It’s been another long stretch since out last Madonna Timeline, but that’s about to come to an end. Nothing coy about this post, and no insufferable guessing game: ‘American Life’ is the next song up, and as one of the most interesting (and maligned) musical moments in her career, I want to get it right. The album of the same name marked Madonna’s most controversial work in several years, having gone through a softer period marked by highlights such as ‘Evita‘ and ‘Ray of Light‘ – and though she still knew how to make waves, I’m not sure she knew the capsizing about to occur when you messed with the crazy forces that followed the early years of the new millennium.
‘American Life’ was her electronic pastoral, and though it somewhat heavy-handedly shoe-horned its way into being a treatise on America, it was actually more of one woman’s journey through the simple landscape of living, with all the requisite insecurities, anger, romance, wonder and grief that surviving in this country – and this world – mandated. Songs like ‘Hollywood’ and ‘Nobody Knows Me’ may have been a pointed statement on the elusive and hollow American dream, but much of the other material deals with more personal issues. The resplendent choir-backed ‘Nothing Fails‘ starts quietly and builds into a nuanced variation on ‘Like A Prayer‘ while ‘Mother and Father‘ continues the parental complexities of ‘Promise to Try‘ and ‘Oh Father‘. Love, in all its many splendored forms, finds expression in ‘X-static Process‘, ‘Intervention‘ and ‘Love Profusion’. There’s even the classic clunker (because it wouldn’t be a proper Madonna album without a ‘Jimmy Jimmy’ or ‘Act of Contrition‘ or ‘I’m Going Bananas‘) in the form of ‘I’m So Stupid’. (Though by this point even her clunkers had some merit.)
Musically, the album picked up right where ‘Music‘ left off, with the blips and beeps and stuttering electronic flourishes of Mirwais bumping up against warm folksy guitar work, staccato strings and orchestral grandiosity in tracks like ‘Die Another Day‘ and ‘Easy Ride’.
For better or worse, the sonic stylings honed here may have been lost amid the war imagery and that dark period of American history, which is a shame, because several songs have withstood the test of time, and the ‘American Life’ album itself, despite the lack of any overtly-celebratory tracks, is a thing of deep beauty.
The next Madonna Timeline will honor the title track, one of the most polarizing Madonna songs among fans up until ‘Bitch I’m Madonna‘ – and it’s a doozy. Coming this month…
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