Madonna’s American Life album put me on the path towards
completing my very first screenplay, the title of which would go on to be the theme
of every script I have written in the ten years since: Disillusion.
The realization that I was fantasy-obsessed, and patterning my life after Madonna's
career, was obvious to my loved ones ever since I poured all of my nine year
old creative energies into that video tribute to "Vogue". But my own
epiphany would not come about until the release of American Life, ten years ago
today. I figured there would already be plenty of fellow SuperFans putting this
album and its unprecedented commercial failure against the backdrop of the cultural climate that followed the horrors of 9/11 and preceded the horrors of
The Iraq War. So instead of a sociopolitical context, I thought I'd do what I
do best and put this album into the context of....Me.
Hi.
Rather than a proper multimedia retrospective,
I offer a random assembly of thoughts, linked by some of my
favorite tracks from one of my favorite albums. It's me at my most honest and
unstructured because American Life is
Madonna at her most honest and unstructured. And who would I be if not someone
who lives and breathes to pay tribute to Her? Whereas now I can say that as a
tongue-in-cheek nod to my trademark penchant for idol worship, such a statement
would have been a lot less ironic ten years ago. Up until “The American Life Era”, my devotion to Madonna could theoretically have been read as amusing, admirable, or pathetic.
It was Madonna herself who not-so-subtly encouraged me to look deeper into
myself and how I could contribute to the world with the same passion with which
I contributed to her record sales. It was, specifically, a statement she made when performing
before an audience of SuperFans at an HMV Record Store in London on May 9th, 2003.
"In the process I forgot....that I was special too."
It was the
sort of promotion one would expect from an artist at the launch of their
career, not the relaunch. Fans slept on the street to get into that
ultra-exclusive, never-broadcast mini-concert. Yet while Madonna thanked them for
their worship, she also encouraged them to put it towards their own betterment,
not just hers. As she worded it herself that day:
“If you want to pay tribute to me, do something important
with your life.”
Those three words rang through my head, for they gave
me permission to love myself as much as I loved Madonna. Initially, “maximizing
my own potential”, as a guru might put it, was the ultimate tribute to my idol.
But in time (thanks to my impeccable taste in idols) the desire to do good had
(roughly) as much to do with love for humanity as it did with
worshipping a Goddess. Thanks to the impact that Madonna’s American Life had on my
American life, today my devotion to Madonna is defined by self-respect and a commitment to my own growth as an artist
and human being. It all began the summer after the album was released, when I sacrificed my busy social life to commit myself to the isolation I required in order to complete a screenplay. Whereas my life before American Life was dominated by watching movies, my life after American Life has been dominated by writing movies: nearly all of my film viewership since 2003 has, for better or worse, been a part of my own artistic process. And it was Madonna's "Life" which opened the creative floodgates.
Thanks, Madonna!
Even though American Life continues the journey Madonna embarked upon
with Ray of Light and subsequently Music, in many ways this is, in fact, a reboot of
her career—hence those record store gigs on both sides of the pond. If Confessions On A Dancefloor was the 21st
century reincarnation of her eponymous first album, then this was the debut
record of the artist who Madonna was before she ever signed a recording
contract, back when she shifted between rock and disco in New York clubs. Her
guitar work on this album is apparently amateurish (I wouldn't know one way or
another) but it's also as painfully honest as an adolescent love letter (which I can vouch for with more assurance). Ditto her youthful, almost child-like
singing, a far cry from the post-Evita vocal training that impressed and
divided listeners of Ray of Light and Music. For the "calculating"
SuperDiva to have been so vulnerable and unpolished remains among the ballsiest
moves Madonna ever made. It also defined the "screw the career, I'm finally happy" quality of both the album
itself and how it was sold to the record-buying public.
The first televised performance of one of my all-time favorite songs.
I was convinced American Life would be a smash, though that didn't stop me from buying ten copies of the CD in its first week of release to help it
debut at #1 in America—which it did, giving Madonna her first back-to-back #1 albums
in the U.S. since the 80s. Alas, it was soon to tumble down the charts. Fearing my overspending was bad karma and lead to weak sales, I went on to buy another eighteen copies on CD, vinyl, and eventually digital download between 2003-2005. This meant a lot
of people were gifted copies of American Life during the two and a half years
when it was "the new Madonna album". I gave a copy to the security
guard at my building. I handed out a few to fellow college stoners after passing
around my old bong, “Veronica Electronica”, while not-so-subtly playing the
full length album. (Cannabis has never diminished my ability to be a fascist host
to my company.) I even mailed CDs to friends
and relatives along with a wordy letter about how Madonna's new album was her
best ever and yet was being totally ignored by radio stations and in turn
record buyers. In fact, quite a few of those friends and relatives became
bigger Madonna fans after they actually heard the album. I even gave a CD to one of the first guys I ever hooked up with on his way out my door. The encounter was lovely, but the greatest pleasure that came out of that afternoon was learning that the album made him a bigger Madonna fan, too.
"How could it hurt you when it looks so good?"
Like many fans, I often wonder where Madonna's career would
have lead, or what completely new shape it might have taken, had American Life
sold as many copies in America as did the two albums that
preceded it. It could have been the political mood of the country. It could
have been the hostile reaction to the panned performances Madonna gave onstage in Up For Grabs and on the big-screen in Swept Away and Die Another Day. Or
maybe it was just the same good old-fashioned misogyny that made the
life-after-forty years of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford an uphill
battle against "you already made it, so now be quiet" ageism.
"Do I have to chaaaange?!"
Ultimately, American Life's commercial failure shaped the subsequent decade of Madonna's career. She began to embrace her "greatest hits"
catalogue on The Re-Invention Tour, and returned to a full-on dance music album
after American Life's commercial and promo-only remixes dominated the Billboard Dance/Club Play charts for two years. Like most fans, I thought Confessions On A Dancefloor was
an even better album--in fact, it's my personal favorite of all time, and I
imagine it always will be. But “Confessions” is not simply a great album: it is
the perfect companion to the downtempo American Life, and I could never have loved "Confessions" if I had not first fallen in love with "Life". Personally, I have always
regarded both as Disc 1 & Disc 2 of a haphazard Double LP sent
from the Gods and Goddesses of Pop Utopia. You cannot fully appreciate the
exquisite pleasures of one without the other, and you cannot deny that each
takes the listener on a journey from hard thumping to pleasant release. (Feel
free to view those words as an aural, lyrical, sexual, or spiritual reference: all four interpretations apply to both albums.) And so today
I honor not only American Life, one of Madonna's best albums and one of my favorite works of art, but also the incomparable changes it lead to in
my life. I cannot put into words just how grateful I am to Madonna for weathering
an embarrassing commercial failure in the (X-static) process of inspiring
countless artists like myself. And to think, it's only been ten years....I'm
thrilled to imagine the influence that this truly timeless,
ever-listenable album will continue to have on my life and millions of others in
the decades to come.
"And the world can look so sad....only you make me feel good."
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