The dominatrix reloaded

Reinvention? A pox upon the thought. Applied to Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, the term has passed beyond cliché to take up residence in a lexicolonial convalescent home for words sapped of meaning, awaiting reincarnation in some future age as a quaint-but-cool hipsterism alongside Groovy and Cosmic and Gadzooks.

‘Reinvention’ is the automatic response trotted out by any two-bit pop star cameo-ing on VH-1 polls or average Joes and Jills on the street when vox-popped for an opinion on what makes Madonna’s motor continue to tick more than 20 years after she first came to prominence.
Reinvention, curse its mongrel four-syllable head, is a fancy word for what is prerequisite in any pop star who favours chameleon tactics over the dogged plying of craft. Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. Bowie does it. Britney does it. Prince and The Stones used to do it, and became self-parodies when they stopped. Bob and Leonard never did it. U2 don’t do it, while managing to make it look like they do.
The point is, endowing Madonna with the sobriquet of Queen of Reinvention is about as useful as calling Keith Richards a Survivor or Miz Ross a Diva. It’s done. And it’s dumb.
Yet, unfathomably, Madonna has christened her 2004 summer campaign the Re:Invention tour. It’s as if Dame David did a stadium outing as The Thin White Dukebox or Bruce signed up to advertise a Harley Davidson line called Boss Hogs. Either she’s sending herself up something rotten, or there were too many yes-men and women in the office the day she coughed up that particular banner headline.
But by all accounts the Re:Invention tour’s content bodes better than its title. The current campaign differs from all other Madonna jaunts, and not just because it’s the first time she’s included Ireland on the schedule. There’s more at stake for a start, maybe more than any time since her 1993 Girly Show revue. If previous tours have rejoiced in the white heat of new album publicity blitzes, this one comes a full year after the release of American Life, her most indifferently received and poorly selling album in a decade. And while it would be a gross overstatement to label the current offensive as Madge’s Last Stand, it does come with the distinct whiff of a damage limitation following a year of relatively muted activity. Those of us who thought Ms Ciccone circumnavigated mid-life identity crisis with ease on Ray Of Light and Music might have spoken too soon. This show is rated triple R for Retreat, Regroup and Reload.
In cold boardroom terms alone, you have to wonder what’s the demographic for a yoga-bared Kabbalah-quotin’ macrobiotic woman turned tweedy lady of the manor; a wanna-be Brit aristo whose Detroit roots keep showing; a multi millionaire land-owner waving writs and running ramblers off her estate like some gentrified Annie Oakley. Could it be that the foremost pop star of her age, who wrought unimaginable fame and revenue out of raw talent by dint of sheer hard labour and a keen nose for controversy, has of late frittered her considerable energies in a variety of theatrical, cinematic, literary and domestic pursuits? Or are we premature burying when we should be praising like we should?
Consider the following extract from a recent Observer profile by Barbara Ellen, one of the more astute Madonna-watchers currently practising journalism.
“… if Madonna were a fictional character, one could only retain public sympathy for her by having her ‘pay the price’ for her unnatural behaviour. By rights, she should be living alone in a dusty Hollywood mansion by now - childless, embittered, staggering Norma Desmond-style down a Gone With The Wind staircase, a hideous bony claw shaking her diamonds at the world (‘It’s time for my close-up’). Instead she’s happily married with two lovely kids, everything’s worked out great for her – and some people just seem to find that gutting.”
Nevertheless, Madonna’s current commercial standing is even more precarious than at the time of even her most ill-judged moves (Dick Tracy, the Sex book, the Letterman debacle, the mumsy ballad period of Evita) because in being such spectacular failures, they also generated spectacular publicity. The real problem with the American Life album was not that it bombed, but rather fizzled out. Madonna has been loathed and loved, but being ignored is anathema to her public persona.

Last time hotpress ran a feature on Madonna, we left the story just as she’d released the GHV2 collection at the end of the 2001 Drowned World tour. Ostensibly promoting the Music album, whose material made up the bulk of the set-list, the campaign was named after the opening track on Ray Of Light, originally lifted from JG Ballard’s classic 1962 eco-nightmare debut novel.
The show was as muddied as the origins of the title. When she wasn’t enacting corny cowgirl choreography and already dated Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon routines, Madonna strummed her acoustic guitar dressed like some kind of Freaky Friday car pool mom trapped in her pubescent daughter’s skate rat garb. Peers and critics alike labelled it as Cher with a bigger budget. The paying public justifiably complained about the paucity of hits on the set-list. Exit stage left, pursued by a large question mark.
When Madonna next took to the boards in May of 2002, it was in her first theatrical role since Mamet’s Speed The Plow 14 years before. The play was David Williamson’s Up For Grabs, and in it she played Loren, a naïve art dealer taking desperate measures to sell a Jackson Pollock canvas, including seducing her clients. The production ran for ten weeks in Wyndham’s Theatre in London’s West End, to mixed reviews.
But this was nothing compared to the utter lambasting given her performance as spoilt society bitch Amber, playing opposite Adrianno Giannini’s noble prole Giuseppe in her husband Guy Ritchie’s third full length feature Swept Away. When Ritchie, the accomplished director of snazzy new generation Brit gangster movies Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, signed on for this remake of Lina Wertmüller’s 1974 comedy Travolti da un Insolito Destino Nell’Azzurro Mare D’Agosto (Swept Away… by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August), a story about the class and sexual power struggles between two castaways marooned on a Mediterranean island, there were mutterings in the film community about his being chronically unsuited to the material. Not only this, but he had to contend with the albatross of his missus’ reputation, whose thespian career was the stuff of Rotten Tomatoes legend on account of a string of straight-to-video nasties such as Who’s That Girl, Shanghai Surprise and Body Of Evidence – although to be fair, she has on occasion proved herself capable of heavyweight roles, most markedly playing a beaten and vulnerable actress in Abel Ferrara’s Dangerous Game.
Still, the fears proved well founded. When the film was released in winter of 2002 it received some of the cruellest reviews in recent memory. By no means the worst of these was the New York Times’ verdict, a withering dismissal of Swept Away as “a soggy and superfluous motion picture. To work, the picture must show how Amber and Giuseppe change each other: how their seesawing power games reach an unexpected but inevitable state of equilibrium. But Mr. Ritchie lacks both the attention span and the writerly instinct to convey this transformation.”
Ritchie himself reportedly broke directorial protocol on the red carpet at the film’s premiere by shouting to the paparazzi his true feelings toward the movie, proclaiming it terrible, while his spouse, ever the trouper, gave him a mortified slap on the arm.
A new Madonna record should’ve rendered such hiccups mere chaff and chattel, as had happened with past crimes and misdemeanours. But ‘American Life’, released in spring of 2003, was Madonna’s weakest single in years (subsequently voted number nine in a Blender magazine poll of the Top 50 worst songs of all time, sandwiched between Eddie Murphy’s ‘Party All The Time’ and McCartney and Wonder’s ‘Ebony And Ivory’).
In musical terms she made the mistake of returning to a bank of ideas she’d burgled only two years before, namely the stash of bleeps, vocoders and electronic treatments that were French producer Mirwais Ahmadzai’s stock tricks. The result lacked the freshness and sense of surprise that distinguished her classic singles. Madonna had always excelled at hearing the auguries of pop’s approaching winds, not the prevailing ones. ‘American Life’, spancelled with a clunky rhythm, stylised synthesizings and a lamentable attempt at rapping, sounded distinctly like last year’s thing.
Not only had she miscalculated in terms of sonic opportunism, but also her lyrical and visual instincts were awry. Released in the teeth of the US attack on Iraq, early reports promised an accompanying military-themed promo clip set to generate a level of scandal on a par with ‘Like A Prayer’, the Mary Lambert directed video that managed to aggravate the three prime American pressure points – race, religion and sex – in four minutes flat. But at the last moment she pulled the video and had it recut, excising footage of helicopters, explosions and a Bush-alike lighting a stogie off a hand grenade. The whole exercise reeked of lost bottle. Robbed of context, the American Life album’s cover art, portraying Madge as a sort of She Guevara revolutionary figure in beret and fatigues, gave the impression of an artist who wanted to play dress-up in cool combat gear without the troublesome burden of addressing US hawks’ foreign policy.
All of this was further confused by the fact that the visuals didn’t even match the lyrical content in the first place, the song being a navel gazing hymn to celebrity pangs and bootstrap ambition every bit as trite as ‘Material Girl’. Here was a singer harping about that greatest and most poisonous fallacy, the American Dream, at a time when anti-American sentiment was at an all-time high. Even the dogs on the street knew the real subject at hand was the American Nightmare, from Wounded Knee to 9/11. Random channel surfers going from CNN to MTV encountered a juxtapositioning of bombs over Baghdad with a filthy rich pop singer prattling on about lattes and Pilates and the number of personal chefs in her employ. It was a bad Marie Antoinette moment. Madonna, an artist who could once read pop’s biorhythms as sharply as her own, seemed well and truly unplugged from the cosmic mainframe.
The upshot of all this was that the launch of the American Life album was akin to an over-budgeted movie suffering a lame first weekend. With pop music becoming increasingly subsumed into the morass of gadget culture, and the era of slow-burn long-life albums endangered by downloading and the rise of the I-Pod, the slump adversely affected the far superior follow up single ‘Hollywood’ – as fine a tune as she’d penned in recent times, even if the sentiment tasted of sour grapes.
In terms of content, the American Life album was a curious artefact, a hybrid of sparse pulses and electro folk-pop. At times disarmingly candid (‘Love Profusion’, ‘Intervention’) there were also songs so earnest and self-absorbed (‘I’m So Stupid’, ‘Static Process’) that they befitted a 16-year-old songwriter doing his first Whelan’s support slot rather than a smart and savvy pop princess.
So, here was a record lost halfway between the nightclub and the coffee house. One could rationalise it as an artist searching out a way to age gracefully, except that her elders – Rickie Lee Jones and Patti Smith to name two – were spitting ire at the military-industrial complex rather than gazing up their own orifices.
The album’s relative failure was exacerbated by a number of questionable career moves. Madonna’s children’s book The English Roses, the first of a series of five, was published last autumn, with 10,000 out of a million print run shifted in the first week alone, but few seemed genuinely excited about Madge as bespectacled author rather than Queen Bodacious.
Then there was a cheesy Gap ad with Missy Elliot and an even cheesier cameo on Britney’s ‘Me Against The Music’. And of course, the highly stage-managed walk-on part as the meat in a Britney/Christina tongue sandwich at the MTV Awards, a blatant but nonetheless entertaining piece of hot cross-generational soft-core lesbo action featuring Madge as groom to two brides wearing her old ‘Like A Virgin’ cast-offs, the queen bee book-ended by nubile prison bitches. That the biggest column inches Madge had garnered all year depended on her would-be usurpers spoke volumes.

So, in the wake of the car crash that was American Life, Madonna did something she’d never done in her entire career. She sought refuge on the road, embarking on a mammoth American tour last May, and the contrast between 2001’s Drowned World show and the Re:Invention extravaganza could not have been more pronounced if it had attended one of the young ladies’ schools of deportment in which Madge might be considering Lourdes for enrolment.
First off, the darker art-for-art’s-sake vibe had been replaced by a revue style trip through 20th century entertainment, from 1920s cabaret to gun-wielding bootcamp manoeuvres (a marked volte face from a year ago) to champagne-for-my real-friends nightclub ambience. More to the point, if that last tour betrayed little acknowledgment of anything she’d penned before ’98, this one was rammed with hits reupholstered enough to keep her artistic conscience quiet, yet not so out there as to enter the realm of guess-that-tune Dylan obtuseness.
So, for your dollar you got Madonna in thigh high boots and corset cavorting with her standard ensemble of camp-is-as-camp-does dancers. You got crowd pleasers like ‘Vogue’, ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ and ‘Holiday’ interspersed with the new stuff (‘American Life, ‘Hollywood’, ‘Nothing Fails’, ‘Die Another Day’). For the eyebrow-raising quotient, there was a revisiting of the dreadful eat-me-beat-me ‘Hanky Panky’ nursery rhyme from the Dick Tracy soundtrack and an acoustic version of Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ (one of the tunes banned by Clear Channel backed radio stations). Plus, in marked contrast to Ms Spears, she put those Evita lessons to good use and eschewed the DAT karaoke for live vocals.
But the real barometer was in the till. The US leg of the campaign did respectable business in what has by all accounts been a real bummer of a summer for US concert promoters, in recession since mid-April, with Lollapalooza cancelled due to lack of interest, poor sales for hitherto safe bets such as Van Halen, the Dead and Kiss, and teen market sure shots like Britney and Christina cancelling or postponing for various non-business reasons. Only package deals such as the perennial Ozzfest and the tenth Warped tour have thrived in a concert season that, according to Pollstar, was down 2 percent for the month of June.
And while Madonna’s US tour failed to completely sell out (due presumably to average ticket prices of $175) it still managed to gross almost $45 million.
But still, it’s not about the benjamins for Madonna anymore. It’s about whether or not Blond Ambition pales to bland ambition. She can’t claim the same cultural impact as ten or 15 years ago, but she may have come to embody something even more valuable: a Fuck You figure for women who refuse to roll over just because they turned 40. Plus, she is perhaps the only 80s icon apart from Bruce not to have completely lost the plot. And if someone like Linda Perry can be justly hailed as a hitmaker on the back of work for Pink, Christina and Courtney, let’s get some perspective: Madonna’s been doing it for two decades. Stack her Greatest Hits collections back-to-back, throw in a dozen or more key album tracks and you’ve got a body of work to compare with pop classicists like Spector, The Beatles and Abba.
And when the lights go down on Slane, debates like the one you hold in your hands will be useful only as insulation against damp grass. Right now she’s throwing a party. What happens after the clean-up operation is in the lap of the gods.

Madonna plays Slane Castle, Co. Meath on Sundy 29 August