With The Immaculate Collection, Madonna was able to remix and edit her history as well as her songs, jumping triumphantly from the True Blue singles to the Like A Prayer ones, from superstar consolidation to next-level persona building. She took the opportunity to erase her 1987, a messy year creatively as well as personally as the string of underdone singles from the Who’s That Girl soundtrack showed. The title track is better than the clattering, SAW-ish “Causing A Commotion” or diffuse ballad “The Look Of Love”, but this is still a barely engaged Madonna. It’s only on the “light up my life” bridge that she seems at all bothered, and there’s no real emotional connection between that and the rest of the song – the whole thing is marking time. Since I like ‘latin Madonna’ I think it marks time very pleasantly, but we’re still in the departure lounge of San Pedro airport here, waiting resignedly for something to happen.
Score: 5
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Shanghai Surprise had already proved that Madonna’s acting limitations were easily breached, and Who’s That Girl – note the presumptuous lack of a question mark, as though we should purge ourselves for not already knowing – did nothing to revise that opinion; a shaggy dog (or, more precisely, a shaggy cougar) story forgotten seconds after leaving the cinema. The presence of Griffin Dunne as male lead demonstrated that it was a poor rewrite of Scorsese’s After Hours, but beyond Ciccone’s Beezlebub eyebrows, the escaped cougar – or was it a pet cougar? – and the inexplicable presence of John Mills it rapidly swallows itself up in its own vapidity.
The theme song is conspicuously absent from Madonna’s Immaculate Collection, no doubt because everyone involved realised that it was a virtual clone of “La Isla Bonita,” complete with Hispanic interspersions in the chorus* – was Ciccone that worried about Gloria Estefan? – and it is as prettily vacant as its predecessor; Madonna justifying her self-love in the third person (“Now you’re falling at her feet/Try to get away but you can’t”) although the premature mythologisation jars with the faux-helplessness of “Light up my life/No one can help me now.”
The four Madonna tracks featured on the Who’s That Girl soundtrack album reek of True Blue rejects (“Causing A Commotion” is a vapid rewrite of “Into The Groove,” although I quite liked “The Look Of Love” at the time), and the album is otherwise a strange melange, incorporating “Turn It Up” by Michael Davidson, the singer and the Stock/Aitken/Waterman production that history forgot, insubstantial nuggets from the likes of Club Nouveau and Coati Mundi, and Scritti Politti’s “Best Thing Ever,” which latter a year hence would resurface as the least interesting track on Provision. But, as with “La Isla Bonita,” Madonna utterly fails to convince the listener that she’s worth the interest, and the only possible response to the titular question is “who cares?”
*Is it just me who hears the slightest of nods towards Elizabeth Frazer in those interjections?
It’s years since I listened to any of the singles, but the ones that are getting the least effusive write-ups here – this, La Isla Bonita and True Blue – were my favourites of the big Madonna hits. The slight air of the shoulder-shrug about them, the fact that they were by Madonna’s standards positively diffident, made them seem that much more attractive to a 16/17-year-old indie kid that the more strident and insistent songs that have entered into the modern pop canon. When the WTG? soundtrack album was released, I bumped into the local hardcore punk lad (he later became a guitarist in God) on the train home from Windsor. He had an Our Price bag, and when I asked what was in it, he produced the soundtrack album. Loved this song, he said, and couldn’t get enough of it.
I quite like “Causing A Commotion”! I still find Madonna’s most purely, innocently subtext-free bubblegum moments oddly bracing, like she’s pulled the rug from under your feet in the opposite direction that you were expecting. Songs like that, “Dear Jessie”, “Cherish” etc still seem rather strange coming from her.
Yeah spot on about “Who’s That Girl”, a pity that a potentially iconic song title went to waste on a song this blah. Not awful though, 5 or 6 depending on mood.
“Dear Jessie” is the secret highlight of Like A Prayer.
I love “Cherish” to bits, either adore or skip “Dear Jessie” completely depending on mood but “Commotion” just doesn’t work for me, it really would sound better with Sonia or someone doing it. It needs to be less classy
Every song I know titled ‘Who’s That Girl’ I like and this is no exception. Unremarkable but a comfortable enough 7 as I’d never not be happy to hear it. Didn’t comment on her previous #1 but no serious objections to La Isla Bonita either – the context issue is of no real interest to me as it was such a decent “tribute”. Prefer both to ‘True Blue’. Her next topper tho, a whole new level…
Great review, Tom – I agree entirely. It’s just disposable fluff – though the fact that her offcuts/unreleased songs are largely mediocre proves how great her ear was for editing. Shame it’s now been included on Celebration in the place of many other far more deserving songs.
gratuitous/relevant self-promotion: http://iconography.tumblr.com/post/210204383/whos-that-girl
@lex: Free of the baggage of expectations, I think she generally pulls off such songs very well in their own right… though Dear Jessie in context – a wide-eyed Technicolour kids’ lullaby sequenced directly before Madonna’s most painfully autobiographical song about her mother’s death – fails at everything except being jarring. Alone, it’s just saccharine.
@Tom: You don’t hear Causing a Commotion as an inferior Into the Groove rewrite?
Well, I couldn’t remember it at all so I’m only going by one YouTube listen – the instrumentation strikes me as more up-to-date than “Groove” and also so much of “Groove” is to do with the force of personality/the ideal of dancing etc etc that I guess I didn’t see the similarity, though listening again it’s there.
I don’t think you can separate the “Latin period” Madonna from the 1987 Miami sound. In the US we had hits by Expose and Company B and Lisa Lisa. Who’s That Girl fit right in, but the other groups’ records were better.
By this stage, my interest in Madonna was at an all-time low (and no-one else I knew could give two shits about her either). “True Blue” had been the final straw; I thought of it being played at Conservative Party discos, shuddered and turned away. (Was there some contemporaneous TV documentary footage? I rather think there was.) She no longer represented anything smart, sexy, subversive or in other way in tune with the times – and so I viewed her merely as a rather naff and boring superstar, perpetuating a complacently triumphalist status quo. (“Open Your Heart” and “La Isla Bonita” did eventually, and rightly, win me over, but not for another two or three years.)
I dutifully played “Who’s That Girl” out – just the once, mind – but still remember my hesitation before placing it on the decks, and an attendant unease that I was Diluting My Art with such populist pandering. And besides, next to all the great Chicago house (“Do It Properly”), rare groove (“Cross The Track”) and funk-sampling hip-hop (“I Know You Got Soul”) that I was playing, it sounded so leaden, so weedy, so crap. And, hmm, it doesn’t sound a whole lot better now. So 5 is about right.
N.B. I do take tonya’s point at #10 re. the Miami Sound, but little of it had crossed over to the UK – although Rainy Davis’s “Sweetheart” and Nocera’s “Summertime Summertime” were both big tunes for Graeme Park’s weekend crowd in the same club. And Company B’s magnificent “Fascinated” went on to become one of my biggest floor-fillers…
In terms of acting ability, Madonna was never going to make that dent in Hollywood she so clearly craved at the time. Who’s That Girl casts Madonna alongside Griffin Dunne and neither of them could poosibly challenge Katherine Hepburn or Cary Grant. Punctum cites WTG as a rehash of After Hours, where I remember it as more of a rehash of Bringing Up Baby (for leopard insert cougar). No matter, it’s a paper thin movie with little to recommend it.
The title song however is a continuation of “Latin Period” Madonna’s acknowledgment of Miami-based latin pop. Less a movement than a mere distraction over here. Miami Sound Machine had been successful with Dr Beat off the excellent Eyes Of Innocence album, and followed with a steady procession of hits. I don’t recall Lisa Lisa or Expose for that matter troubling the upper reaches of the chart all that often, but all were dancefloor staples until the homogenising effects of Chicago and Detroit made Miami somewhat pale by comparison.
So this is Madonna shoehorning her new single onto the film soundtrack and persuading the producers to rename it. I understand the working title was “Slammer”. Ah, well business is business after all. WTG’s skip-along and airy arrangement doesn’t make it as engaging as “The Look Of Love” or as danceable as “Causing A Commotion”, but it stands up by itself, but we’re really just marking time until her next chart topper…
Wow, that’s generic eighties pop – No wonder I didn’t remember it. There’s a little passage that sounds like The Art of Noise on an off-day, and there’s an odd sort of synthesised acordian noise in there, that really reminds me of something that I really like from about 1985, but frustratingly can’t work out what it is.
My guilty confession about this stage of Popular is that I really don’t think that Madonna ever particularly improves any single that she makes. If they were good, they would have been good whoever fronted them, and if they were indifferent, like this or True Blue, I can’t find any sense of personal charm or mystique to lift the experience.
I once wrote something on The Hits That Madonna Forgot, the two [i]Who’s That Girl[/i] megahits among them. “Who’s That Girl” didn’t even appear on a comp until last year’s [i]Celebration[/i], while “Causing a Commotion” is still missing (#2 for three weeks in the US, in case you wondered).
The epitome of my least favorite Madonna period this is dull as dishwater. At least True Blue and La Isla Bonita, despite their clunky productions were catchy and memorable but this just washes over me completely. I had little recollection of it before i just relistening to it 5 mins ago and am already forgetting it all over again. The fact I havent heard in 20+ years indicates i’m not the only one. 4/10
Speaking of Celebration, what a missed opportunity that was-why Madonna hasnt released a chronological 3 disc singles box set is a mystery.
While I agree with you that this is a mediocre, filler number one, I do think you seriously underestimate ‘The Look Of Love’. That song is a clear prelude to Like A Prayer in my opinion. A very classy, understated affair which is unfortunately forgotten due to its (relatively) low chart placing and lack of a proper video. The lyrics are unusually soul-searching and the melody atypically mournful for a soundtrack album stuffed with generic mid-80s cheese.
Consider the final bridge. There’s definitely more going on here than a tossed-off third single for a side project.
[i]All the books I’ve read
and the things I know
Never taught me to live
Never taught me to let go…[/i]
One of her most underrated tracks if you ask me.
This is pretty but it’s certainly Madonna on cruise control.
Never seen the film but I assume it’s in the class of Under the Cherry Moon.
Agree with Tom’s review: WTG rewrites La Isla Bonita to even less effect.
Agree with thefatgat,12, that the film principally rewrites Bringing Up Baby. I’d add just that it includes a big helping of the early ’70s, Streisand-vehicle, rewrite of BUB; What’s up Doc? (Which managed to keep its question-mark!)
The great movie around this time with somewhat similar themes was Something Wild (it has the original version of New Order’s Temptation on its soundtrack IIRC). There was kind of a direct like-for-like comparison of Melanie Griffith in that film with Madonna in WTG. Yikes.
Anyhow, it’s certainly become part of M.’s charm that she’s incredibly hard-working, is willing to fall on her butt like this (having your ass handed to you by K. Hepburn, Streisand, and Griffith simultaneously – nice!), but *shall* return triumphant. What a gal.
Lastly, the silver screen remix of Causing a Commotion is *incredible* (so aerobic!).
As I stated in my “La Isla Bonita” post, Madonna, at this stage could record anything and it would be a hit. Including this forgotten #1 from a forgotten movie. Like the followup, “Causing A Commotion”, this is a trifle. Hummable and catchy, because Madonna could craft singles like this very easily at this point, but not one even she would want to be reminded of. A U.S. #1 as well.
I don’t mind this so much – perhaps it’s lack of familiarity makes it seem (marginally) fresher than LIB.
The video is a mediocre mess of sentiment (kids) and movie marketing. What strikes me is how young Madonna appears.
As regards her movie career I once did a case study of Madonna’s movies in a Film Studies class and came to the conclusion that her acting ‘method’ consisted of getting a different hair style.
re17 As a Prince fan I went to see ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ at the cinema when it came out but I suspect that even WTG would have more merit.
The sound of Madonna coasting. Both the video and single have the look of a rushed, hastily thrown together package. 5 seems about right.
@13: I think she’s incredibly emotive at her best, both as a songwriter and interpreter – Papa Don’t Preach is the perfect example.
Perhaps further proof is the fact that there are virtually NO good Madonna covers – for example:
The original of Open Your Heart in Spanish – vocally hammy, production generic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kC5SwKycM4
Alizee’s bored-to-tears take on La Isla Bonita, an inexplicable number-two hit in France: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZlgNj-rIxw
Hardly comprehensive, but in comparison Madonna’s skill becomes much more obvious.
Yes, yes, pleasant, lightweight, on autopilot, a mere trifle, but the question we should be asking is
WHERE’S THE COUGAR, MATEY?
This must be one of the most consensual threads we’ve had for a long time. This is the first instance of Madonna taking her eye off the ball musically (see also most of the 90s). Having said that I really love that synthetic brass line that cuts in after the first line of the second verse and still anticipate it with a thrill whenever the song’s played on the radio.
I agree that “The Look Of Love” is the best of the trio but it’s still an inferior re-hash of “Live To Tell”
#23 Probably chasing Uncle Disgusting away or snacking on a Ruddy Big Pig !
Re 22 Teenage Fanclub’s Like A Virgin is pretty good.
@MikeMCSG,23. Surely the ’90s were pretty solid for M.: The whole Ray of Light album’s great, some of Bedtime Stories is great and all of it’s solid, and Erotica’s patchy but intriguing (my sense is that it’s kind of grown on people though various remixes and as the literal over-exposure of the Sex book with which it was associated at the time has faded out of memory – that’s certainly been the case with me). Beyond that, Vogue, Justify my love, Beautiful Stranger and the Evita tunes… Put all of that together, and in my view you’ve got a superstar-decade-to-be-reckoned-with.
Thinking about it, one of the key reasons I warmed so strongly to 1989-90 Imperial Phase/Critical Consensus Madonna (of which more in due course) is that it felt like such a self-improving step up from 1986-87 Crap/Boring/One-Dimensional Madonna, i.e. it was her determination to transcend her limitations (artistically and technically) which endeared her to me. So in a way, the lameness of “Who’s That Girl” is actually a critical stage in Madonna’s story. Perhaps she couldn’t have got to where she was going without it.
Mike, what you’re describing is a classic case of “difficult 2nd/3rd album syndrome” where the creative momentum stalls and only the most successful artists can gain top commercial returns on what is effectively dreck. It’s then down to the artist in question to get their creative mojo back, possibly winning new fans in the process.
#24 I wrote MOST of the 90s meaning up to the “Ray Of Light” re-birth. As you yourself say the other LPs were patchy. As for Evita did you really get off on hearing 20 year old Lloyd Webber tunes sung by a limited vocalist ? And I haven’t even mentioned “Hanky Panky” !
@24 ’90s Madonna was really great! Her so-called “90s slump” consists entirely of Evita. Erotica is easily my favourite Madonna album and Bedtime Stories is really underrated (we discussed it a bit on the “La Isla Bonita” thread). Evita was a misstep (but more because it was unexpectedly reverent than an actual disaster). And then every one of her 1998-2005 albums has at least a few songs that are up there with the best of her ’80s work.
#28 – Partially it’s difficult 3rd album syndrome, but it’s also a collective realisation: “we underestimated you / you’re “better” (more talented/more artistically interesting) than we gave you credit for”. See also Kylie and arguably Lady GaGa. But since early Madonna was generally reckoned to be pretty damned great, this is where tracks like “True Blue”, “Who’s That Girl” and “Causing A Commotion” have a crucial part to play – because in a roundabout way, they serve to strengthen her 1989-90 rebirth.
This is really pretty ordinary stuff, and as I’m not as enamoured of M. as most of you I can’t rouse myself to more than a 4. Possibly even a 3 if I were feeling uncharitable, but not today.
Billy @13, that certainly chimes with my own feelings about ’86-’87 Madonna, then and now.
@MikeMCSG,29. Yeah, I think the Evita *singles* are OK and I give M. a few brownie points for those. The film and its soundtrack taken as a whole are embarrassing, to be sure, but I was just adding up the positive side of the ledger.
@Lex,30. I’m definitely trending towards agreeing with your assessment of Erotica (every year that passes it seems to sound a little better to me), and I think we completely agree on Bedtime Stories. Back in #24 I just wanted to make my case to MiKeMCSG using only premises I thought anyone would grant.
#22 – Madonna covers all crap? AHEM – Ciccone Youth “Into the Groovey”, almost as good as the original.
On the M. covers front I strongly recommend (rough ‘n’ ready, Austin bluegrass band) The Meat Purveyors’ Madonna Trilogy (which combines Like a Virg., Burning Up, and Lucky Star). [The MPs are a howlingly great live band – don’t miss ’em if perchance they show up in your neck of the woods.]
Another decent Madonna cover is “Borderline” by Stardeath and White Dwarfs, who supported the Flaming Lips back in November. It was really quite amusing seeing the gradual realisation on the faces of the crowd.
I actually like some of the Sonic Youth I’ve heard but “Into The Groovey” is fucking dreadful.
“Burning Up” is OK though.
Three singles titled ‘Who’s That Girl’ within a few years: Madonna; Eurythmics; Flock of Seagulls. Madonna reaches the top on both sides of the Atlantic with hers.
This is Madonna in her megastar phase, right before she got ‘serious’. The single (and the next two) exist purely to fulfill fan demand for more stuff while she went on a huge international tour, and also to promote the movie of the same name. In the movie she tries to carry-over her ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ persona into another lightweight comedy which attempts to try and fix the damage done by ‘Shanghai Surprise’. A patchy period for Miss Ciccone; she starts the year with the last of the True Blue singles, moves into a big tour… then the mediocre (but not terrible) movie (which goes down better overseas), some ok singles, a remix album, and then she disappears while Gloria Estefan, Tiffany, Debbie Gibson and Kylie all take up the slack, right up until she returns and makes them look like also-rans.
This single is a perfectly fine pop song; uptempo and catchy. When compared to the other charts hits of the day it isn’t hard to see why it reached the top. There’s nothing drastically wrong here, but the problem is; there’s nothing drastically right. She’s going through (well worn) motions. Having said that, there’s no reason why she shouldn’t have allowed it to take up space on The Immaculate Collection (I feel the same way about True Blue, Dress You Up and Angel). There’s a little too much career editorialising going on with her, and often it isn’t necessary. This is one of those times. 7 for me.
@36 – just youtubed this and it’s nowhere near as good as the Lips’ own version they’ve been flogging for years (skip to 1:15 in http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/media/s2665913.htm for one rather ragged radio take)
While we wait for the next #1 to be “arriba’d”, I just noticed that the UK and US both had the same three consecutive #1 singles at this time (Madonna and the next two). Wondering how common that has been, when it last happened or whether the Hot 100 and the Top 40 have both had a matching sequence of more than three #1s.
Unexceptional Madonna, yes, but unexceptional Madonna is still pretty good by most standards.
What I wanted to touch on here was something Punctum alluded to in the first post on this thread – “was she that worried about Gloria Estefan?” It’s only when catching the BBC4 documentary on “Latin Music USA” a few Friday nights ago that I realised what a breakthrough Hispanic music was making at that time – MSM obviously, Los Lobos (the next number one, now de-bunnied) … but also a singer who had been a total black hole in my knowledge until that evening, name of Selena.
Selena won the Best Female Vocalist award at the Tejano Music Awards (we’d know the style as Tex-Mex) in 1987 and dominated the category for the next seven years. In February 1995 she played to an audience of 65,000 at the Houston Astrodome, and just over a month later – 15 years ago tomorrow, in fact, as I write – she was shot dead by the president of her fan club following a row over its finances. NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw described her as “The Mexican Madonna” and indeed Madonna was among those who phoned Selena’s family to express condolences. Her funeral drew as big a crowd as the Astrodome gig, and the Governor of Texas – one George W Bush – declared her birthday “Selena Day”.
Back in 1987, her breakthrough year, the idea of a majorly successful singer known by a single Latin name cannot have been lost on Ms Ciccone, who was ever skilful at keying into the latest hot topic and applying it to her own music. But do other British Popular readers find Selena a mystifying absence in their pop knowledge?
I would love to know who initiated the exclusive Madonna-fest on the latest episode of Glee (episode15). The show has previously covered ‘Papa don’t preach’ so perhaps that alerted her to the potential of the show to reach a new, younger audience. Did the writers and producers come up with the idea of an all Madonna show or did she insist? Either way she had to agree to this and it reflects her alertness and capacity to adapt to what is current.
I speculated on another thread that Glee could represent a future model for pop music. Just as older actors (and particularly actresses) are extending their screen careers by voicing animations, so previous pop stars can get the fresh faces and autotuned voices of Glee to ventriloquise their old hits.
I’ll be interested if any other performers get the same treatment.
@lonepilgrim. It’s being reported that it was Glee’s creator Ryan Murphy who approached M. with the ‘whole show’ idea.
On one level, of course, this idea just continues trends towards particular-artist singstar/guitarhero/rock star games. On another level, however, the thing with Madonna does feel special: it isn’t just her *music* in the show, it’s all the various characters being inspired/obsessed by her, and finding things in the music that resonate weirdly with them. And that only works because M’s had such a long career at the top (or close enough to it) that she’s had time to pick up so many different resonances/meanings for people.
Glee could do whole shows on other people – most obviously, perhaps, Elvis, Beatles, The Who, Abba, Michael Jackson but also contemporary people like Beyonce and Gaga – and in many of those cases it would probably be a strictly musical upgrade. But I’m a little shocked myself to realize the extent to which Madonna has had a breadth of cultural impact over a very long period that’s currently unrivaled, so that I don’t in fact see a whole show obsessively about any other artist being able to work the way ‘The Power of Madonna’ did. That said, there could be other musical special event shows that would be fun for specific audiences. E.g., I could imagine Bowie or Morrissey&Marr having some role in an ep. as visiting cool teachers or whatever, and then this being used as jumping off point to explore their magnificent songbooks. I’d love that, and it would be great for the show, but I think that that would be more like the theater geek stuff on the show with Kristin Cronenweth and Idina Menzel guest starring and singing – much of Glee’s audience doesn’t know who they are and the characters on the show don’t – than like the true Madonnarama/hysteria we’ve just seen.
Given that GaGa has effectively taken Madonna’s hitherto essential nowness from under her nose, I suspect that this is the only way forward for her now – absorption into The Canon, into History.
Goddamn I hate Glee. STOP RUINING MY FAVOURITE SONGS, UGH.
Read and weep Lex!
That said, the show remains gimmicky and it hasn’t found a sustainable pace and tone or a consistent approach to its characters yet. At this point, one would have to say its odds of lasting beyond a season or two aren’t good.
⌗44 thanks swan, according to Wikipedia M gave permission in 2009 for the show to use her entire catalogue which backs up punctum’s point @45 .
As much as I’d like to see a Bowie special I think they’d struggle to create a coherent narrative from his lyrics. Maybe Fame, ‘Heroes’ & Let’s Dance would fit the bill – but a bigger problem is that I doubt that he’s on the musical radar of the kids who make up the core audience.
I agree with swanstep when he says’ that I don’t in fact see a whole show obsessively about any other artist being able to work the way ‘The Power of Madonna’ did’.
In the States, isn’t Bowie effectively a two-hit wonder?
@49, punctum. Maybe a few more than that: at least space oddity, ziggy, fame, heroes, young americans, let’s dance are known/recognized by everyone, but it’s true that Bowie never reached the true popular stratosphere in the US that Led Zep or Elton John did.