The Times AL review: Out of tunes with the times

Pop Albums

Out of tunes with the times
By Lisa Verrico

Madonna's combat chic and scattershot techno miss the mark

MADONNA'S FIRST assault on the album chart for three years should have
been a precisely timed operation. The woman as well known for
reinventing herself as she is for her songs had cottoned on to the
hostile mood of the moment and decided to hitch a ride on the prospect
of war. So she clad herself in combats, dyed her hair dark brown, donned
a beret and dog tags and made a controversial, guns'n'Gucci video for
the album's title track and first single. It was war-meets-pop with a
wink, with an army of stylists instead of soldiers and a George Bush
lookalike.

The problem was, a real war got in the way. Or rather, Madonna got cold
feet. On the eve of its release last week, the video was ditched - out
of respect for real soldiers - and Madonna's big comeback was delivered
a severe body blow. Stripped of the video, American Life misses its
target by about a mile. It's a messy mish-mash of blippy techno beats,
bendy keyboard parts, treated acoustic guitars, lyrics about being a
celebrity and a rap that sounds positively silly. Oh, and there isn't a
tune.

Since hooking up with the Parisian producer Mirwais, Madonna's music has
become increasingly electronic. It was William Orbit's work on Ray of
Light that first sent the singer down that road, but with Mirwais on
1999's multimillion-selling Music Madge plunged much deeper into dance.

And as part of a glossy package it worked pretty well. Music's title
track was a catchy classic that still sounds good, and the second
single, Don't Tell Me, boasted a clever blend of acoustic guitars and
beats. As for the rest of the album, well, it was OK. But the mighty
Madge is such a master at marketing that no one really noticed the
fillers. We were all too busy admiring her cowboy outfits and watching
Ali G act as her chauffeur.

With American Life, how-ever, Madonna has taken her techno trip too far.
What her audience wants are pop songs and - as much as I hate to be the
one to break it to you - there aren't any on her new album. Instead,
Madonna has opted for a batch of experimental, studio-produced backing
tracks, all of which occasionally break into bizarre, acoustic
guitar-backed bits. On paper, it must have looked like a good idea. On
record, it doesn't really work. Hence, on first listen, you half want to
pat Madge on the back for being so brave. But at the same time you'd
like to rap her on the knuckles and shout: "What were you thinking?"
It's not that American Life is bad, it's just kind of caught in a
no-man's-land. Or maybe it's simply too clever for its own good. Either
way, it tries too hard.

Mostly, the mix of electronic and acoustic just jars, there are no songs
you can sing along to and too few melodies you'll remember for more than
a few minutes.

The album opens with the title track, which sets the scene for what's to
come. It's a strangely soulless single. It sounds like Madonna, it's got
good beats, there are enough odd noises to keep you interested and
there's no denying it's an adventurous step on from Music. But the song
never adds up to the sum of its parts. It isn't even a good radio
record. Will anyone be playing it a year from now? I doubt it.

The second song and next single, Hollywood, is better. It's more pop,
for a start, and less disjointed, which at least makes it
dancefloor-friendly.

Madonna continues her "celebrity is s" theme - something, apparently,
she has only just discovered - to swaths of synths, booming bass, a
driving, drum machine-driven rhythm and thumping beats. This time,
though, it doesn't sound much like Madonna. You could imagine a pop
puppet such as Holly Valance singing Hollywood in an attempt to be hip.
It's good, but not special enough to be prime-time Madge.

Much of the rest of the album follows a predictable pattern. I'm So
Stupid has a buzzy bassline, a looped guitar part, brisk-paced house
beats and several acoustic intermissions in which Madge sings in that
odd, gentrified accent she adopted for Evita. On Nothing Fails, she
strips the song down and invites along a gospel choir. On the
stuttering, Aphex Twin-influenced Easy Ride, she brings in classical
strings, and on the likeable Mother and Father - a song about her search
for the meaning of life inspired by the death of her mother when she was
just six - she sings in an oddly pitched voice, as though to show there
are sides of her we haven't seen yet. But it's always the same template,
just given a twist.

Madonna veers slightly off course midway through American Life for a
trio of tracks dedicated to her hubby, Guy Ritchie. Singing about the
love of your life is a tricky task and, inevitably, Madge goes gooey.
Nothing Fails begins with the line, "I'm in love with you, you silly
thing," and goes downhill from there. Intervention is sweet and has
lovely, lush instrumentation, but it's four chords played over and over
and all set in the same key.

Meanwhile, X-Static Process is a bizarre ballad with a backing track and
vocal that don't fit together and a verse that goes: "I always wished
that I could find/ Someone as beautiful as you/ But in the process I
forgot that I was special too." Oh dear.

American Life may be a grower and - well, hell - it's Madonna, so it'll
sell. But on first impression, it's a rather large let-down.

Rating: 2/5
[This message was edited Sun Apr 13 9:13:22 PDT 2003 by AaronSuperior]

"The Guardian" review, by Alexis Petridis

There is something distinctly odd about the news that the video for
Madonna's current single American Life has been withdrawn. The official
line is that Madonna is worried about offending people - a novel concept
from a woman whose fame has been based on provocation.

The notion that anybody would be offended by a video featuring a troupe
of overweight dancers in military fatigues, and a George Bush lookalike
lighting a cigar with a hand grenade, is faintly ridiculous.

Bearing in mind that Madonna made the video in February, when even the
most hopeful anti-war campaigner must have realised that conflict was
inevitable, her decision to withdraw the video seems disingenuous,
another attempt to draw attention to herself.

The sense that a lot of fuss is being made over nothing is underlined by
American Life itself. On the opening track of her first album for three
years, Madonna announces, she would "like to express my extreme point of
view". It's difficult to hear that line without feeling a prickle of
excitement.

Madonna, after all, is not a woman noted for the subtlety of her
approach. She felt the best way to encourage greater openness about sex
was to publish a book featuring pictures of her hang-gliding in the
nude. She tackled the subject of racism by making a video in which she
snogged a black Christ and danced in a field full of burning crosses.
That's Madonna being normal.

What on earth might her extreme point of view involve? That the world is
ruled by a shadowy cabal of super-intelligent lizards?

Sadly not. Her extreme point of view turns out to be that money can't
buy you happiness and that fame isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Listeners reeling from this shock revelation are advised to press the
pause button and compose themselves before track two, Hollywood, on
which Madonna exclusively divulges that not everyone who wants to make
it in the movies succeeds.

She sings the verses in a high-pitched little-girl voice. Presumably the
idea is to underline the notion of innocence lost. In fact, it
underlines the notion that a 44-year-old woman should never sing in a
high-pitched little-girl voice, unless someone is forcing her to do so
at gunpoint.

American Life calms down a bit after that, as Madonna stops singing like
Bonnie Langford and her lyrics return to more familiar topics. There are
songs about how great her kids are, what a tragedy her mother's early
death was, and what an all-round credit to the human race Guy Ritchie is
- the latter surely a more controversial suggestion than anything on the
title track.

Finally, and most importantly, she starts coming up with the sort of
sublime pop melodies that are noticeably absent from the first half of
the album. Nothing Fails has a wonderful choral finale. Intervention
marries a New Order-like ambience to a chorus that one of those Swedish
pop factories would kill to come up with. The closing Easy Ride is
fantastic.

And yet, there is something underwhelming about the sound of American
Life, a sense of musical deja vu, of retreading old ground. In a weird
way, you can't blame Madonna.

Over her 20-year career she has been visually original, a provocative
stylist, an intelligent lyricist and a sublime melodist, but she has
never been a ground-breaking musician. Blessed with a sharp set of ears
and a perfect sense of timing, her skill has lain in repackaging the
cutting-edge innovations of club music for a mass-market pop audience:
the electro-funk of mid-1980s New York, house, trip-hop, trance and,
most recently, the French disco of Daft Punk.

However, in the three years since she released Music, club music has
become creatively moribund. There are no new cutting-edge innovations to
borrow. Instead, she has called upon French producer Mirwais Ahmadzai to
do his Poundstretcher Daft Punk routine once more. That is a mistake.

Even by dance producer standards, Ahmadzai is a one-trick cheval. He has
two ideas, both already deployed on Music: putting Madonna's voice
through an electronic effect called a Vocoder and cutting up
acoustic-guitar patterns so they stutter. He sticks doggedly to this
approach throughout American Life.

Eventually, you begin to wish that Madonna had spent less time worrying
about the reaction her video might cause in the US, and had instead
tried to curry favour with the American public by embarking on a
one-woman French boycott.

However, when Madonna is on form, not even Ahmadzai's limitations can
hold her back. American Life's best tracks make a mockery of virtually
all other current pop music - but those highlights are outweighed by
stuff that is indistinct and somehow beneath pop's unassailable queen.

The album's problem has nothing to do with controversy or extreme points
of view. This time, there just aren't enough good songs.

The Daily Telegraph reviews "AL"

Songs that bleep/rhymes so cheap/is pop's queen/the new has-been?

Neil McCormick reviews Madonna's new album, American Life

While Baghdad was falling to US troops on Wednesday, select British
journalists were herded to a secret location in central London, plied
with drink and briefed by a stern record company executive before
listening to a single playback of the new Madonna album, American Life,
on a bank of enormous speakers at bone-rattling volume. If these tactics
were meant to promote shock and awe, they badly misfired. Asked at the
conclusion if we would like to hear any of the tracks again, there was
only embarrassed silence.

Twee: Madonna's new album lacks melodic flexibility and adventure

As many of you may have already suspected, Madonna's new army-surplus
look (modelled in her recently withdrawn video and displayed on posters
throughout the country) turns out not to be a comment on war, just her
latest fashion infatuation. The posters depict Madonna in the manner of
a communist revolutionary. If there is anything more to this than
misappropriated iconography, it is that her new album could be her
little red book, The Thoughts of Chairwoman Madge. And what this veteran
of the style wars has to reveal boils down to a simple message: fame is
hell.

Over martially rigid beats and a cacophony of digitally manipulated
bleeps and burbles from French producer Mirwais, Madonna delivers her
celebrity philosophy in the brook-no-questions tones of a parade-ground
sergeant (with all the emotional nuance that implies). Employing
inflexible rhyming couplets, she rattles off musical discourses full of
cheap polemic ("Music stations always play the same songs/ I'm bored
with the concept of right and wrong"), weak sloganeering ("There are too
many questions/ There is not one solution/ There is no resurrection/
There is so much confusion"), cliched insight ("I always wished that I
could find/ Someone as beautiful as you/ But in the process I forgot/
That I was special too"), and some of the most banal rhymes in pop ("I'm
not that kind of guy/ Sometimes I feel shy/ I think I can fly/ Closer to
the sky").

Madonna has always been defined by her choice of collaborators, but
these days one suspects her biggest collaborator is herself. My sources
at Olympic Studios in London, where she did most of the recording,
assure me this was a very hands-on experience for the star. Taking
snatches of backing tracks created by Mirwais, she dictated musical
direction, composing all lyrics and melodies. That the latter are
particularly weak suggests she might benefit from a stronger songwriting
partner, someone able to curb Madonna's tendency to lose herself in
contemplation of her famous navel.

Mirwais is a one-trick pony, and we heard that trick being done to death
on Madonna's last studio set, Music: cut-up, stop-start rhythms;
propulsive, linear synth lines; touches of acoustic guitars making
sudden appearances high in the mix. Every track seems to be in the same
key and (beneath clever but essentially cosmetic inversions) to feature
a couple of major chords hammered out in dull sequence. There is a
complete absence of melodic flexibility and adventure here.

Even when the drum machine is mercifully silenced on the pretentious
psuedo-ballad X-Static Process, Madonna's vocals retain the same
rhythmic severity and tonal stiffness. Her singing is disappointing
throughout, her delivery switching between the stridency of an S&M madam
instructing clients how to behave, and short bursts of girly
vulnerability, all breathy sweetness and eyelash-fluttering high notes.
The latter voice comes to the fore on Mother and Father, a trite attempt
at soul-baring, addressing the emotional vacuum created by the death of
her mother. John Lennon set the standards for such intimate,
confessional material on the heart-rending, confrontational Mother in
1970, letting his pain rip over raw, bluesy guitars. Madonna intones
twee lyrics of loss over a typical Mirwais track, not so much primal
scream as prissy disco. "My mother died when I was five/ And all I did
was sit and cry/ I cried and cried and cried all day/ Until the
neighbours went away" she reveals. It's excruciating. I can feel her
pain. But can she feel mine?

Should we care about a Madonna album? Her William-Orbit-produced Ray of
Light in 1998 certainly worked as a whole listening experience and
suggested she might have scope to develop as a mature artist, but her
favoured oeuvre is the single, the oxygen of pop music, and there are
just about enough individually striking, sonically compelling tracks
here to drive this behemoth into the charts when it is released on April
21.

Current single American Life and the jolly follow-up Hollywood are
probably the best of them. But, when her choppy Bond theme tune, Die
Another Day, is the other stand-out, it is hard not to escape the
feeling that the Queen of Pop's regime may be about to collapse.

Do you mean that "they" are anti american because they gave to the last Madonna's album (if only it could be the last ) bad critics?
"Madge goes gooey" what Jeremy will think of this?
*
[This message was edited Sun Apr 13 9:48:17 PDT 2003 by jn2]

From what I've seen Madonna's always got an overly enthusiastic reponse from the UK press. Maybe this song is getting bad reviews ecause it's just oh so very er... bad.

As much as I love Madonna,the American Life single is terrible

Much love Pochacco

jn2 said:

no, I mean "they" as in the British music press that rarely has a good review to give out and even when it does, it's overly backhanded and they only say the good things so they can get on to their clever inside jokes to try to make them look elevated above the masses and the medium they're paid to review. that's the "they" i meant.


and believe me, i'm the first to jump up Madonna's ass when she does something i think is stupid or wrong, so i'm not slamming the British music press just because they're saying bad things about Madonna. it's been a pet peeve of mine for quite awhile...

Essence said:

i agree. the song sucks. and it's understandable that it'd get bad reviews. but they're talking about the album.


so far, the response seems to be split. it's either really great or really horrible.


which should make actually listening to it when it comes out all the more interesting.

i like great vs. bad reviews more than 90% of them just saying "it's alright, i guess..."

The British press were in LOVE with Ray of Light and Music to a lesser extent. A few of the tabloids have given AL good reviews, but notice the bad ones are from the respectable newspapers as posted above.

She was simply due for a backlash. The press never worship someone for longer than 5 years when they're alive.

Am I the only one who LOVES the rap on the title track? I think it's great! It's ironic,funny and very lively...


"I do yoga and pilates
And the room is full of hotties
So,I'm checking out the bodies
And you know I'm satisfied"


I heard that Madonna also raps on the song "Mother And Father"


To see the lyrics to all the songs,go to...


http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~ke...ericanlife




[This message was edited Sun Apr 13 9:54:36 PDT 2003 by DavidEye]

Ellie said:

i find it interesting that the British press is giving her bad reviews right now, considering her anti-war stance, while the American media that everyone says is some pro-war propaganda machine is giving her good reviews for the same project.

It's the pulling of the video that was the erm, "last straw". She's been acting for the last year and the press have always made a bit of a joke about that. I actually predicted a backlash with the next album. I just sort of knew it. She's still a credible force in the industry though and her fans will defend her to the end.

Plus... sorry, the song does indeed suck :p There are probably better lead single choices on the album.

I think she'll go in at #1 in the UK next Sunday though. Her only competition is Robbie Williams with a song I haven't even heard yet, and from an album that's already sold squillions.

Ellie said:

Madonna's been getting backlash for 20 years tho. it'll pass. there's never been a time when she wasn't under constant criticism. this kind of stuff always happens any time she pokes her head out. yeah, the single sucks and the album may not have impressed some reviewers, but this his hardly backlash. this is trick #2 in the Reporters Guide to Irritating Madonna.

#1. write a 1000 word editorial on how Madonna is over. (if you're writing about it, it ain't over)
#2. write that her latest album, movie, video, controversy, whatever, is boring. (if you're writing about it, it ain't boring).

same old shit, year after year. my only actual beef with the reviews i posted at the beginning of this thread is with the way the British music press treats pretty much everything that comes under its radar. it's either crap, or it's good, but they don't want to come out and tell you it's good, because they want to get a lot of snide in-jokes into the article to make them seem like they're above it all: the audience, the artist, and even the entire medium of popular music.