The story of M

It’s also for mother. Soon after Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone gave birth to her first daughter Lourdes in October 1996, a change occurred, and no, I’m not talking early menopause. Fifteen years into her career, the singer went from being a 2D frozen image into that rare thing; a human icon – or if you prefer, a moving statue.

Until then, Madonna’s music thrived in the space between soul and skin, the big G and the big G-spot, fertile subject matter for everyone from Presley to Prince to Patti Smith. Even her earliest Minnie Mouse-on-helium hits chased the theme of dirty dancing as a key to transcendence. As Steve Buscemi’s Mr Pink implied in his Reservoir Dogs monologue, ‘Like A Virgin’ could’ve been the testimony of a girl who got fucked so good she saw God. But 1998’s Ray Of Light album took this ever- evolving artist way beyond the old Madonna/Whore archetypes.

Since then, it’s as if the subjugation of ego required by parenthood has allowed her best music to come through. Neither the ripe wank-fantasy of yore nor the Grace Kelly/Ingrid Bergman tightened-bow beauty she may become, Madonna’s now in the middle of an Indian summer.

Listen: “Tell the bed not to lay/Like the open mouth of a grave.” The line jumps out of the video playing on MTV, incongruous as the interloper in Poe’s ‘Masque Of The Red Death’, or a line of Anthrax spliced in with the coke on a glass table at a Beverly Hills blow-out. It’s a phrase that might go unnoticed in a tune by Will Oldham or Nick Cave or Polly Harvey. What makes it extraordinary is that it occurs in the middle of ‘Don’t Tell Me’, one of the later songs on Madonna’s current GHV2 collection, and a highlight of her most recent Music album.

‘Don’t Tell Me’ makes visible the shadow that has always lived just below the surface of Madonna’s shiny pop sheen, the purple-tinged residue a Roman Catholic upbringing (she chose Veronica as her Confirmation name, after the saint who wiped the face of the crucified Christ). It hints at an ever-present awareness of mortality – in fact, the first two thirds of her career have been marked by an absence as much as a presence, the Mother-shaped hole all too familiar to Lennon, Lydon, U2, Bob Geldof and Sinéad O’Connor.

“I grew up incredibly fearful of death and obsessed with it because my mother died when I was so young,” she told Arena magazine in late 1998. Later, in the same conversation, this: “I was carrying my daughter to bed, and I thought some day she’s going to be a very old woman and someone’s going to be carrying her. And the thought just devastated me.”

This mood is all over ‘Mer Girl’, the last track on Ray Of Light, and one of the first she recorded with William Orbit, a one-take vocal over an ambient watercolour and an interpolation of Gabor Szabo’s ‘Space’. The song describes a dream-like scenario where the singer is running, “From the man I cannot keep/From my mother who haunts me/Even though she’s gone/From my daughter that never sleeps”. On she runs, through a dreamscape of churches, apple orchards, streets, rain and cemeteries full of crumbling tombstones and forgotten names, until the ground gives way beneath her feet, leaves cover her face, ants march across her back, a black sky opens, “And I smelt her burning flesh/Her rotting bones/Her decay/I ran and I ran/I’m still running today”.

This was a hell of a long way from ‘Holiday’.

If 1989’s Like A Prayer was Madonna’s first real adult album, then Ray Of Light reads like a farewell to foolish things, a song cycle informed by the changes in her own biochemistry, but also her studies of Kabbalah, a medieval branch of Judaism that suggests the mystic systems of Yeats as much as the a la carte wafflings of the Lilith generation. Even the titles ‘Nothing Really Matters’ and ‘The Power Of Goodbye’ rang with a kind of Zen detachment/acceptance. Gone were the punishing physical workouts that characterised her 20s and early 30s, to be replaced by the spiritualist’s workout of choice: yoga.

“If you start practising yoga the whole idea is that you learn detachment and ultimately this is preparation for your death,” Madonna said in 1998, “and so you can’t help but thinking about death. There are actual positions in yoga that activate a feeling in you that supposedly – and this is based in ancient Vedic text – is very similar to the fear that you experience when you’re facing your death. And the idea is to bring yourself closer and closer to that feeling and actually make yourself really comfortable with it.”

The casual spectator might consider this uncharacteristically black-minded talk from Madonna, but consider the following information from Andrew Morton’s new biography of the singer. The young Madonna often had recurring nightmares about being buried alive, trapped in a coffin as insects and rats ate her flesh. “I was very conscious of God watching everything I did,” she said in 1985. “Until I was eleven or twelve, I believed the Devil was in my basement and I would run up the stairway so fast so he wouldn’t grab my ankles.”

Madonna with a hellhound on her tail? Who’d have thought it?

She was born in Pontiac, the third of eight children. Her father was a Chrysler engineer called Silvio (later Tony) Ciccone, the grandson of an Italian immigrant, and her mother Madonna Fortin was a striking woman of French Canadian descent. Although her siblings remember her as spoiled, Madonna junior grew up under a pretty strict work regime, either tending her father’s vegetable garden or doing similar chores at her grandparents’ house in Pennsylvania. When Madonna Jr. was six years old, her mother died young from breast cancer. It wasn’t a subject much talked about thereafter, and the child kept expecting her mother to return, even though three years later Tony Ciccone married their housekeeper.

The teenage Madonna showed serious promise as a dancer, and encouraged by her dance professor Christopher Flynn, she spent 1977’s Summer of Sam in New York, moving there for good a year later, much to her father’s displeasure. Legend has it she arrived at La Guardia airport and took a taxi to Times Square, close to being broke, and ended up staying on the sofa of the first stranger who swallowed her hard luck story. If true, it was a risky move. She wasn’t so fortunate a few months later when she was approached by a well-built black man who made her walk at knife point up several flights of stairs to the rooftop of a rundown tenement building. There, the man forced her to perform oral sex on him, before leaving her sobbing and terrified, afraid to go back down the stairs. Throughout the whole ordeal, her attacker never spoke a word. Years later, when defending some of the fantasy scenes in her Sex book, Madonna went public about the incident, admitting that while the trauma ultimately made her stronger, it put her off oral sex for life.

Up to this point she’d still dreamed of making it as a professional dancer, but the fierce competition and time-consuming graft demanded by the discipline made her impatient. After a brief stint in Paris as part of a revue starring one hit disco wonder Patrick Hernandez (whose four minutes of fame rejoiced in the gloriously dumb title ‘Born To Be Alive’) she returned to New York, determined to cut it as a musician.

A brief spell as drummer/singer in a new wave band called The Breakfast Club followed, before she found a home in a tenement on the Lower East Side, spending every weekend in clubs like Danceteria and the Mudd Club, hustling the DJs and A&R men. Her first break came from DJ Mark Kamins, who produced her singles ‘Everybody’ and ‘Burnin’ Up, which made some noises on the dance charts and secured her a deal with Seymour Stein’s Sire label, a Warner subsidiary hitherto known chiefly for acts like The Ramones and Talking Heads. ‘Holiday’ followed in 1983, produced by Jellybean Benitez, a huge dance hit in the US that also crossed over to the worldwide pop charts. At the time Madonna could easily have been mistaken for one of dozens of pop fly-by-nights, but she was no ingénue. A very streetwise 25-year-old, she spent her first royalty cheque on musical equipment and a bike. According to Andrew Morton, she also terminated a pregnancy resulting from her relationship with Benitez.

Madonna’s first album was a soda pop sugar rush, but it was the following year’s Like A Virgin that gave her both the persona and performance of her career, writhing around in an abbreviated wedding dress at the 1984 MTV awards. The album was her first number one. Overnight, she was everywhere. Her role in the likable farce Desperately Seeking Susan would remain the acting gig she’d most be remembered for, mainly because she played herself; a streetwise, gum-chewing, bare-midriffed street urchin bedecked in rags and crucifixes, a look that spawned a legion of Madonna-be’s (rumour had it that Rosanna Arquette never forgave the young Madonna for usurping her in what was supposed to be her vehicle to the Hollywood A-list).

Her set at Live Aid the following year was akin to a graduation ball, while True Blue was her wedding album, marking her nuptials to gifted young Hollywood firebrand Sean Penn. Their courtship was characterised by bouts of paparazzi punching, and on their wedding day, Penn scrawled “Fuck Off” in the Malibu sand for the benefit of the helicopters hired by tabloid snappers desperate for the money shot. The marriage, a tempestuous one earning the couple the nickname ‘the Poison Penns’, didn’t last much longer than the album campaign.

True Blue sold 13 million copies and spawned a whole string of hit singles, the best of which was ‘Papa Don’t Preach’, whose subject matter of teenage pregnancy provided an anthem for a thousand girls in trouble. Madonna toured relentlessly and worked hard on her acting career, but she was hopelessly miscast opposite Penn in Shanghai Surprise, while Who’s That Girl fared little better. By 1988 she’d divorced Penn and made her Marilyn Monroe fantasies real by dating John Kennedy Jr.

1989 marked the first of her spectacular comebacks. Like A Prayer was Madonna’s strongest album to date. The lead-off single and title track – a grand gothic disco melange of angelic Abba harmonies and gospel exultation – was helped no end by the controversial Mary Lambert-directed video to the song, whose twin themes of the persecution of an interracial couple and the connection between sexual and spiritual ecstasy caused Pepsi to pull out of their sponsorship deal with the singer (although she got to keep her $5 million advance). Scenes of Madonna clad in a flimsy black slip and getting it on in church with a sexy black saint earned her the denouncement of El Papa himself. That album also shifted 13 million units worldwide and spawned five singles, including ‘Cherish’ and ‘Express Yourself’. With the following year’s Immaculate Collection greatest hits package, Madonna’s position seemed unassailable.

Depending on your perspective, the early ’90s were where it all went horribly wrong for Madonna, or where she transformed herself from a Catholic American Princess into a transgressive martyr. First off was her role in the so-so Dick Tracy, opposite her then beau, Hollywood playboy Warren Beatty. Despite a handful of tunes by Stephen Sondheim, the soundtrack album I’m Breathless proved nothing more than a confusing diversion, although the stylish one-off single ‘Vogue’ displayed exactly how to convert the New York pink pound into mid-western folding green. (The clip for the song was directed by David Fincher, who went onto make the none-more bleak Aliens 3, Se7en, The Game and Fight Club, a prime example of Madonna cherry picking talent just as it ripens.)

Then there was Truth Or Dare (or In Bed With Madonna as it was re-titled in Europe), the documentary film of the 1990 Blonde Ambition tour, which provided an extraordinary insight into Madonna’s life on the campaign trail, not because it offered any clue of what she’s like off-camera, but because it illustrated, as Warren Beatty dryly put it, that she was never off camera. Throughout the movie, she comes across as the quintessential spoiled diva, while the staged scenes of the singer weeping over her mother’s grave are equally hard to take. Even worse was an interlude where one of her staff confessed she thought she’d been drugged and date-raped: Madonna’s first reaction was to laugh.

“What’s the point of making a documentary if you’re not going to show those sides,” the singer told Q magazine in 1998. “I look at that movie and I think, ‘My God how petulant was I? And, ‘Oh God, what a brat!’ But I’m not horrified by it. That’s where I was and I’ve grown up a lot since.”

Next came the infamous Sex book, a collection of softcore erotica featuring the singer in an endless variety of unclothed and uncompromising positions with the likes of Naomi Campbell, Isabella Rosellini and Vanilla Ice. One of the first projects undertaken by Madonna’s own Maverick production company, the book was definitely over-hyped and overpriced, but not without merit. Giving it the benefit of the doubt, the unbiased reader might rationalise it as a kind of Free Your Ass And Your Mind Will Follow manifesto. Years later, Madonna would rue that the advertising world benefited greatly from her testing of taboos, not to mention stealing her ideas. But then, she was hardly in a position to complain about intellectual copyright. In the opinion of Patricia Morrisroe, biographer of New York society boy, queer art icon and Patti Smith soul mate Robert Mapplethorpe, Sex owed a sizable debt to Mapplethorpe’s Lady, with its portraits of female bodybuilder Lisa Lyons. “Madonna and photographer Steven Meisel would essentially create a pornographic version of Lady when they collaborated on Sex, the rock star’s pictorial fantasies of bondage, bisexuality and biracial sex,” Morrisroe wrote. “The book became a publishing event, and Madonna’s muscular body was viewed as a triumph of discipline, whereas Lyons was castigated as a freak.”

Still, Sex was immaculately designed, and at times very funny, as anyone who got around to reading the text might have discovered. (“Dear Johnny, Things have not been the same since you left. I hardly ever think about my pussy. I get the same way with chocolate. First I can’t get enough and then if you so much as mention the word truffle I get queasy. It’s not that I get sick thinking of my pussy, it’s just that it needs a rest . . . Love XX DITA.”)

In the midst of all the brouhaha, Madonna released one of her most groundbreaking singles, a prime slice of Moroder/Summer-gone-breakbeat electro-sex called ‘Justify My Love’, built around a Public Enemy loop and produced by new boy on the block Lenny Kravitz, with whom she allegedly had a brief affair. The accompanying video, basically a real-time version of several Sex scenes, became an MTV X-rated staple. Unfortunately Madonna followed this with yet another ill-informed film choice. Body Of Evidence was a cod-noir Basic Instinct retread whose most remarkable attribute was that Willem Dafoe’s lawyer character seemed to button up his blazer as often as Madonna unbuttoned her blouse. One couldn’t but think that her real role opposite Dafoe should’ve been as Mary Magdalene in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ.

The 1992 Erotica album rather got lost in all of this hoopla, which is a pity, because it remains one of her most overlooked records, a kind of penthouse disco hi-concept album spangled with gems like the title track, ‘Deeper And Deeper’, ‘Rain’, and one of her most beguiling ballads ‘Waiting’. The problem was that, by now, Madonna seemed over-exposed in every conceivable sense of the word. The Girly Show 1993 tour was yet another mercilessly drilled Cabaret revue, but the prevailing air was that she didn’t know when to quit. A foul-mouthed and bad-tempered appearance on the David Letterman show did little for her cause. And once again, the Vatican was on her case, denouncing the tour.

In 1992, writer Nick Tosches, a fellow Italian American, constructed an imaginary dialogue between Madonna and the ghost of Pope Alexander VI. Here’s a sample:

Pope: You’re thirty-three now, the age at which Christ died; is that true?

M: That’s true.

Would you suck His cock?

Yes.

Even if he didn’t buy your records? Even if He damned you as He spent himself?

Yes

So, you would render unto Christ what you deny Warren Beatty?

In 1994 she had a fling with flamboyant basketball star Dennis Rodman. Less than a year after their relationship ended, Rodman sold her out, dedicating an entire chapter of his autobiography Bad As I Wanna Be to their couplings, saying, “She wasn’t an acrobat. But she wasn’t a dead fish, either.” Madonna likened the account to something “even a bad porno writer would not take credit for.”

Madonna hadn’t quite become a laughing stock, but the danger was she’d soon have no stock at all. Her next album Bedtime Stories redressed the balance somewhat. While hardly her most dynamic musical statement, the songs were uniformly strong, and at times pointed, especially in the case of ‘I’m Not Sorry’, with its serpentine sub-bass and refrain of “I’m not your bitch/Don’t hang your shit on me”, a response to the pillorying she received throughout the Sex era.

She spent the next two years chasing the film role she believed she was born to play, that of Evita Peron. After some serious lobbying she won the part, not to mention wooing Argentinean president Carlos Menem, a staunch Peron-ite who, until he met the singer, had been opposed to allowing director Alan Parker to use government buildings in the shoot. Evita was respectably received, although the Tim Rice/Andrew Lloyd Webber soundtrack album placed Madonna smack bang in the middle of the road, jostling for space with Streisand and Celine Dion, far from her natural nocturnal habitats.

M is for modernist. Madonna’s celebrity itself is only half interesting. The real tickler is not that Ms Ciccone is possibly the most famous woman on earth, but that she seems to simultaneously inhabit two worlds, the firmament and the flophouse. She is a woman capable of introducing the counterculture’s scuzziest emissaries – Charles Bukowski, Abel Ferrara, Dr Dre – to the Kennedys and maybe even the Queen. Study a critical and commercial graph of her career and you’ll find the low points are usually those where she has shamelessly courted the MOR mainstream: Who’s That Girl, I’m Breathless, Something To Remember, Evita, ‘American Pie’.

Madonna’s best trick has always been to translate the peripheral into pop culture. From her earliest days trying to hustle her tush into New York’s post-54 club scene, she’s only ever been as good as the ideas she steals from the fringes. (Even in Desperately Seeking Susan there was evidence of Madonna’s connections with the New York netherworld – Richard Hell played her boyfriend.) Later, the marriage to Sean Penn resulted in the mind-boggling scenario of Madonna doing dinner with dipso barfly writer Charles Bukowski. Penn adored Bukowski and was hell bent on playing him in Barbet Schroeder’s biopic Barfly, but it never came to pass. Buk himself was rather fond of the young actor, but never could stand his wife. According to Howard Sounes’ Bukowski biog Locked In The Arms Of A Crazy Life, the writer once forgot himself and made a disparaging comment about Ciccone in front of Penn. The young hothead rose as if to fight him, but Bukowski growled, “Hey, Sean, sit down. You know I can take you.” A couple of years later, after Madonna and Penn had divorced, the singer’s agent contacted Bukowski to ask if he’d be willing to pose with her for the Sex book. He refused, telling friends she behaved like she’d discovered the subject. Madonna, for her part, tried in vain to explain to journalists that the tome was an homage to Paris de Nuit, the 1933 collection of photographs by Brassai.

Surprisingly enough, for what is essentially a radio-friendly record, 1994’s Bedtime Stories, contains some of her most left-field musical elements, drawing on everything from mellowest Nirvana (check out the Kurt Cobain harmonies grafted onto ‘Secret’) to phat gangsta basslines and Dre-style beeswarm effects (‘Human Nature’) to the space-opera of the title track, penned by Bjork (a rare example of Madonna being swamped by another artist’s persona – she xeroxed the Icelandic singer’s peculiar phrasing like an amateur.)

The previous year, Madonna had undertaken perhaps her riskiest collaboration, co-producing and starring in Dangerous Game for film-maker Abel Ferrara, infamous for such raw and edgy movies as Driller Killer, King Of New York and Bad Lieutenant. In this film within a film, she played an actress by the name of Sarah Jennings, who in turn portrayed a woman in the midst of a disintegrating marriage to a violent booze and drugs swilling husband. The whole mess is presided over by philandering director Eddie Israel (played by Harvey Keitel). Throughout the film, the lines between fiction and reality are continually blurred – Ferrara’s wife Nancy also appeared in the film, and their and Keitel’s marriages were in trouble at the time. Ferrara even conceded that the film was a kind of Madonna biography of sorts, going so far as to cast James Russo – a close friend of Sean Penn – as her on-screen husband. In one improvised scene, Madonna, as Jennings, recounts in camera her rape ordeal from 15 years before. The irony was, this film’s fiction told audiences more about Madonna than the supposed fly-on-the-wall scenes in In Bed With…

Dangerous Game wasn’t Ferrara’s best, and it bombed at the box office (it cost 10 million dollars and took in $60,000), but it did at last stretch Madonna as an actress, although she was more than put out by the director’s chaotic methods – he had no qualms about working while drunk. Ever the pro, Madonna showed up to the set on time and with her lines learned, only to find Ferrara had thrown the script out. In one instance, things degenerated into a pushing match between star and director, and upon seeing the final cut Madonna faxed him pages of handwritten abuse.

But then, Madonna took the research for her role seriously, to the degree of visiting battered women’s homes and going to an underground club in the meatpacking district of New York to smoke several joints and take notes on the effect. Indeed, despite her crippling exercise regimes, Madonna has never been too puritanical about drugs. According to Ronin Ro’s history of Death Row records Have Gun Will Travel, when Tupac Shakur dropped by NBC studios in New York in April 1994 to watch Snoop Doggy Dogg perform on Saturday Night Live, he found Snoop and Dre smoking marijuana with Ms Ciccone. Of course, from the beginning, Madonna relied on the support of the gay dance scene, with its amyl nitrate rush, E-lation and champagne-cocaine confidence. When Q’s writer mentioned Ecstasy to the singer in relation to Ray Of Light, she regarded him as if he were several steps down the evolutionary ladder: “You guys are still taking Ecstasy, not Special K?” (Ketamine, not the breakfast cereal – PM).

As an exercise in getting Madonna re-established as a dance act, Ray Of Light was a triumph, and the input of respected ambient composer/producer William Orbit can’t be overstated. Orbit was not an obvious choice to turn her career around after Evita, but he was an inspired one. The vocal coaching Madonna received for the Evita role paid dividends, particularly on the soaring title tune, while Orbit had a gift for producing nagging guitar lines and memorable hooks as well as his trademark abstract washes of sound. The result was at once as modern a record as Madonna had made, but also the most commercial. It sold 12 million copies and won three Grammies.

If Ray Of Light proved a major return to form, then Madonna didn’t waste any time getting back in the saddle. ‘Beautiful Stranger’ from the second Austin Powers movie soundtrack proved that Orbit could not only excel at dance esoterica, but also draw out Madonna’s purest pop instincts. For her next album, Madonna retained his services, but also hooked up with French producer Mirwais, an erstwhile Iggy/Suicide fan who found a second lease of life in a climate informed by French beat boffins and soundscapers such as Daft Punk and Air. In ways, Mirwais was the quintessential Madonna collaborator – his own single ‘Disco Science’ was remixed by Georgio Moroder, while Stephane Sednaoui (who’d also worked with Madonna on the clip for ‘Fever’) directed the arty blue movie that accompanied the tune.

Mirwais swathed Ciccone’s voice in goth-geisha treatments, vocoders, pitch-shifters and all manner of futuristic gizmos. To some, the resulting Music album was the perfect marriage of sonic artiness and pop sensibility. Others thought it made her sound like Cher. But whatever about the trimmings, the songs were strong: ‘Impressive Instant’, ‘Don’t Tell Me’, ‘Amazing’, ‘What It Feels Like For A Girl’ and the title track were a deft blend of steel rhythm and human soul.

“You could say she wanted to try new things every time,” Mirwais explains. “She takes risks. Maybe it’s a little bit more different because it’s the first time she has worked with a non-Anglo Saxon person. She’s really intelligent and she has a good sense of psychology herself, she can manage a lot of different situations.”

And once again Madonna courted controversy, this time with an after-the-watershed joyriding video for ‘What It Feels Like For A Girl’ directed by filmmaker Guy Ritchie, her second husband and father of her second child Rocco. The two met through Sting’s wife Trudie Styler while negotiating a soundtrack deal for his Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels.

Summer of 2001 saw Madonna her embark on her first world tour in eight years. It was greeted with mixed reviews. Many critics – and a few of her peers – insisted that the live show hadn’t evolved in tandem with the music, that the Drowned World production smacked of showbiz over soul, with its cheesy Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon routines and corny designer bondage clobber. Again Cher’s name was invoked – except this wasn’t even greatest hits review. It was the only sour note in what had proved to be the singer’s most fruitful incarnation.

In the wake of that tour, Madonna now stands at yet another crossroads. Will she go for the glitter or the grit? The middle of the road or the ditch? Time will tell if she’s evolved into an artist who has at last found her stride, or if she’s still a dilettante who’ll continue to boomerang between the penthouse and the pavement.

Watch this space.

GHV2 is out now on Warner Music