Billboard: Madonna's 'Rebel Heart' Blends Inventive Beats and Maximalist Pop
Oppositions are the animating tension of Rebel Heart: Biting breakup songs like "Heartbreak City" rub up against some of the most absurdly lubricious sex songs of her absurdly lubricious career, like the Kanye West-co-produced "Holy Water," where she compares her bodily fluids to the song's title, then proclaims, "Yeezus loves my pussy best." Declarations of invincibility like "Unapologetic Bitch" are undone by laments over the price of fame and the way that even hearts of steel can break. Her decades-long love affair with house continues alongside her decades-long love affair with singer-songwriter confessions. Religious devotion and earthly love are cross-wired in the Avicii-helmed power ballad "Messiah." And songs with spare, inventive beats battle for dominance against expertly realized maximalist pop.
There's one other tension of note: Her determination to outgrow the past and shed her skin (as she puts it on the title track) tangles with her own back catalog. Three different songs refer to old hits, with "Veni Vidi Vici" stringing together titles like a bad Oscar medley: "I opened up my heart, I learned the power of goodbye/I saw a ray of light, music saved my life." If anyone is entitled to honor herself with her own drag show, it's her. Still, these backward glances are odd, and perhaps tip the hand that Madonna albums are now launching pads for Madonna tours, where the old songs can come out and play (indeed, on March 2, she announced a 35-city global run).
Or maybe not. Madonna has never gotten the credit she deserves as a musician, or as an album artist. Her essential interests are unchanging -- dancefloor ecstasy, European balladry, 1960s pop classicism -- but her expression of them finds new articulations. Rebel Heart has 14 producers working in seven different teams and still it sounds exactly like a Madonna album. That includes oddball standouts like "Body Shop," courtesy of beatmakers DJ Dahi (Drake, Kendrick Lamar) and Blood Diamonds (Grimes), which is propelled by a spare, sitar-like guitar figure.
There are times you hope for a little more dumb fun -- enter Diplo, who turns up on five tracks with his air horn and Caribbean beats and would be welcome on more -- and there's at least one moody ballad too many. But then an aqueous bassline bubbles up and a surge of trance-y pulses sweeps you along to Madonnaland, where introspection and abandon engage in erotic acts of self-actualization. After 32 years, it's still a great place to be.
This story will appear in the March 14 issue of Billboard.
The Times: flawed but vibrant album: still in the game, still pushing forward
Halfway through Rebel Heart, her 13th album, comes Illuminati, a robot-voiced listing of all the people — or shape-shifting lizards, according to David Icke — who are said to belong to this sinister order. Jay-Z, Beyoncé, even that poor lost man-child Justin Bieber get a mention in a catchy disco tune that pokes fun at conspiracy theorists’ fondness for mythologising famous people.
Those same theorists are now suggesting that the Illuminati took revenge on Madge by subjecting her to a terrible punishment at the Brits: tying her cape on too tight.
In fact, Madonna’s accident showed her to be not only human after all, but also possessed of a strength of character that has seen her through four decades of outrageous fortune. She knew how to fly backwards without breaking her neck, she bounced up in seconds and got on with the show and, rather than sack her mortified dancers, she took them out for dinner.
All this won public approval, which she needed badly after melodramatically describing the leak of Rebel Heart in December as “artistic rape and terrorism”. Madonna’s fall became the story of the Brits, but it was her reaction to it that casts her album in such a benign glow.
It’s not perfect. Like so many recent albums by major pop stars, it’s too long. Why do we need a standard and a deluxe edition? Would an author offer an extended version of their new novel for a few quid more? It takes away from the idea of an album as a complete work.
Madonna has drafted in all manner of modish producers, including Kanye West, resulting in a modern pop equivalent of a bring-and-buy sale. And the lyrical rudeness can be less sexy, more downright gynaecological. When she sings “kiss it better, make it wetter” onHoly Water, you don’t know where to look. Yet at her best Madonna remains head and shoulders above everyone else in pop.
There’s a price to pay for reinventing yourself as a postmodern figure of worldwide fame and controversy and Madonna weighs it up onJoan of Arc, a ballad that is as smart as it is heartfelt. “Each time they take a photograph I lose a part I can’t get back,” she sings. “Each time they write a hateful word, dragging my soul into the dirt, I want to die.”
The agonies of fame and fortune is not a subject we non-rich, non-famous people traditionally have much sympathy for, but Madonna throws a light on to her reality by being honest and it draws the listener towards her.
Heartbreak City is another cri de coeur, a piano ballad on which she tries to make sense of the end of a relationship. There’s more than a tinge of bitterness to the words about an ex-boyfriend (or husband? Watch out, Guy Ritchie) who hitched a ride on Madonna’s coat-tails.
“You got just what you came for, a bit of fame and fortune, and now I’m no longer needed,” she sings, adding: “And then you had the nerve to say that we could still be friends.” It’s reassuring to know the most disingenuous pay-off in the history of relationships is used not just on teenagers getting chucked for the first time, but on multimillionaire queens of pop too.
The hi-octane pop songs here recall the hook-laden glories of Madonna’s Eighties heyday. Living For Love and Devil Pray have tinges of the irreligious gospel that made her 1988 classic Like a Prayer so irresistible, and the aforementioned Illuminati recalls Vogue, her 1990 paean to posing in nightclubs, while also serving as a reminder that a fun, throwaway tune can be clever too.
Things fall apart on Iconic, on which Madonna comes across less like a cultural icon and more like a motivational speaker reading out platitudes of empowerment, but for the most part the album jumps happily between revelation and disco escapism.
Frustratingly, some of the best songs are on the deluxe edition only. Madonna has a Julius Caesar moment on Veni Vidi Vici, giving us a quick run-through of her myriad achievements before deflating her own pomposity by adding, “I exposed my naked arse and I did it with a smile”.
The (deluxe) album ends with the title track, a combination of country rock and electronic pop. “I’ve spent time as a narcissist . . . trying to be provocative,” sings Madonna before telling herself, “Never look back. It’s a waste of time.” It sums up the message of this flawed but vibrant album: still in the game, still pushing forward, now in a position to reflect on all that has happened with sagacity. (Out now, Interscope)