It must be a source of reassurance to any gay pop icon to know that no matter how crummy her last career move, she can always come back. Indeed, the great thing about being a gay icon is that a few wrong turns and public mistakes serve only to make you even more of a gay icon.
Take, for instance, Kylie Minogue. Like the most devoted of soldiers’ wives, her core fanbase waited patiently as she went off to record two stinky albums of pointless Hoxton pop. When she returned with Spinning Around and Can’t Get You Out of My Head, the relationship was all the stronger for her lapse. Likewise Cher and Believe. After a slew of dreary soft-rock albums, she finally gave her staunchest admirers what they wanted — in spite of the fact that she needed persuading even to release the song.
Though trifling by comparison, most of Madonna’s crimes against pop have been deposited a little too recently for comfort in the communal memory bank. As difficult Madonna albums go, American Life was up there with Bedtime Stories. It was lambasted in some quarters for its preoccupation with big issues (fame, war and, um, the “tree of life”), but all that stuff wouldn’t have mattered if the songs were a bit more fun. But combined with the worry that she was turning into Camilla Parker Bowles, there were very real concerns that from here on we’d have to make do with Gwen Stefani and Alison Goldfrapp for amazonian future-pop — and even accept that they were making a better job of it than Madonna has in the past few years. Hands up who smiled when the Oldfrapp nickname came into circulation? Oh, we of little faith.
Early indications that she had learnt from her mistakes have, of course, come with the news that she has sidelined Mirwais Ahmadzaï, her collaborator on Music and American Life in favour of the thrillingly unsubtle Les Rhythmes Digitales honcho Stuart Price. The new single Hung Up has already delivered sensationally on that promise.
With its inspired use of the opening synth fanfare from Abba’s Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man after Midnight) it serves notice that Madonna has gone back to her roots. Of course, in the case of most artists the mere idea of such a thing is enough to have you stifling yawns: U2 hanging out with old bluesmen; Green Day’s torpid punk affectations; Van Morrison’s stultifying run of hotel-lobby jazz albums.
In the case of Madonna though, back to basics means New York in the late 1970s, when the aspiring star arrived from Michigan, shortened her name to one iconic handle and survived on popcorn as she struggled to make it as a dancer. It’s the tail end of disco, when the nightclubs Danceteria and Studio 54 were booming, a new $10 pill called Ecstasy accelerated the beat into a soft synthetic pulse and every great pop song came with its own whoosh! moment. On Confessions on a Dance Floor the whoosh! factor is high, not least on I Love New York, which has the song’s fabulously unapologetic sentiments carried along on an insistent digitised I Wanna Be Your Dog riff: “LA is for people who sleep/ Paris and London, baby you can keep . . . If you don’t like my attitude, then you can eff off/ Just go to Texas/ Isn’t that where they golf?”
The catty provocations of the delivery here are just one of hundreds of reasons why Confessions . . . is the gayest record yet. If Village People, Pet Shop Boys, Man 2 Man featuring Man Parrish, Donna Summer and a resurrected Sylvester all left Studio 54 at 4am, each with a bottle of poppers taped to their nose, and ventured straight into a recording studio where Giorgio Moroder was waiting for them with a tray of Breezers, they still wouldn’t make a record as gay as Confessions on a Dance Floor. “I’m gonna tell you about love,” Madonna intones breathily on Future Lovers, “Would you like to try?” All the while, arpeggiating I Feel Love synths fade in and out of view, contriving a sweet sense of disorientation that increases when the beat stops and she urges us back into the heart of the action. Then, cue everything all at once. Whoosh! moment No 17. ()
In keeping with Madonna’s and Price’s attempt to create something akin to a trip, songs grow out of other songs, mini-fugues escort you into more pop possibilities. As if 25 years of lapsed Catholicism, songs about her dead mother, clinches with black Christs and a starring role in Evita haven’t already earned her a lifetime gold privilege pass at G.A.Y., two songs on here plant themselves firmly in that wonderful Europop tradition — ATB’s 9pm (Till I Come), Desireless’s Voyage Voyage, Abba’s hymnal Lay All Your Love On Me — where major tunes and minor chords collide over a rhythm that urges escape.
Assisted by a canny steal from the Jacksons’ Can You Feel It, Sorry begins in wounded Italian tongues of betrayal, before casting the 47-year-old singer in an abusive relationship. Better still is Forbidden Love. Over a tune that resembles post-coital Daft Punk, it sees Madonna cooing, “Once upon a time there was a boy and there was a girl,” so tenderly that not even the thought that she might be singing about the director of Snatch can ruin it. However many versions of Madonna we’ve been sold, I can’t recall ever having heard this smitten soft-hearted girl — well, perhaps on True Blue, but that was a song so rotten that it was hardly surprising that Sean Penn left her shortly after.
It’s a higher love that Madonna seeks to address on the mantric invocations of Isaac. No doubt divined from her recent kabbalah dalliances, the song features Yitzhak Sinwani singing lines from a Yemenite poem (the one that Ofra Haza popularised in her 1988 hit Im Nin’ Alu) as swirling strings rise to meet an ever-intensifying rhythm — a perfect cue for Madonna to leap into affectingly bonkers talk of angels calling your name and life being some kind of great cosmic test.
Yes, sometimes it’s hard to keep a straight face, but let us also not forget that one reason why Madonna elicits such devotion from her fans is the restless spirit that she brings to bear on her records. It’s a quality we’re only too ready to acknowledge in the music of, say, Bob Dylan or Eric Clapton — but because Madonna came from pop, it’s something that rarely seems to warrant a mention. But ever since Like a Prayer — the record where it became apparent that fame wasn’t going to fill the void — it’s been there.
On How High she sings, “It’s funny/ I spent my whole life wanting to be talked about/ I did it, just about everything to see my name in lights/ Was it all worth it . . . I guess I deserve it.”
She is never one to underestimate her own cultural impact, and the closing track, Like It Or Not, follows Survival, Human Nature and Nobody Knows Me in a long tradition of Cicconian ripostes to her detractors. On this one, she suggests that the critical brickbats are just an occupational hazard of iconhood: “I’ll be the garden/ You be the snake/ All of my fruit is yours to take/ Better the devil you know/ Your love for me will grow.” At which point, it’s all that your usually reserved, university-educated correspondent can do to withhold from leaping up and squealing, “You go, girlfriend!”
Ultimately, it’s just the one very clever idea at the heart of Confessions... that makes it such an unalloyed joy. By returning to the source of her grand pop odyssey, Madonna has avoided the trap that has suckered zillions before — namely, that spiritual, soul-baring sentiments don’t need to be accompanied by furrowed-brow music. It seems obvious when you think about it, but it occurs to so few artists. Whatever discourse arises from her twelfth and finest album, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Confessions on a Dance Floor is a record designed to make you lose yourself in that whoosh! moment — knowing that by doing so, there’s every chance you’ll truly find yourself.
