Madonna's Drowned Worlds

New Approaches to her Cultural Transformations, 1983-2003

Santiago Fouz-Hernández, Freya Jarman-Ivens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351559539
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Madonna is perhaps one of the most consistently transgressive and self-transforming artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The recent release of two critically acclaimed and best-selling albums and a sold-out world tour have renewed media and academic interest in the artist. Madonna presents a set of strikingly new challenges to cultural analysis, and new developments in Gender, Queer and Ethnic studies have shed more light on her entire oeuvre. Whilst the contributors do refer to classic cultural theorists such as Baudrillard, Zizek, Foucault and Barthes, new theoretical approaches to Madonna's work feature prominently. In view of this, the present volume offers new perspectives on Madonna's work to date, addressing her configurations of race, gender and sex(uality) and with special emphasis on her resurrection after the Sex backlash in the early 1990s. The collection focuses on new Madonna-related topics such as Hinduism, Judaism, Japanese culture, All-American culture, Queer culture, Motherhood and her influence on newer 'girl acts' such as the Spice Girls and Britney Spears. The book explores the themes of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and celebrity consumption through the lens of Madonna's songs, videos and shows. An international array of scholars portrays Madonna's popularisation of the notion that identity is not fixed and can be continuously rearranged and revamped. The book should have wide appeal for all those concerned with gender studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, lesbian and gay musicology as well as popular music studies.

PART I
The Girlie Show: Gender Identities

Olivier Tridon

Chapter 1
Dragging out camp
Narrative agendas in Madonna’s musical production

Stan Hawkins

Loaded with a wealth of musical surprises, Madonna’s tracks transport with them everything we enjoy about pop. Representing an expansive sonic plane, her productions open up an important space for understanding the intricacies of identity at play. The position adopted in this chapter is directed at a search for a theory of constructed performance that concentrates on the issue of style through camp mannerism. In a broad sense, Madonna’s musical productions form useful points of departure for working out how identity constructions in pop can entice us into new spaces for social and cultural assimilation. Through all her songs, her musical expression connotes pleasure and enjoyment within a definable socio-historical relationship. It is as if the very effects of production and commercialization – the vital components of pop expression – encapsulate the full trajectories of her personality. To a large extent the link between musical production and pop artists inscribes not just the mechanics of sound reproduction but also the ideas and attitudes that refer to the pop performance as a constructed event. It is on this basis that I want to ground my theoretical discussion of Madonna’s performance in a detailed discussion of the relationship between her musical expression and camp.

Musical production is inextricably wrapped up not only in how Madonna chooses to market herself but also in how she wishes to sound. Understood in this way, her recordings shape both her desires and those of the fans who express their feelings through responses to the sound event. Not least, the technologies of studio production construct the personal touches and nuances of whom we hear and how they express themselves. Generally, pop recordings realize the audio dynamics of an ideal performance, where the focus falls on the intensity and presence of musical processes. Because of this, recordings harness stories and in so doing they function as implied narratives that transport the subjectivity of the singer or artist as central character.

What I also want to suggest is that the skill in writing pop songs lies as much in the sound production as in selecting the subject matter of the song. Notably, Madonna’s songs are derived from a musical appropriation of production trends emanating from dance culture,¹ which are expressed through her performance. Most crucially, it is her turning to camp that has steadily become a dominant feature of her musical performance. Indeed, her texts are about a narcissistic masquerading which exhibits a sense of self-mockery that is excessive in many ways.²

Attached to aesthetic preferences, our enjoyment of music discloses notions of community that have to do with us understanding the functional side of assumptions dealing with taste (see Frith, 1996). Indeed, this also involves the erotic dimension of performance and how it overflows into the spectacular body. Within the confines of this chapter, my employment of the term ‘camp pop’ is a response to the milieu of popular culture entertainment that symbolizes a celebration of artifice, commerciality and, hence, good and bad taste.³ At the core of this conception, I would suggest that the aesthetic quality of camp pop designates a move towards a doubleness in which musical expression forms a major part of its construction. In Madonna’s case, it is the nature of her brand of pop that explores the potential to which her personality can pertain. Her music relies upon attitude, tone and irony, and is subversive of inflexible social and moral rules. Its positioning therefore suggests a distancing from the constraints of conventional ideas in art and life. For instance, in the visual display of Madonna’s role-playing, her videos often imply that sex and gender roles are contrived. In this sense, the theatricalization of Madonna’s identity allows for an empathy that is equated with the listener’s own sense of submission.

Though her style might mock the seriousness of rock and other musical forms, it still is earnest in its own way. Thus, as much as humour and fun, earnestness forms a crucial ingredient of camp. This is no more evident than in the distortion of prescribed forms of taste and behaviour through the role-playing mechanisms of drag. In Esther Newton’s terminology, drag designates role-playing (1999, p. 105) and implies a sex role. In this case, the distancing between the artist and role-playing implicates a degree of superficiality through the switching on and off of these roles at will. Newton states that, in drag, the actor ‘should throw himself into it; he should put on a good show; he should view the whole experience as fun, as a camp’ (p. 105). Clearly, the doubleness of this strategy is what lies at the heart of drag; it is a system of impersonation through show.

We might pursue the interrelationship of the two terms, camp and pop, which, in their combination, allow for the surplus sensibility of a disposable culture that invokes signifiers of fun and pleasure that are oppositional. On different uses of the terms camp and pop, Andrew Ross (1999) has problematized numerous styles, which include heavy metal, glam rock, punk and rock. His employment of ‘pop camp’ denotes a cultural and historical periodization of mass culture, with an important focus on the 1960s camp contradictory and layered cultured economy. In debating this concept, Ross emphasizes how camp was ‘an antidote to Pop’s contagion of obsolescence’ (1999, p. 321). There are two matters of interest that build on Ross’s critique. The first deals with the idea of stylized performance in pop with all its artificial gesturing. In particular, I am referring to the camp qualities that succeed in winning over the fans by affected performance. For the present argument, I would suggest that it is audiences’ specific responses to the performing body that determine the expressive quality of the music. At any rate, when we respond to pop recordings we relate to a repertory of emotional elements that are shaped by moments transported by the logic of musical shape and sound. The second matter concerns the purposefulness of technological seduction in pop through constructs of artificiality and inauthenticity as they are bound up in the recording process itself. Certainly, each time we hear a vocal track within a mix, we react primarily to the technical dialects of audio signal processes and how the voice is recorded. As I have argued in earlier studies, studio production has the most significant effect on the details of sound in a manner that lures us through time into the personal sphere of the performer (see Hawkins, 1997 and 2002). Engineered to ensure that the intended listener achieves a special association with the performer, the recording ultimately concerns the feelings and sentiments of shared communities. What I mean by this is that recordings are about common tastes that help distinguish not only musical styles but also the cultural and social organization of specific musical preferences. From this perspective, then, the power of the recording is manifested in the imaginary process of musical listening.⁴ In Madonna’s music, the detailed effects of technology are undeniably tied into the full mediation of her star persona, especially as every sound becomes conditional on the fine balance between producer, engineer, artist and, of course, the record company. Since the early 1980s, Madonna’s role in the studio has gradually evolved to a point where her input into the final product has become almost total.⁵ This is borne out chiefly by the technical processes that reveal not only the artist’s collaborative relationship with her team of workers, but also the type of audience for which the music is produced. So, given that it is the audience that permits the communication of musical messages, we might ask to what extent then is camp felt as part of the musical experience. And, if considered as a strategic event that relies on production and reception, how does camp set the limits for what determines a specific response?⁶

As music’s rhetoric relies on emotive states and moods, pop artists draw on specific musical traditions to communicate their intentions.⁷ While all Madonna’s songs share many of the same musical elements,⁸ their overall studio conceptions are significantly different. Most of all, the technical editing processes found in her productions disclose important details of compositional processing. There often arises a sense of a new reality through the expressive levels of editing in her music. In most cases, her recordings are collaborative projects in which a range of expert producers becomes part of Madonna’s trademark. Indeed, it is the myriad of personal styles and voices that characterize the individuality of each one of her albums, videos and songs.

From one perspective, Madonna’s recordings can be read as deconstructions of traditional notions of live performance. Like her image, her musical material is presented in ways that deliberately exceed the bounds of live performance. The studio conditions determining each track are certainly part of the challenge of her ‘live’ act, as her recordings are realized in ways that make live performances simulated events. This is evident in her concerts, where a high degree of playback creates the illusion of an authenticity that translates into a hyper-artificiality, which is always attached to the recording. In this sense, her style is postmodern in that it becomes a reaction to modernist tendencies and historical periods.⁹ Manifested through a strategy of layering sounds and effects, her recordings open up a broad spectrum of possibilities for us to further consider her music as a product of camp pop.

Dragging camp through sound production

If the promo video or live concert focuses our attention on the desired representation of the star, so the sound production always underwrites the pleasures of the text.¹⁰ In Madonna’s track ‘Music’ (2000), the meaning of the song is instantly encoded by one’s associations with the artist’s voice and image. Posing as a Rhinestone cowgirl on the album sleeve of Music (2000), in a construction that can be read as fake, what is presented to us is an outright celebration of camp. From the outset, ‘Music’– produced by Madonna and Mirwais Ahmadzï – is charged with dazzling splashes of electronica and top class production tricks.

Quite over the top in its production veneer, the track mediates a camp sensibility through the flashiness of the mix. In particular, the revival of disco style makes this explicit. As each bar builds up into groove patterns that stabilize the feel of the beat, Madonna embraces every rhythmic impulse to play around with titillation. Instead of opening up the song herself, she elects to use an affected, sexy male voice recorded close-up in a sleazy, American drawl: ‘Hey Mr DJ, put a record on. I want to dance with my baby.’ Phased through heavy reverb, this phrase is tweaked to build up anticipation and tension. Following a reverse cymbal crescendo, the groove revs up with a tightly quantized, funky syncopated figure dominated by a single pitch motif on a low voluptuous Hammond organ tone (Figure 1.1). Sixteen bars of a groove laced with an impressive array of electronic pyrotechnics – high-pitched vocoded flirtatious vocals on the words ‘Boogie Woogie. Do you like to?’, disco string stabs, dry snares on the second and fourth beats, stereo panning of an intricately spliced-up guitar riff – provide the textural carpet for Madonna’s grand entry. Significantly, the regulation of spatial properties in the mix and the textural density of this introduction serve as a warm up for the entire song.¹¹ From the moment Madonna enters the recording and takes over from the male voice, the processing and imaging of her voice in the mix becomes a central feature. Highly quantized, the groove pattern is filled out by a sub-bass accenting the two beats of the funk figure we have already heard (Figure 1.1). On arrival at the first chorus, less than one minute into the song, the word ‘music’ is cleverly edited through vocoding in a way that contorts Madonna’s voice with a joyful earnestness. Instantly, a degree of playfulness emerges from the sonorous elasticity of her vocal phrasing and inflections that discloses the song’s camp quality. In fact, ‘Music’ sets up a horizontal plane of sonic attributes that are related and defined by their imaging in the mix. By this I am suggesting that the imaging of single musical ideas is contingent on the specific physical location of each sound source within the recording itself. In addition, musical imaging concerns the perceived location of these sonic properties from the perspective of the listener.¹² Amongst the many appealing features that stand out in this track’s imaging is the variability of sound sources and their means of manipulation within the production, not least through their spatial relationships. As if to make this track an exercise in plotting her control through technical virtuosity and sophisticated engineering, Madonna sets out to show off her production skills unashamedly. Musically, this is instilled as much through a range of technological pyrotechnics as in the features involving pitch, rhythm, timbre and melodic linearity.¹³

Fig. 1.1 Organ groove from ‘Music’

Source: transcribed by the author from Music (Warner, 2000)

As I experience it, the pleasure in ‘Music’ is based around an erotic sensibility that proposes something quite glamorous and technically ambitious. This occurs within an audio space that is vast, with a myriad of details that challenge our notions of aural reality. In this context, distance relates to where the listener imagines the sound to be and where the front and rear boundaries of the audio image are established by the listener’s conception of distance.¹⁴ And it is in this sense that production techniques utilize notions of sonic reality as a form of theatrical distancing and placement. Importantly, sensations of distance in recordings are not just about dynamics, volume or levels of reverberation; they are also about intimacy. In ‘Music’, the listener is exposed to a composite sound object that is primarily the result of timbral difference and fluctuating levels of reverberation. This is discernible all the way through, as timbres and textures are altered rapidly and in dramatic ways through synthesis and signal processing.¹⁵

Aesthetically, the effect of this is that certain sounds are located within environments that feel synthetic and mannered and where timbral definition is highly profiled by ‘spacey’ (as in out of the world) edits and mixes. Indeed, the full galaxy of sounds in ‘Music’ entails a compilation of ideas that zigzag in and out of different locations at varying speeds. Constantly mobile, the various sound objects in the mix can be charged with creating the aural fantasy. As repeated hearings of this song soon reveal, musical ideas are pasted and dragged over one another to construct the musical form – a technique controlled by digital editing. Within the many different layers of the mix, the elements of sound (and in this case sound that exists mainly as computer information) are edited in real time, often through meticulous predetermined...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Editors’ Notes
• Who’s That Girl?
• PART I: The Girlie Show: Gender Identities
• PART II: Post-Virgin: Sexual Identities
• PART III: Drowned Worlds: Ethnic Identities
• PART IV: Blond Ambition: Consuming Celebrity
• Bibliography
• Index