushed.
Having dispatched with a tango version of “Die Another Day,” Madonna reappeared in bohemian black with a hippie bandana, looking like her Maverick protégée Alanis Morissette. Complete with acoustic guitar, she performed moving versions of “Nothing Fails,” “Like a Prayer,” and “Mother and Father.” The only mawkish note was her rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” on a par with “American Pie” for underscoring pointedly what Madonna is not. Her renditions of other people’s protest songs sound like karaoke, whereas her uplifting dance anthems are inimitable. For the final section, she brought in Lorne Cousin, a bagpipe player from the Scottish Highlands. “It was Madonna’s idea. It was the link between ‘Imagine’ and ‘Into the Groove.’ The idea was that it would start off slowly, like a lament, to follow the mood of that song and then build up in tempo so that it led to ‘Into the Groove.’ I think it worked really well,” recalled Cousin.