Madonna: Like an Icon
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Madonna: Like an Icon

Lucy O'Brien

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eBook - ePub

Madonna: Like an Icon

Lucy O'Brien

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MADONNA: LIKE AN ICON is a groundbreaking biography finally solves the mystery at the heart of her chameleon-like existence. Extensively researched and perceptively written by journalist Lucy O'Brien, it explores the complex personality and legendary drive that has made Madonna the most famous female pop artist of our time. O'Brien draws upon scores of interviews with producers, musicians, collaborators, lovers, and friends - many of whom have never spoken so candidly - to examine Madonna's fascinating life. From her mother's premature death to her dynamic arrival on the New York club scene to her training for Evita and beyond, every stage of her life is illuminated.

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Book Two

CONFESSION

5

SICK AND PERVERTED

I’m going to rule the world.
—Madonna
FLAUNTING HER NAKED AMBITION LIKE A PREFIGHT boxer, Madonna announced on Dick Clark’s popular American Band-stand: “I’m going to rule the world.” She also claimed, like John Lennon did two decades earlier, that she would be “bigger than Jesus.” It was January 1984, and she knew the pressure was on to make her second album work. Her debut was doing very nicely, thank you, but if she was to vault over the heads of other acts to superstardom, she needed to nail a new sound.
The critical person in this equation was Nile Rodgers. The architect of futuristic disco and the man behind Chic, he was also the man who reshaped David Bowie’s sound with the hugely commercial Let’s Dance. A fan of Bowie’s androgynous image and authoritative pop skills, Madonna took notice. Rodgers was invited by Jellybean Benitez and an enthusiastic Warner executive to a gig she was playing, opening for the Sony artist Jenny Burton. “Not everyone in the room got it, but boy, I got it! There was this girl singing and dancing at a time when nobody was doing it. That was black music’s heritage and here was this white girl bringing it back,” Rodgers recalled.
He invited Madonna over to his apartment to listen to her demos for the next album. He wasn’t sold on all the songs, but she made it clear that if he didn’t learn to love them, they wouldn’t be working together. Her experience with Lucas had made her defensive and anxious. She still had only a two-album deal with Warner at this stage, and she was determined to get it right. Rodgers thought the main problem was in the execution of the demos—too much sequencing, not enough live band. “I told her, if you sequence this stuff, all you’ll end up with is really cute pop songs, but if we play the songs and get the interpretation of great musicians, then we can really take this to a higher level. I told her being able to perform in front of a band would establish her as a real artist.”
The key song for Madonna was “Like a Virgin,” which at the time Rodgers felt was one of the weakest. “She was convinced it was the one. I was like, ‘Are you nuts?’” The chorus was catchy, but it had a corny, novelty air. Madonna knew instinctively, however, that it was her signature tune. It worked on two levels: both as a passionate look at personal transformation and also as a ditty dripping with irony. It was written by the then relatively unknown songwriting duo of Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg. The latter had had a hit with Linda Ronstadt’s “How Do I Make You” and a couple of tracks with Pat Benatar, but had yet to establish himself. In 1983, he was driving around in his pickup truck, musing on his love life. “I’d survived a very traumatic divorce. Then I met somebody and felt very elated about it. It seemed a miracle to me—I’d made it through the wilderness, I felt brand-new,” Steinberg told me. “When people suffer a disturbing breakup, they feel a bit shell-shocked, that they’ll never be able to open their heart again.”
Steinberg wrote a song about his new love. He kept the verses sincere, with a sense of longing and life experience, but decided to do something “cutting edge, risquĂ©, and playful” for the chorus. “Believe me, I wasn’t a weirdo thinking that ‘like a virgin’ would be a normal, sincere statement. I knew it would be provocative. I wasn’t writing my diary, I wanted to write a hit song.” Inspired by Smokey Robinson’s song “Virgin Man,” Steinberg wrote the chorus with a tongue-in-cheek 50s twist. When Tom Kelly added the music, he approached the song as a ballad. “But the chorus sounded ridiculous as a ballad. He tried numerous approaches, then in his frustration began bashing the piano and singing falsetto. ‘That’s it! Right there!’ I said.” Though delighted with the result, the duo found it a difficult song to “place,” and were turned down by numerous artists and labels. “They laughed, saying ‘No one will ever sing that song.’ In a way, it was written for one person. Thinking of the word ‘virgin’ and the name Madonna—how perfect can you get?” says Steinberg.
Warner Bros. executive Michael Ostin finally snapped it up, saying it was perfect for his artist Madonna. When she first heard it, she deemed it “sick and perverted,” but that wasn’t a problem. “Sick and perverted always appeals to me,” she said, “
there were so many innuendoes in it, I thought, ‘This is great. This will really screw with people.’” For a post-Catholic girl steeped in Vatican II dogma, she knew it would work well with the cheery virgin/whore dichotomy she was developing. And for the first time she could see the look, the music, and the personal philosophy coming together. When she argued with Nile Rodgers to keep the song on the album, she declared: “Losing your virginity is the most important thing that ever happens to a girl. It’s all girls talk about and girls will all relate to it.”
In Steinberg’s opinion the finished song is “an absolute blueprint” of his original. In his view, they didn’t do anything else apart from bringing in a live drummer. And, with an approach that would later get her into trouble, “Madonna sang every note exactly the way Tom Kelly did, right down to the word ‘hey!’”
THE Like a Virgin sessions took place that spring at the Power Station studios in Midtown Manhattan. The record boasted the powerhouse Chic lineup of the bassist Bernard Edwards, drummer Tony Thompson, and Rodgers on guitar. It also featured Jimmy Bralower, a drummer who had worked with Kurtis Blow, Chic, and Hall & Oates, and who was making a name for himself as a whiz kid with fledgling electronic drum technology. Responsible for the album’s pop sheen and snappy drum programming, he pulled the live instrumentation and electronics together. “The album is very landscaped, tight, and precise—a little different for the time,” he says. “We had the earliest computerized drums—what hip-hop has become—those were the tools. Twenty years later, this music is part of history, but at the time there was no other music to take a cue from. It was like driving without directions, purely on instinct.”
For Bralower, this was an exciting record to make. “When Nile brought me in, I thought, I dig ‘Borderline’ and ‘Holiday’—oh yeah, I guess I’m going to be making one of those. Then I was handed ‘Like a Virgin’ and ‘Material Girl’ and I thought, What is going on?” He quickly realized that this would be a departure from Madonna’s disco roots. “She and Nile had in mind something bigger than anyone else envisioned for her.”
The record kicks off with “Material Girl,” the song that would become Madonna’s personal anthem for the 1980s. It’s notable that now she rarely performs that song live, and doesn’t identify with the sentiment, however ironic. But back in the early 80s, when the “Greed Is Good” yuppie dystopia was emerging, this was a clarion call. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, shoulder pads and power-dressing were high fashion, and the sense of a hippie alternative had been pushed so far to the margins it was about to disappear. As one of her former backup vocalists, Gwen Guthrie, once sang to an idle boyfriend, “Ain’t Nuthin’ Going on but the Rent.” Money had become the big motivator in the 80s culture. Although the video accompanying “Material Girl” clearly shows an antimaterialist backstory, the main thrust is one of credit, interest, and cold hard cash. Mr. Right is to be someone of equal financial status, a well-dressed peacock who can stand beside her in the power pop firmament.
An upbeat radio song, its very conventionality is undercut by the camp male chorus and Madonna’s asides; those yelps and girlish vocals that have become her trademark. It’s the complement to “Like a Virgin,” her second most enduring hit from these years. Here her voice sounds sweet and adolescent, a mock-up of the girl-group style. She sings of the renewing force of love with total self-belief, comfortable with the pitching and phrasing, delivering it like the anthem it becomes. With its lascivious swing, Four Tops–style bass line, and suggestive lyrics, she knows it is “her” song, and puts her stamp on it. Jimmy Bralower remembers laying down the “sonic landscape” for the rhythms. “If you listen to the drums on ‘Like a Virgin,’ they’re big, fat, and wide. They take up a lot of space. If it had been done any other way, the song would’ve lacked authority. We were clear about how the sounds would move listeners subliminally.” And much of this song’s attraction is in the persistent way it hooks into the subconscious.
Continuing the theme of lushness and excess set by “Material Girl,” the song “Dress You Up” uses fashion as a metaphor. Sung by a woman clearly addicted to clothes, this is a love tune that rocks. With its heady groove and carefree vocal, it accentuates Madonna’s physical, sensual world. As a dancer, she is moved by touch and texture, and it’s all here in the lyrics and kinetic delivery. “With ‘Dress You Up,’ I was going for a popping, closer, more immediate sound,” explains Bralower. Similarly, with the track “Angel,” he helped create a sense of intimacy, propelled by driving rhythm. “If we’d given ‘Angel’ the same wide sound as ‘Like a Virgin,’ it would’ve been lumbering, there would have been no snap to it. For the whole record we were consciously creating extreme sounds—backbeats, snare drums very high-pitched, bass drums fat, wide, and long. It was not a normal set of sounds. We were pushing the envelope on the cartoon-like quality.”
Back at Warner Bros., people were getting worried. This was clearly not going to be a reprise of her debut. “Phone calls would come in from various places. ‘What are you doing? What is this record you’re making?’ People were scared out of their minds, fearful of change. When you have three hits in a certain vein, you do the same thing again. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Madonna was bucking all normal trends, she was fighting trends,” recalls Bralower.
Nile Rodgers resolutely stuck by his artist. His approach was efficient. As Bralower says, “He kept the record rooted in dance rhythms and he’d break past the obvious. His recording style was organized; clean, tight, a little bit aggressive. We made the record in six weeks from top to bottom. Procedurally it was like a well-oiled machine.” That suited Madonna, who liked to work at a similar pace. “The thing between us, man, it was sexual, it was passionate, it was creative,” recalled Rodgers. Even though he admits the songs were “rudimentary Chic exercises
one-take stuff,” there was liberation in their simplicity.
Madonna varied the tone with mid-tempo ballads like “Pretender” and “Stay,” but these were less successful—the former marked by a limp arrangement, and the latter weighed down by that dated 80s synth sound. Ironically, at this stage, Madonna was more powerful singing about abstract love of the dance or a lust for life rather than the day-to-day mundanity of breaking up and making up. With its driving, clattering beats, the survivalist anthem “Over and Over” was more her style. This reflected her attitude at the time—that love was fine but her real focus was personal ambition and the energy it needed to take her higher. The standout Like a Virgin songs were the backdrop for Madonna the star. “She was saying, ‘I wanna be a movie star,’” says Bralower. “She knew something.” As her East Village friend Johnny Dynell says: “She saw music as a way to get into the movies. ‘I wanna be Jessica Lange,’ she told me. I don’t think she ever thought she’d be doing music thirty years later.”
Although Madonna wasn’t yet a full-blown star (“She wasn’t particularly comfortable in her lifestyle, she hadn’t seen royalties yet,” Bralower says diplomatically), she was acting like one. “She could be headstrong and—I’m being very kind—rambunctious. But she was smart, she made her playground extreme,” he adds. She was the restless boy-toy girl with the colorful bracelets, focused on every minute of the session. “Very often artists show up to sing and then go shopping, but she was there the whole time. This was a very important record to her.”
She was careful with the album artwork, introducing her virgin/ whore persona with proud transparency. The cover was shot by a cool new name in fashion—Steven Meisel. Here Madonna props herself up on silk cushions, looking straight to camera, all curves and seductive temptress. She wears a huge drop earring, a silver crucifix, diamond choker, and an exquisite lace bustier. Her extravagant tulle skirt and dainty fingerless gloves are offset by the hip-hop BOY TOY belt. It’s a picture of ironic innocence, the virginal bride with fake 80s blush. On the reverse she appears stripped down in a black negligee, wearing minimal jewelry and sheer stockings. She sits on a thread-bare, beaten-up bed, with plain sheets, an existential cup of coffee placed on top, and her hair is mussed with that look of all-night wanton sex—a Cindy Sherman–esque picture in its sense of a backstory, a continuing narrative. She is the star in her own B-movie.
BY NOW, Madonna was moving on and up, and had left her Michigan roots far behind. She was contacted out of the blue by her old boyfriend from high school, Wyn Cooper. “I called her up, her name was in the phone book, believe it or not. I didn’t recognize her voice. I said, ‘Is that Madonna Ciccone?’ pronounced Si-ccone. And, using the more Italian pronunciation, she answered, ‘No, it’s Chi-ccone.’ Oh God, I thought, you get to New York and change the pronunciation of your name. She didn’t seem interested. ‘I don’t have time to talk to you,’ she said. ‘I’m on my way to Fire Island.’”
She felt ambivalent about old school friends, uncertain about where they fitted in her new life. On one level, she yearned for the security of home, while on another level, she had to keep in step with the superstar persona she was creating. She would call her former best friend Carol Belanger in the middle of the night, crying and saying: “I feel so lonely. I’ve got no one to talk to.” Then, when she’d come to Detroit to do a gig, she would leave tickets for Carol for an after-show party. “But when Carol turned up, Madonna would be surrounded by other people and wouldn’t speak to her,” says Cooper. “Carol was very hurt by that.”
Madonna was socializing in different circles. No longer sleeping on egg crates, she moved into a spacious apartment with Jellybean on Broome Street in SoHo. They were entranced with one another (“She was my girl,” he said), and both were moving fast in their careers. “We spent hundreds of hours necking in the studio between takes,” he recalled. “We had a very open relationship. It was part of my lifestyle, her lifestyle. I believe we were meant to meet and work together. A lot of great things came out of that relationship.”
WITH Like a Virgin in the bag, Madonna was anxious for it to be released. Seeing this as her ticket to a film career, she was not pleased when Warner sat on it. Her debut album was doing so well, they wanted to wait until it had played itself out before unleashing Like a Virgin. When it was eventually released in November 1984, the record stood out amid stiff competition. Despite her impatience, the timing was just right. “Music is the main vector of celebrity. When it’s a success its impact is just as strong as a bullet hitting the target,” she has said.
In the pop world, she was competing with Michael Jackson (at the peak of his career with the 25 million–selling Thriller album), and Prince (who had just reached critical mass with Purple Rain). The record industry was changing. As Gil Friesen, former president of U.S. A&M Records, said: “It was no longer a free-for-all expanding market. It was, going into the 1980s, an industry where there was tough competition for market share, with business principles that governed.”
The teenage audience that had kept the business buoyant in the 1960s and 1970s grew smaller, leading to the 1979 “crash.” Singles sales slumped to 10 percent of record sales, and major record company CBS lost 46 percent of annual profits, having to sell stock to survive. The 1980s was about the rise of the corporate artist. Stars like Jackson, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, and Lionel Ritchie were pulling the industry out of its slump. According to CBS Records’ Al Teller, “The superstar is the giant bonanza. The big hit is to develop superstar careers. That is the biggest win you can have.”
Madonna needed to establish herself as a priority act for Warner. Major labels were not going to take risks and were heavily reliant on saleable images, particularly for female artists, who have long been considered more difficult to “sell.” Madonna was lucky in that MTV had become second in importance to the music industry as a promotional vehicle. She was to use this medium with devastating aplomb, but at the time of Like a Virgin’s release, she was yet to make her mark as the video queen. In 1984, the big female sellers were black artists like the Pointer Sisters, Tina Turner, Sade, and Chaka Khan—women with big soul voices and lived experience to match. They exuded glamour and dignity, but (with the exception of the anarchic Chaka Khan) not an offbeat quirkiness.
Madonna was a different proposition: white (and therefore easier to market), thoroughly sexual, and provocative. Her only major rival in mass pop terms was Cyndi Lauper, a powerhouse pop talent from Queens, New York, who in 1984 had a major hit with the sparkly girly anthem to female solidarity “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Like Madonna, she came, on her mother’s side, from an Italian-American lower-middle-class background. Like Madonna, she had a subversive, cartoon image, dying her hair green and wearing vivid thrift-store clothes. She had a peculiar voice and impressive range—from the soulful balladry of “Time After Time” to the tongue-in-cheek delights of “She Bop,” a top-three hit song about female masturbation. And she also had a huge audience of screaming wannabes.
Used to being the gawky misfit from a single-parent background, Lauper wanted success “out of anger. People would give me grief about the way I dressed, then Boy George’s success opened the door for me,” she told me in the early 90s. “I was shocked at the reaction. I’d go out onstage and the audience would be filled with girls screaming, ripping at my clothes. I’d never heard girls screaming over a woman before, and at first I thought, They think I’m gay. The only bad thing is I wasn’t!”
Both Madonna and Lauper had tapped into that rich seam of adolescent female desire. The longing expressed by the screaming was a longing to be the desired object, to have her as your metaphorical best friend, to literally walk in her shoes. That way led to self-determination, glamour, and happiness. Add a degree of sexual confusion, and you have a potent mix.
At first, Lauper stole the march, with four top-ten singles and a 4.5 million–selling debut album, She’s So Unusual. “If you were to take Cyndi’s first album and compare it with Madonna’s first album, my God, Cyndi’s is so much better. Just out of the starting gate, she took the lead real fast,” says Billy Steinberg, who went on to write for Lauper such hit songs as “True Colors” and “I Drove All Night.” But while Madonna thrived on adulation and success, Lauper found it an unwelcome pressure. “You can’t live in that sort of atmosphere as a meteoric phenomenon, it doesn’t go with being creative. It’s always been a struggle for me to sell myself,”...

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