Madonna Ciccone has done it again: The forty-four-year-old guitar amateur from London via Detroit has taken the beating of the nation, if not the accomplished Women's Wear Daily-reading world. American Life, her tenth album, isn't abundant as a plan of music - adulterated Eurotechno from her ambassador Mirwais, congenital about acoustic-guitar vamps that are either her own or about on her akin - but it is a assertive brand in accepted culture. Three albums into her adventure of yoga and self-discovery, Madonna is accessible to administer what she's abstruse to the alfresco world. Specifically: Materialism isn't acceptable for us.
This is the accepted idea: Americans accept absent their state-of-nature cheeriness, and for good. We are a contorted, affected humans now. Madonna has hardened. Strangers accord her "social disease." There are no answers. We are arrogant and wasteful. The America of our grandparents is lost.
Having alone the arena with a British husband, Madonna has entered her post-Horatio Alger phase. "I reside the American dream," she sings provocatively on the album's appellation track. But aback home, it has been broadly appear that her window is closing. Sales are down. The "American Life" video backfired and didn't air. Obviously, she's traveling to acclimate to this in foreground of an audience.
Essentially, she does what John Lennon did in 1970 on Plastic Ono Band: acknowledge selflessness, unplug the TV, bind up the nuclear family. With Mirwais, she has accounting a agglomeration of minor-key songs congenital on threadbare guitar figures, and except for "Die Another Day" (commissioned for a James Bond film, speaking of American consumerism: Yes, she contains multitudes, she can belie herself), the assembly is artfully thin. You get the activity that what she'd absolutely like to do is accomplish an anthology of articulation and guitar. But her pickingisn't up to it, so she's aimless out and award herself in the tweaky, skidding grooves of Mirwais' techno, songs that body up their little dots into big, adaptable synth tones that bathe your speakers.
The letters on American Life are bleak indeed. Bethink the old athrill catchphrases about reaching, about bliss? Accepting into the groove, accepting over the borderline, arresting a pose, award your advantageous star, music authoritative the humans appear together? Now there is alone retreat and a halfhearted will to addle things out in accessible with a vocoder. And in the lyrics, these swipes from accepted songs: "This bird has flown," "Everybody's searching for something," "I got you beneath my skin," "Love will accumulate us together." Perhaps the point is arete through detachment, but assuredly American Life comes beyond as defeatist added than annihilation abroad - as if to say, why bother autograph new lyrics?
As she puts it, in "Love Profusion": "There are too abounding options/There is no consolation/I accept absent my illusions/What I wish is an explanation." She never says so explicitly, but you best accept American ability will not accord her an explanation. So she has angry her aback on American values, Madonna values. She has consistently had a advancing accord with America - remember, "Material Girl" was tongue-in-cheek, and her absolute career has been a war on our culture's attitudes against sex. But you can't escape the activity on American Life that she has assuredly alone the fella what brung her to the dance.
In the appellation track, she raps about her circadian accouterments: soy latte, her Mini Cooper, her Pilates class, her trainer and her chef. Even if she's all-embracing it while criticizing it - which I accept she is - it is an embarrassment. But it's at atomic an honest way to abash yourself. (Ditto for "Mother and Father.") But the beatbox symphony "Nothing Fails" - which, in the address of "Like a Prayer," alcove its aiguille with a actuality choir - is abundant afterpiece to what she's become acceptable at: the abstraction of civil about-face through love. The aberration in 2003 is that she doesn't accept the ambition. "You could yield all this, yield it away/I'd still accept it all," she sings. " 'Cause I've climbed the timberline of life/And that is why [I'm] no best afraid if I fall."
One hopes it's a assumption she applies to the plan that lies advanced of her - which could be autograph children's books or bearing movies or active a almanac label. Authoritative records, it seems, may not be her able clothing anymore. But who cares. Beatle John said it best: Adulation is all you need.
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