A vs B Part 4: Madonna (my long-standing perception of her) vs Madonna (actually)

I was going to write about Madonna anyway, funnily enough, though now everyone’s writing about her because it’s her 60^th birthday.

I’ve gradually, over the last few years, stopped being a dick about Madonna. Though, annoyingly now, as I did with Joni Mitchell, I’m going to use Bob Dylan as a reference point in explaining why I’m now a Madonna fan.

I think I always start with this quote from Canadian intellectual Michael Ignatieff when I think about Madonna;

“I don’t mind that I see her face on every magazine cover. I don’t mind that she is obscene. I don’t even mind that she can’t sing, can’t dance, can’t act and is none the less the most famous person on the planet. What I can’t stand is that she thinks she’s an artist.”

So persuasively dismissive, I think I allowed myself to think for years that Madonna was always reaching above her station.

But really, if you changed it ever so slightly, it’s exactly what some reactionary snobby prick would have said about Dylan in the 60s (and even now). And it’s no more true for either of them.

I remember Clive James did a show in the early 90s about “Fame” and he really focused on Dylan in the 60s and Madonna in the 80s. I was too young to understand much about what he was getting at, and I don’t remember all that much of what he said.

But there are more than superficial similarities between the two – college dropouts from the north country who came to New York at the start of a decade, had it tough for a few years while they found their voice, pissed off the purists, created a new form, influenced everything that came after them (and acted quite badly and had far too many extra-curricular activities for most people’s liking).

What else links them? Weight of songs … simple. The essence of why I still think of Dylan is streets ahead of all his contemporaries is just the number of great songs over the span of time. And the same is true, in a pop sense, of Madonna. Now, I don’t know if there are great Madonna deep cuts, but there hardly need to be. Over 60 Top 40 singles (nearly all Top 10), and sure, there are some rubbish ones (I think part of the reason I solidified my anti-Madonna sentiment was how dreadful I found her turn-of-the-century run) but there really are so many good ones.

So many songs that, when they came on the radio, I couldn’t resist – I’d find myself asking “do I really think Madonna’s rubbish, I mean, I like ‘Like a Prayer’ … and Live to Tell, and Hung Up, and Borderline, and Crazy for You, and Cherish, and Dear Jessie, and Take a Bow, and Rain, and Into the Groove, and La Isla Bonita, and Ray of Light, I guess … oh and Papa Don’t Preach, oh and This Used to be My Playground …” etc etc

And, you know, she’s a great and varied writer. Many of her songs, as well as the hooks and the ability to draw on the sounds of the day, are interesting, mysterious, have a sense of sadness, a sense of a story not wholly told. I think the idea of Madonna as great singer-songwriter is the one I most egregiously underestimated.

I think there’s a reason I underestimated her. I’ve been more susceptible and easily-influenced than I’d admit, and there’s always been a lot of that Ignatieff-type stuff about her, a serious male contempt for her as famehound which failed to see that, dodgy films, publicity stunts, aside, she really could dance, sing and write. The notion that Madonna is not a great pop singer is pretty ludicrous. It’s an opinion really only reserved for people who don’t think any pop singer is a good singer. People who don’t understand what being a pop singer is.

I also suspect there was a bit of identity at stake – I grew up with sisters, and there were friends of sisters around, and there was a lot of Madonna around, and it was for them, not me. And I suspect her persona was pretty confronting for a fairly prudish teenage boy in the early 90s.

Madonna, as many people say, invented the modern solo pop star (alongside Michael Jackson, though I think even more so), in the sense that it’s barely connected to what came before and so much that came after her is in her image. Michael Jackson, I’d say, is more connected to soul and disco, and Thriller was a continuation of that , while Debbie Harry (who I’d often compare Madonna unfavourably to) was a singer in a punk band who didn’t quite make it a solo star.

So, yeah, this is a bit of a mea culpa, an acknowledgement of a certain dull misogynist prudery that undoubtedly lies behind a lot of the sniffiness at Madonna. At the end of the day, take it all away, and the songs remain.