Two years ago, at the height of Born This Way furore, I identified the problem with Lady Gaga's pop trajectory: after Bad Romance Gaga took as her model the more conceptual, overexposing 1989-1992 Madonna, the Madonna whose music feels secondary to exhibitionism, cultural provocation and domination for its own sake. That was a problem for Gaga because Madonna had all the cultural political capital gained from her first three albums to spend down during that period, while Gaga's obnoxious and exhausting phase had to be 'funded' out of only the handful of broadly appealing singles up to Bad Romance.
Fast-forward two years and Gaga's OK-ish (and certainly better than BTW) next album, Artpop, arrives together with all sorts of extra-musical, antic and excessive promotional stunts, but only the hard core of fans are paying any sort of positive attention: Gaga's selling a few hundred thousand records not millions. The sort of good will you need to have to get the casual fan to buy your stuff no longer exists for Gaga - it's all been spent. Maybe Gaga will enjoy being a more cult figure, albeit one's that's possibly about as big as Bowie was for much of the 1970s:
"As of June 1983, Bowie’s total global album sales were as follows (according to Zanetta/Edwards’ Stardust, figures rounded up/down):
Three top sellers: Ziggy Stardust (1.38 million units moved), ChangesOneBowie (1.33 million), Young Americans (923,000). A few gold records: Diamond Dogs (745,000), David Live (598,000), Station to Station (552,800), Aladdin Sane (533,000); a few mid-list sellers: Space Oddity (455,600), Hunky Dory (445,600), Pin Ups (421,250), Scary Monsters (347,400). With the “Berlin” records, a complete cratering: “Heroes” (279,000), Low (265,900), Lodger (153,360), Stage (127,350). Between 1977 and 1983, one of every two new Bowie LPs was returned unsold by retailers. By contrast, Michael Jackson sold over a million copies of Off the Wall between August and December 1979 alone." (Pushing After The Dame)
Here's hoping she can come up with some 'Berlin'-worthy music once she realizes her new status.
2013 has seen the rise of the exciting, brilliantly precocious Lorde. This was a genuinely unexpected development; 2013 was supposed to be the year of the 'Baby Robyns': Frida Sundemo, Faye, MØ, and the like:
I'm not sure that it quite makes sense for all these Scandi-gals to sell nothing while Lorde sells millions! Indeed Robyn herself has never had quite the global success (esp. in North America) that Lorde is having. Thus, while Lorde is a fantastic development for the charts, the flukiness and winner-take-all-ness of pop chart success remains troubling. Incredible luck is involved in becoming a 'chosen one'. Lorde shows signs of understanding this, and of appreciating her good fortune more generally. Let's hope she never forgets the point (it's probably one of the keys, along with staying a little bit 'alternative' to the mainstream, to Lorde's preserving good will and having a long career).
Man I miss this more mysterious, adult Madonna. 2012's born-again teenager Madonna doesn't do it for me (does anyone like it?).
Madonna has had two terrific albums since Ray of Light: Music and Confessions on a Dancefloor. But apart from those....
Update: Listening again to Madonna's ignored/semi-reviled American Life (2003), I find that it's quite a lot better than I remembered. It now feels to me a little like the Amnesiac to Music's Kid A: similar but less commercial and without the big boost that being the immediate successor of a career-changing/zeitgeist-defining album (OK Computer, Ray of Light respectively) affords. At any rate, anyone who likes Music should definitely check out the following tracks: Nobody Knows Me (a dark version of Music), Nothing Fails (a dark Don't Tell Me), Easy Ride, and X-static Process. And three other tracks - Die Another Day, Hollywood, and Love Profusion - are at least OK.
A largely overlooked gem from 1995. I was reminded of this wonderful song again today by hearing Superstar (excerpt only) from Madonna's latest album, MDNA. There's a lot to be said in pop music for keeping things melodically and rhythmically simple (at least some of the time), which then allows for focus on timbre and on lyrics. That's the game Poster Children plays to perfection here. The problem with everything I've heard so far from MDNA, including Superstar, is that nothing fills up all the space that's left for timbral and lyrical explorations. M. doesn't seem to have any stories or personality she cares to share with us this time, and there's a general lack of effort on the timbre side of things. One wants to say something like 'M. can get anyone from Nile Rodgers on down to play on her records, so how has it come to this?' Anyhow, Poster Children's shoulda-been-a-hit shows everyone how it's done.
Update: Fave MDNA tracks after 1.5 full listens are Superstar, I'm a Sinner, Love Spent, and two bonus tracks, I Fucked Up and B-day Song. Still, none of these is an outright winner in my view. The best track on MDNA wouldn't make it into the top half of the tracks on Robyn's Body Talk (2010), which should be a little depressing to her M-ness. (Robyn's key collaborator Klas Ahlund co-authored Some Girls on MDNA, and that is indeed one of the better tracks. But all I could think of when listening to it was that Robyn would be a better fit for its attitude-heavy, robot-schtick.)
Update 2: What MDNA really needs is something like a cover of a great but relatively obscure Abba song to lift it. I'd recommend this forgotten gem from Voulez-vous for the purpose:
Pretty good show. Prince is still the best by the proverbial country mile (I've elsewhere recommended that the NFL should just make Prince their steady), followed by U2 who were great at the country-still-in-shock-after-9/11 Superbowl in 2002, but M's the best of everyone else.
One other general thought: the show put M. back into perspective. On the one hand, yes, M. faces a problem: she's spawned generations of fast-hybridizing, dance-pop/mediaste imitators, and those hordes do threaten to make further output from her redundant, or to force her into the past. (Bowie faced a particularly galling version of this problem in the early 1980s, when he was confronted with hundreds of fast-moving young acts, assiduously mining out every open seam from every part of his catalogue and image-history. Imitation is sincerest flattery but it can kill the imitated host!) On the other hand, M. really is central to the sort of spectacle that pop has largely become. The Superbowl show demonstrated this by being both a version of the sort of performance that M. has done since the mid '80s, and also strikingly similar to much of what passes for state of the art pop music performance.
Update: I'm pretty sure that Madonna's big entrance/first look was supposed to recreate Liz Taylor's entry into Rome in Cleopatra (1963), but it actually felt more like Julianne Moore's dream sequence Maud Lebowski:
One of the most illuminating pieces about Gaga from her Fame/Fame Monster, 2010 prime was Overkiller Queen by David Schmader. Schmader's best point comes late in the article:
Much is made of Gaga's extensive plundering of Madonna, but not enough is made of the speed and intensity with which this plundering has occurred. It took Madonna six years to get from dance-floor diva to international hit-maker to high-art pop icon; it took Gaga four singles, all culled from her debut album. Much like Bo Diddley sped up the blues to make rock 'n' roll, Stefani Germanotta sped up the pop machine that made Madonna to make Lady Gaga.
In the light of all of the singles from Born This Way, this now seems even more right to me than it did in 2010 only with a darker twist. Yes, Gaga leapt directly from Holiday to Like a Prayer/Vogue/Justify My Love/Deeper and Deeper (take your pick), i.e., to the Madonna of Cultural Studies departments. But that's a problem: while there are obvious high-points from that more conceptual, overexposing 1989-1992 Madonna (esp. the tracks I just mentioned), that's a period in which Madonna's music feels secondary to exhibitionism, cultural provocation and domination for its own sake. During that period Madonna burned through a lot of the good will she'd accumulated from her first three, pretty immaculate albums, and she just plain wore out her welcome with a lot of people. Madonna the self-conscious media artist/student of her own image had its moments, but taken as a whole it was too much, too calculating, and ultimately just tiring and boring (in the special way that only the over-wrought and over-stimulating risks - 'Oh, you again. Always with the wanting of attention. Go away!').
It's mildly heretical to say it, but that middle period Madonna, while superficially triumphant was actually a bit toxic. Madonna had to go away for while after it and come back with a more self-contained, more musical focus. Bedtime Stories, Ray of Light, and Music were the result of that pulling back from excess, and they jointly constitute the second great career peak for M. after her initial not-putting-a-foot-wrong/breakthrough period that continued up through the True Blue album. (I count Confessions on a Dancefloor and its tour as M's much lonelier third career peak - five years later we're still waiting to see whether that's all she wrote for M. at pop's top-table - she'll have lasted longer than anyone else if it is.)
Again, heretical though it is to say it, the 'Madonna Studies' period of M. that Gaga has indeed fast-forwarded to, while impressive in certain ways was also obnoxious and unconvincing, and with the perspective of distance was a kind of creative low for M. (notwithstanding its special resonances with certain sub-cultures).
Gaga is currently only superficially triumphant: all of the Born This Way singles have been tiring and boring, hectoring, un-musical attention events. They may deepen Gaga's connections with certain core fans and true believers, but for a wider public it's a disastrous turn. Madonna had all the cultural political capital gained from her first three albums to spend down, whereas Gaga's obnoxious and exhausting phase has to be 'funded' out of only the handful of broadly appealing singles up to Bad Romance. That's a problem. Schmader (and others) called the phenomenon right back in 2010 but they didn't see the problem that posed for Gaga and for the public alike.
All the early word suggested that W.E. had the godawful (almost inevitably unsatisfying) Julie and Julia, unbalanced nobody&somebody ('Wally and Wallis'), dual-time-period structure, and that it further might borrow a trick or two from Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. Uh-oh! Probably only someone as instinctive and masterful as Almodovar could get a nobody&somebody structure to fly, and Marie Antoinette would have been a disaster but for Sofia C.'s exquisite, hipster taste - so really isn't copiable or a template for anyone else.
And given that Edward VIII was an appalling, unlikeable guy in reality (whether Simpson was too is disputed), a female-centric, outsider/American like Madonna will be tempted, as art of being highly sympathetic to Simpson, to be evasive about Edward VIII. That is, if you don't soften the realities of Edward somehow, Simpson may start to look like a complete idiot, and at worst like a complete reprobate herself. So Madonna's likely going to be doubly tempted: to elide both Simpson's own significant sympathies with and ties to the Nazis, and the basic fact that she married a guy who honestly dreamed during WW2 of a Nazi victory and of his own future as Hitler's lieutenant-ruler over the remains of the British Empire is going to pall for most people. The latter point lends itself to a story of grim irony: Wallis Simpson saves the UK and the world by inadvertently helping to bring low the horrifying Edward VIII. But that's not a very romantic tale and, in any case, it's complex and can't be squeezed into half a film, so doesn't sound at all like what Madonna's offering.
First reviews of W.E. from the Venice Film Festival including this bollocking from the Guardian suggest that all of the structural and stylistic and thematic chickens that seemed to loom over this film have in fact come home to roost, e.g., apparently the modern-time-period parallel female figure in the film, Wally (played by Abby Cornish) says of Simpson and Edward VIII that they were 'naive not Nazis'. Well, we await the context of that quote - perhaps Wally is being an airhead when she makes that remark. But, preliminarily, 'Double uh-oh! What a trap Madonna's fallen into!' Apparently, however, the film has some nice cinematography, design, and (maybe) music.
I'm a big Madonna fan overall, but this project sounded bad from the beginning, has a pointless/stupid title (see discussion below), and now appears to be tepid at best in actuality. I will wait for a few more reviews before making a final decision about whether to see W.E. at a cinema, but things aren't looking good.
W.E.'s title makes me think of Zamyatin's We (hence our image above). And, seriously, wouldn't M. have enjoyed making a film of that more? Her music video work with, say, Fincher on Express Yourself and Romanek on Bedtime Story, etc. should have given her some clues about how to stage that sort of intelligent, dystopian sci-fi. And We's character, I-330 is an erotic subversive who says things like "There is no final revolution. Revolutions are infinite." One wants to say, "C'mon M., that's you! Film that." W.E., by way of contrast, sounds more like a film representation of M.'s faux-British accent. Triple uh-oh insofar as that's so.
Evidently channeling early Madonna (reminds me of fan fave 'Think of me' from M's first album) and some other post-disco/pre-house stuff (some Tom Tom Club vocals and Evelyn King 'Love come down' overall feel), this song is lots of fun, isn't compressed to hell, and has a nifty vid too. Also, Ronika appears to be 'hot', but isn't pushing that side of things hard at all (by current pop standards); a good sign. Word is that her follow-up song, Wi Yoo, is even better. Yay.
Update: The Guardian did a 'one to watch' profile of Ronika back in February (which I missed at the time). They were right!
Second-tier items and people's preferences with respect to them are very revealing: everyone likes the very best stuff in a given genre, or from a given artist etc. simply because it's excellent and because excellence often involves precisely transcending a genre's or an artists's limitations and specificities. Second-tier (and n>1-tier) stuff, by way of contrast, tends to be much more reflective of genre or artist norms. If you love that stuff then you love the sort of thing that genre is or that artist does, not just the occasional, super-achievements that are as if someone was taking dictation from God. You're a Jazz fan if you check out the jazz clubs in any city you visit, not if you just listen to Coltrane. You're not an Abba fan if you love Dancing Queen, you almost certainly are if you love its B-side, That's Me. And so on.
In the case of Madonna's singles, M. herself draws a fairly bright line between her first- and second-tier material: True Blue gets omitted from greatest hits/best ofs, etc., as does Angel (which M. apparently hasn't performed live since the Like A Virgin tour). Other second-tier M. singles (from her first 'imperial period' as it were) include Spotlight and Causing a Commotion.
While some of the affection that fans tend to feel for these tracks stems simply from the fact that they haven’t been overplayed the way beloved signature songs undoubtedly have, these tracks are also just good, unpretentious, uncluttered, dance-pop records - they're almost garage dance-pop. Unlike Borderline, Holiday, Like Virgin, Material Girl, Crazy for You, Live to Tell, etc., they’re not massively better than their non-M. competition at the time. They almost certainly wouldn't have made M. a mega-star, maybe no kind of star. But they're a lot of fun, and the simple/more human-scale M. that they project has a special place in fans' hearts. Or so it seems to me!
The third single from Madonna's Like a Virgin album, Angel didn't get a proper video, but the 'promo-only' vid. that Warners UK spliced together from previous outings is enormously fun: What an intoxicating visual presence M. was in her first bloom of stardom, and what a debt M. owes to Mary Lambert, the director of the vids. for Borderline, Like A Virgin, and Material Girl. M. is very sexy in all of her early videos, including Lambert's three, but Lambert also (i) always gets M. to act, and (ii) connects M. with wider traditions of cinema representation of women (both Hollywood and indie/European art-house). The upshot is that Lambert's videos for M. are sexy, but they're also analytic and layering. Seeing them pulled apart from their original soundtracks and cut against other effective but comparatively one-dimensional video sequences is incredibly telling: Lambert's images lift everything around them. Madonna Studies starts here.
Soundtracked by arguably the paradigmatic, second-tier M. tune, Lambert's achievement is especially impressive: the 'promo-only' video for a second-tier single distils something like the essence of M's early style and appeal.
For a nice, unpretentious review of Lambert's video for Borderline, go here. For some vid. of Lambert talking about a recent documentary of hers, go here.
In my previous post I focused on Holiday's music and lyrics. But what of Madonna's performance? Your own mileage from M's vocals may vary, but for me her Holiday vocals are terrific: they're characterful, but in a non-showy way that doesn't compete with the groove and that sells the vibe of the music. Most memorable for me are the various 'Oh yeah's, 'Hol-i-daye!'s and 'It would be-ee so-o nice's that occur as little response-line (see my previous post for discussion of Holiday's call-and-response structure) sub-dramas throughout the record. In the final third of the record especially, M's voice rasps a little as it tickles quickly across the runs of notes on these occasions, which I find incredibly fun and even moving.
Madonna's voice isn't a Donna Summer or Annie Lennox (or even a Shannon) powerhouse, but it is the voice of a dance music true believer. She really does want to 'let love shine' through the medium of the sort of time-out from life's pressures that a truly celebratory dance record affords. We need a Holiday. Yes, we do. And, by God, we've got one while this record plays. The upshot is that Holiday is a 6+ minute record that everyone wishes would never end. Interestingly, as far as I'm aware, no one else has ever been able to cover Holiday with any profit, let alone with real authority. This is surely in part because Madonna herself has consistently and very publicly explored new versions of the song, effectively stamping herself all over it - see examples below. But it also may simply be the case that Madonna's original recording maximized the potential of the underlying song, which would have been a trifle coming from anyone else. (Tellingly, Holiday was offered to and rejected by at least two other artists before Madonna and her producer 'Jellybean' Benitez grabbed it with both hands.) We provisionally conclude that what appears to be true is true. Madonna nailed her parts on the record, and 'Jellybean' Benitez (with a crucial assist from Zarr's piano) aced the rest.
Of course, performance on an original record isn't the whole story about a lot of the best pop music. In addition, there's at least what you look like and, if you're v. lucky, how you move and perform, especially live. Holiday entered a recently MTV-ed world relatively unloved and without an official video, but this setback in fact ended up foregrounding Madonna's strengths in post-(recorded performance) dimensions of pop success. Not having a video to sell Holiday for her led Madonna to perform (normally with her brother Chris Ciccone and her friend Erica Bell[1]) as a live dancer on every North American and European TV show that hosted lip-synching acts that would have her. Many of those performances still astonish: Madonna's dance-training is evident, and she's in constant motion in a way that sells both the record and herself as something new and interesting. Her work ethic and entrepreneurial/take charge drive was also apparent. Message received: v. sexy, possibly destined to give certain sorts of puritan feminists fits, but no foolish floozy this one.
While M. in 1983/1984 has a version of what we might call the 'cool but approachable, white-girl, club chick' look of the period (think Bananarama, say, in their fondly remembered Shy Boy video), M's not trying to 'be cool' or just 'be seen' or, as in Bananarama's own case, just half-heartedly shuffle towards being mobile. Rather, she's a hard-working dancer in action (who's obviously watched a lot of Soul Train growing up!), and that action is highly aerobic. It's worth noting that aerobics classes were huge, and growing and differentiating fast in the early '80s (think Jane Fonda workouts, the cheese-ball Travolta movie Perfect, and the like). In an only slightly subterranean way, then, Madonna's highly aerobic dance performances for Holiday are part of that explosion, building a new bridge between night-time club-culture and a woman-centered, day-time world of classes and exercise.
Consider in this light the following fragment of a performance of Holiday on a French magazine show:
While a lot of club-kids (perennially, at least for a period) aspire to be aloof, posing, quasi-decadent night-people, M. herself is happy to get her leg above her head for you. By a pool. In the sunshine.
Or consider M's performance of Holiday on Top of the Pops early in 1984:[2]
The crowd starts whooping as the aerobic energy from the stage starts to hit them, particularly when tightly choreographed, snaky, sensuous, sideways movements suddenly accompany the lead-off Chorus, after the Intro has been accompanied by a sucker-punch combination of more relaxed movement and dancer smiles all around. By the time we come back from the piano solo, Madonna (and Chris and Erica) are at the front of the stage, arms raised in triumph like they've won the World Cup! But then they surprise us again by breaking back into further cool, choreographed moves. We are so there. It's a landmark pop moment/performance, electrifying, and star-making in a way that's hard to appreciate these days, i.e., post-Madonna. A sexy, cool NYC chick, but one who, like Elvis and MJ, could really move, and who had every beat and gesture planned, truly stood out in 1984. There'd never been anyone like her.
Holiday was born in and designed for clubs, i.e., environments similar in scale and kind to the TOTP studio. On one level, then, Holiday's success in that setting shouldn't have surprised. But what of live performances in vast arenas, before 50K+ people? Would Holiday scale up? In early 1984, one wouldn't have necessarily expected Madonna's dance-pop to be especially at home at something as big and messy as Live Aid, but in fact she ruled the (admittedly rather shambolic) US end of that mid-1985 event (her final 'Now I know you're mine' from Into the Groove sounded downright sinister to some ears that day!). At any rate, as her opening number at Live Aid, Holiday got Madonna off on the best possible foot:
A personal favorite among Madonna's many stunning Holidays is the rocked-out version from the Who's That Girl? tour in 1987, i.e., from the first relatively rough/relatively fallow period for Madonna (both professionally and personally) since her 1984 breakthrough. Just because your latest music is uninspired[3], your current movie stinks, and your marriage to Sean Penn is on the rocks, doesn't mean you can't still slay 'em live (and arguably be in the best voice and dancer shape of your life):
Watch the whole thing: 'Let's have some order here'. At this point, M. on stage is a whirlwind and something like the best Howard Hawks gal ever (which is to say, a serious candidate for 'best gal ever' period, let's face it), notwithstanding that her movie in that vein was a disaster.
Other notable Holidays include the performance recorded in Truth or Dare from the Blonde Ambition tour:
and a performance in Brixton in 2000 at which Madonna described Holiday as having for her a special connection with London (presumably referring to 1984's TOTP triumph):
Lastly, consider a fan's omnibus history of Holidays:
In sum, although it may be, in various ways, overly simple and naive, Holiday has been a perfect vehicle for Madonna. Its uncluttered aerobicness has always allowed her basic, formidable and attractive personality to shine through, while the convincing 'we'-ness/egoless-ness/persona-free-ness of its lyric sidesteps the principal liabilities of that (wannabe then actual) superstar personality (too much ego, about which a supplicant audience ends up knowing too much, general insufferableness, and so on). Performing Holiday live has been an on-going showcase for Madonna's interpretive chops and for her dance and performance skills more generally, but I suspect that M. especially continues to love Holiday because of the holiday from ego and talking about herself and persona-generation that it represents. Each time she sings Holiday, Madonna gets to be partly reborn as that before-she-was-famous club-kid who just wants to lose herself in dancing, and who wishes we were on the floor with her.[4] It would be-ee so-o nice. We are so so there.
Many people have tried to create sunny, inclusive, utopian dance tunes that appeal explicitly to what's universal in us, and many have failed. Madonna's first big success, however, does precisely that, making a foundational, dance-pop standard for the ages.
[1] Important early solo performances/lip-synchs of Holiday include spots on Solid Gold, hosted by glamorous Marilyn ('Up, up, and away') McCoo, and, especially, on American Bandstand with Dick Clark. The latter isn't currently available on youtube, but it's downloadable here. Madonna's notorious 'I plan to rule the world' interview with Dick Clark after that performance, is downloadable here.
[2] The TOTP performance was broadcast on Thursday, January 26, 1984, a day before Madonna (w/ Chris and Erica) performed both Burning Up and Holiday on The Tube as part of a special broadcast from Factory Records' famous Hacienda Club in Manchester. Bizarrely, however, the Hipster-reality-distortion-field that still surrounds both The Tube and Factory/Hacienda has caused numerous people, e.g., here, to misrepresent M's Hacienda spot as her 'first UK TV appearance' or 'her first appearance outside NY' or whatever it may be, and quite generally to pretend that her much more successful TOTP appearance (much more widely seen, much better lit, shot, and sounding, and so on) never happened.
[3] Although that's a relative judgment - relative to Madonna's hardly putting a foot wrong up to Who's that Girl? For example, I like Causing a Commotion a lot (and love its 'silver screen' 12" remix). It would be a crown jewel in other acts' allegedly Imperial Periods. But it's definitely second- or even third-tier Madonna. It's the sort of stuff that can be a 'fan favorite', but it's not world-beating or new-fan-making.
[4] One of Madonna's other, early signature songs, Into the Groove, makes this pre-fame, happy, but also touchingly yearning and lonely club-kid idea of Madonna that's implicit in Holiday, completely explicit: 'I'm tired of dancing here all by myself/Tonight I want to dance with someone else!' ITG's an amazing song and record, but that little bit of explicit auto-biog. and persona-generation makes it, I believe, less distinctive and useful overall to Madonna than Holiday is. That is, ITG is on one level just more confessional/talking-about-herself stuff, and why shouldn't M. want a break from all that? Moroever, insofar as ITG does self-describe, to that extent it raises questions of age-/status-appropriateness that Holiday doesn't. That is, it's hard for someone who's been enormously successful for 20+ years to sing convincingly and explicitly about being dance-partner-less, whereas Holiday's giddy, utopian wishes always work. In sum, M. has excellent reasons to treasure Holiday, and to simply enjoy performing it more than she evidently does ITG.
Released without a stand-alone video in September 1983, Holiday became Madonna's first hit (and first signature song) early in 1984. And whereas Madonna has recently signaled her skepticism about or even disdain for some of her other early hits and signature songs, e.g., Into The Groove, she's evidently still very fond of Holiday, citing it as her favorite among her own (not necessarily self-written) songs in an interview in 2005. In this note I take a close look at this terrific record, focusing on Holiday's music and lyrics. In the sequel I discuss how Madonna made Holiday a pop landmark by getting out there and selling it and herself to the world.
Music
Holiday is musically very simple:
Just four chords (in D-maj) arranged in exactly one 4-bar pattern: IV,V|V,vi|IV,V|iii,IV
Each bar in the pattern has the same timing: 3/8 for the first chord, 5/8 for the second chord, i.e., the second chord in each bar is always a quaver ahead of the beat.
Since the first and third bars of the pattern are the same, the overall 'feel' of the pattern is (counted out): theme and theme and up and stretch; theme and theme and down and relax (repeat). That is, given its moderate-quick tempo, Holiday 'feels' very aerobic, or very like an aerobics class. This is crucial, in my view, and I'll make much of it in the sequel.
In part because of its extreme musical simplicity/directness, Holiday isn't musically especially original or forward-looking. Indeed, Holiday is more or less exactly like the direct musical offspring of Chic's Good Times (from 1979) and ABC's Look of Love (from mid-1982). Let's focus on Holiday's LOL-lineage:
LOL bounces around the same four chords as Holiday – IV,V,vi,iii (only in C-maj)
LOL's main verse pattern is the same as the final two bars of Holiday's sole pattern, i.e., IV,V|iii,IV with a 3/8, 5/8 timing within each bar, and essentially the same timbre (muted-chiming, synth chords) picks out the basic changes in both H and LOL
LOL's and H's tempi, synth bass-lines, and string section embellishments are very similar, although in each dimension Holiday is simpler, more metronomic, and more synthetic/electronic than LOL.[1]
Important musical differences between LOL and H include:
Madonna's beat is a gloriously stiff Oberheim drum-machine, whereas ABC's rhythm track employs God's own army of electronic wizardry and low-flying orchestral percussionists, courtesy of Trevor Horn and Ann Dudley
Holiday is fleshed out by a buffet of interlocking, Chic-/Nile Rodgers-style, disco guitar figures
Holiday musically climaxes with a delightful piano part due to Fred Zaar. After plinking away in the background for 16 bars or so, Zaar finally breaks out into a solo, bringing the track joyously home.[2] That piano overall is similar to piano in Nick Lowe's I love the Sound of Breaking Glass (from 1978), and Steve Nieve's piano parts in Everyday I Write the Book, a near-contemporary (July 1983) single from Elvis Costello and the Attractions. More generally, Zaar's solo is in the lightly vaudeville piano tradition that occasionally surfaces in the Beatles, as well as in things like Thunderclap Newman's Something in the Air, and then persistently in the mutant pub-rock piano of Nieve, Jools Holland (Squeeze), in Eddie Rayner's playing for Split Enz, and even in Benny Anderson (Abba) at least some of the time. This style of piano is very different from Ann Dudley's brilliant, cod-classical for ABC (and Benny Anderson much of the time), let alone from the (Korg M-1) 'House' piano that dominated dance music for years after about 1988 (and has arguably never really gone away).
It's worth mentioning at this point that the remix of Holiday on Madonna's first greatest hits package, The Immaculate Collection should be avoided at all costs. It barbarically omits the piano solo, thereby decapitating the whole track, and it coats the whole song in various kinds of obsolete audio processing whose micro-latencies destroy the precision-timing and stiffness of the rhythm track.[3] Throughout this note, I therefore discuss just the original single mix of Holiday, which was collected on Madonna's first album, and which was sensitively edited for radio and for lip-synch performances. Lyrics
As we've already seen, Holiday has little musical structure to speak of. Thus, almost all of the variation in the song, e.g., all verse/chorus/middle eight structure, etc., has to be created solely by the vocal line and the lyrics. Holiday doesn't disappoint in this regard, and its basic structure so conceived is as follows: Intro/Chorus/Verse1/Double Chorus (with responses)/Verse2/Chorus (with responses)/Middle 8 (just 4 bars really)/Intro/Chorus (with responses)/Intro (with responses)/Intro (with principal novel variant responses)/Intro+piano solo/Intro to fade (with various responses).
The key to Holiday from this structural-lyrical perspective is its call and response structure, which develops throughout the song. We originally perceive the Intro:
Holiday
Celebrate
Holiday
Celebrate
just as itself. But by the end of the song it's become a 'call' handled by backing vox, and we hear both Madonna and the piano respond to it. Similarly, in the case of the Chorus, we initially hear mostly just its 'call' part:
If we took a holiday
Took some time to celebrate
Just one day out of life
It would be,
it would be so nice
Although the last response line is in place here, the full response side only gets filled in second time through, i.e., in the double Chorus after the first verse. For still another example, we don't originally hear the vocal in the Middle eight (just 4 bars) as a series of responses. But as the Middle eight's constituent parts get recycled as responses to Chorus and Intro calls in the final third of the record, all becomes clear. In sum, by the end of Holiday, we hear its bobbing and weaving vocal parts and apostrophes in place, and zippered together in a way that's immensely satisfying, even exhilarating
From the top, then, and, to be clear, writing all the calls to the left and all responses to the right, we get -
Intro
Chorus:
If we took a holiday
Took some time to celebrate
Just one day out of life
It would be,
it would be so nice
Verse 1:
Everybody spread the word
We're gonna have a celebration
All across the world
In every nation
It's time for the good times
Forget about the bad times, oh yeah
One day to come together
To release the pressure
We need a holiday
Double Chorus (with responses):
If we took a holiday
Oh...Ooo hoo hoo hoo
Took some time to celebrate
Come on let's celebrate
Just one day out of life
Holiday!
It would be,
it would be so nice
If we took a holiday
Oo yeah oh yeah
Took some time to celebrate
Come on let's celebrate
Just one day out of life
Just one day out of life!
It would be,
it would be so nice
Verse 2:
You can turn this world around
And bring back all of those happy days
Put your troubles down
It's time to celebrate
Let love shine
And we will find
A way to come together
And make things better
We need a holiday
Chorus (with mixed responses):
If we took a holiday
Holiday!
Took some time to celebrate
Come on let's celebrate
Just one day out of life
Just one day out of life!
It would be,
it would be so nice
Middle eight:
Ooh yeah oh yeah
Come on let's celebrate
We have got to get together
Intro
Chorus (with mixed responses):
If we took a holiday
Ooh yeah oh yeah
Took some time to celebrate
Come on let's celebrate
Just one day out of life
Holiday!
It would be,
it would be so nice
Intro (with mixed responses):
Holiday
Oh yeah oh yeah
Celebrate
Come on let's celebrate
Holiday
Just one day out of life!
Celebrate
It would be so nice
Intro (with principal novel variant responses):
Holiday
Holiday, Celebration
Celebrate
Come together in every nation
Holiday
Holiday, Celebration
Celebrate
Come together in every nation
Intro+piano solo
Intro (with mixed responses) + piano continuing to go nuts:
Holiday
We've got to get together
Celebrate
Take some time to celebrate
Holiday
Just one day out of life
Celebrate
It would be so nice
Intro (with principal novel variant responses) (repeat to fade).
Is there anything to these lyrics behind all of this busy, ingenious structure of Intro and Chorus call patterns, zipped and unzipped with varying responses? Probably not. In effect Holiday revolves tightly around the twin concepts Holiday and Celebrate/celebration for its whole length (perhaps drawing on the 'Holiday, Holiday, Holiday, Celebrate!' chorus of Change's A Lover's Holiday (1980)). But spinning though that so gracefully and unmechanically that a song with an unrelenting groove and a single chord progression nonetheless ends up powerfully expressing freedom and release is a significant achievement in my view. It may look easy to write and perform a lyric that invites and urges everyone 'all around the world' to get up and dance and 'get together' - to speak in a plausible 'we' without seeming obnoxious or ridiculous - but evidently it isn't. (I hail and discuss the significance of Holiday's egoless-ness in the sequel.)
The super-positivity that Holiday hymns became a key theme within dance music over the next 20 years (sometimes forming the attitudinal raison d'etre for whole sub-genres, e.g., Hi-NRG, Happy Hardcore, Italo, etc.), but rarely, if ever, was that theme as well articulated and demonstrated as Madonna and her producer managed in Holiday.
[1] And whereas Holiday had a train journey on its single sleeve, LOL has lately (and deliciously) soundtracked Virgin Rail ads. [2] According to wiki, Zaar was a friend of Madonna's and her producer 'Jellybean' Benitez's, and his part was a last-minute, at-home/extra-studio addition to the track. [3] 'Jellybean''s straight remix of Holiday for Madonna's 1987 You Can Dance collection of dance versions is OK in my view, but the 'drier'/less processed sound of the original mix is still better. 'Jellybean''s 'Dub version' remix of Holiday for the same collection is more interesting: it's just a classic, largely instrumental, 'separate all the parts', 12" mix. If you're a fan, everything from the piano to the layers of Nile Rodgers-ish guitars to the backing vox to the drum-machine cow-bell on Holiday is worth hearing in (near) isolation. For me, then, Holiday (Dub version) 6:56 uniquely, nicely complements Holiday's original mix.
Dance yrself clean, the first track on LCD Soundsystem's forthcoming cd is fantastic: a song/record of the year candidate. Somewhat disappointingly, however, the core of that song is lifted wholesale - though reverse engineered rather than literally sampled - from an obscure 1983 B-side, The Pool's Jamaica running and (alt. version) Jamaica resting. Here are the two tracks for comparison [Update May 14, 2010: 'running' has disappeared from youtube just as LCD's opus is being released - interesting! I therefore link to the less-identical 'resting' version]: >
Of course, we've been here before. For example, Radiohead's Creep builds directly on the Hollies classic Air that I breathe. Here are those two tracks for comparison:
A closer comparison, because it's in the artsy-dance genre: Madonna's Justify my love was built around a direct sample of Public Enemy's instrumental track, drum-loop, Security of the first world (on whose provenance, more below!). Here are those tracks:
And, as a final self-test case, which 1987 smash wholesale lifted from/reverse engineered this song by Colonel Abrams from 1985?
In all these cases, rather like when we find out that a beloved song we thought was original is in fact a cover (Madness didn't originate, let alone write 'It must be Love'? Inconceivable!), we end up with an objectively clearer view of who contributed what to the beloved item. On one level, we are only too happy to re-apportion credit accordingly. On another level, however, this is painful. Re-apportioning credit means exactly undermining at least some of the basis for your original enthusiasm and affection, and fans and (later) artists alike hate that. Thus, the Hollies' gain is Thom Yorke's loss. Creep's still a great song, and what Yorke and Jonny Greenwood added is magic, but overall the credit has to be shared. Similarly then, LCD's song may end up being the song of 2010, and LCD will deserve most of the credit if that happens, but a kid in Austin, TX in 1983 will also deserve some.
Of course, a large part of what most of us like about LCD is how deftly they channel what was great about early New Order, mid-period Talking Heads, The Passage in their pomp, and so on. So LCD's general debt to 1979-1984 pop has always been clear (just as Daft Punk's has been). But in the case of Dance yrself clean, LCD channels directly and specifically. A specific debt is thereby incurred, and a specific credit is therefore due.
So much for the moral/appreciation side of things, what of the legal/monetary side? I think LCD should 'man up' and give The Pool a writing credit (hence a share of any royalties). That's what Thom Yorke ended up doing with the Hollies for Creep. At any rate, some reasonable, formal deal should be made. If a writing credit is thought to be beyond the pale, then perhaps something like a sample clearance fee could be negotiated. (Note however that Daft Punk gave George Duke a writing credit, not just a one-off payment, for the use of his crucial sample on Digital love. Note too that LCD will in any case be negotiating from a position of relative strength: The Pool, which was never on a major label is very unlikely to have anything like The Rolling Stones' Verve-spanking, lawyer demons at its disposal!).
Despite being mad as hell about not getting paid, Public Enemy(PE) didn't get a writing credit or, as far as anyone knows, any other form of payment for having their work be the backbone of Justify my love. The reason for PE's frustration in this regard seems to have been that Madonna and her collaborators knew that PE's beats in large part reverse engineered a section of James Brown's Funky drummer, and that, more generally, M. & co. guessed correctly that PE were living in too much of a legal glass house to throw any real stones.
Colonel Abram's strip-miners, Stock-Aitken-Waterman (SAW), just brazened out the charge that they stole most of someone else's record. Indeed they took being hated by the cognoscenti to the bank for the next few years of pop! Assuming that The Pool aren't in a PE-like glass house (i.e., that they were in fact the way we wish LCD were: just deeply influenced and impressed by things like I Zimbra) then the SAW/Colonel Abrams case like Radiohead/Hollies seems like a good model for LCD/The Pool.
In sum, LCD's basic legal/monetary choice is whether to be honorable like Radiohead (or did the Hollies have to threaten to have the Stones' lawyers drag Yorke to hell?) or brazen like SAW. If LCD takes the latter path then this case may end up famously testing the proposition that 1987-style brazening it out is still possible in our youtube/feet-of-clay-finding era? I suspect that it isn't, hence my advice to LCD remains: your song's great, don't screw around with it, make a deal.
