Madonna's "Beautiful Stranger"

[Woebot]

I know I may appear quite curmudgeonly about Pop, that Pop music thread for instance, amidst the rhetorical panning i was genuinely asking what case could be made for Pop. The truth is 9 times out of 10, okay 99 nine times out of a hundred, it doesn't do it for me. Even when I was kiddywink, ducking off school at the college sanitorium, listening to a constant stream of Radio One in the early eighties, it was Blondie's "Heart of Glass" and Peter Gabriel's "Games Without Frontiers" and The Specials "Ghost Town" that would haunt me with their off-kilter vibrations, emanate internal logics foreign to the school and home, suggest the purple modes of secret societies. You might say those tunes are all Pop, yeah and I say maybe they became Pop but they weren't conceived as Pop and we'd fucking argue all day.

Madonna's "Beautiful Stranger" is, as far as i'm concerned, the absolute best of what Pop has to offer. What an improbable success! Old Madge with her stretchmarks, in (is it?) a movie tie-in. That must put it way down the rank of what qualifies as someone's idea of a perfect pop record. It's not a glistening oiled girl-band with mirco-schaffel track or Ricky Martin. Its some fading star, ok she's amazingly lithe, but we're entering into the appreciation of the older woman with this one. Madonna hadn't done a catchy tune for ages, well at least not one I liked ('Ray of Light' 'Music' all that stuff just makes me flash on aerobics classes)

What makes it the very definition of Pop is how totally it's orphaned from these subterranean rhizomes the connection to which DEFINE the Rockist. She hasn't written the track herself, Madonna buys tunes from songwriters, unlike the things just previous to it she hadn't strapped herself to the underground with people like Mirwais and William Orbit (didn't she try Liam Howlett, Goldie AND The Aphex Twin, all of whom told her to walk). She's just gone 'Dash it all!' I suppose using Mike Myers in the video, was, like using Ali G in 'Music' an anglophile gesture, but its one loaded with irony, cos of course Austin Powers is a send-up.

That the track is inseparable from the video is another reason its a quinessential piece of Pop. Here's a handy rule of thumb: any piece of rock music (in the sense of Rock-ist) which has a video made for it is always a crap piece of music, almost without exception, perhaps 'Windowlicker' but certainly none of the other Aphex Twin tracks. Here's another rule of thumb: if the video is a good as the song whatever the track's background in the murk of cult, it's Pop. Obvious really.

I just adore the tune on this one. Cut off from the body of the rest of Madge's trendy records, as well as isolated from the underground, its also incredibly anachronistic. A pastiche of a kind of Lovin' Spoonful, Mama's and Papa's and The Archies day-glo, flower-sucking, penny-farthing-sporting harmonically over-abundant 3-minute wonder, instead of sounding like a modern version of those sort of tunes it sounds like the sort of track that would emerge form LA's 1980s Psychedelic Pop underground. It sounds like The Bangles or Dream Syndicate or summat. The way its built on, and flows between, what feels like a succession of choruses (ie 100% Sugar, sugar) is excessively dreamy. I've worked the song into a video I've just completed, something Sky have commissioned and everyone in the quite militant office where I've been freelancing is whistling it. It's not catchy, it's not addictive, it's practically the Ebola virus.

And the video. Well it's sidesplitting isn't it? It also has this kind of wonderful gravitas. That grown people like Madonna and Myers can send themselves up, and just about everything about who they are, where they live, what they do, like this, well it isn't just funny it's touchingly heroic. The way Madonna rubs her arse in Myers head, it's just nuts. The way he makes a mobile phone with his hand and mouthes 'call me' as she gyrates, seemingly isolated and ignorant on stage; just perfection. OK I hear you say, here we go, taking Madonna seriously (I should do more of this!) well no actually, this isn't really about Madonna. That's the thrust of my argument, it's not about anyone. It's about meat and hair and teeth. OK something portentous and self-conscious like 'Papa don't Preach' is wide-open to "serious interpretation" but this is just a piece of Pop flotsam. It looks like it was filmed in about half an hour for goodness sakes!

To summarise (!) what allows 'Beautiful Stranger' it to be a perfect Pop record is that it's orphaned. Not only does this allow it to stand on fall on it's own merits (THAT'S the argument for Pop) it also means that any alchemy it accrues it has done so in a purely accidental manner. And if you ask me, answering my own question, that quality of the accidental is the quintessence of why Pop might (even if only occasionally ) be valuable.

DOWNLOAD THE VIDEO HERE.

 

[michael]

I suppose using Mike Myers in the video, was, like using Ali G in 'Music' an anglophile gesture, but its one loaded with irony, cos of course Austin Powers is a send-up.

Um, you mention you think it's a film tie-in. Funnily enough, that film would happen to be one of the Austin Powers flicks.

So there's probably a much more basic reason why Mike Myers is used in the video.

Likewise, this explains why it's anachronistic in its sound... it's supposed to be some vaguely flower power thing.

 

[Chef Napalm]

perhaps 'Windowlicker' but certainly none of the other Aphex Twin tracks.

Arguing for arguments' sake perhaps, but surely "Come To Daddy" is just as good. If anything, the video makes the track sound more menacing than it already does.

 

[gumdrops]

heart of glass is pure pop!

 

[hint]

What makes it the very definition of Pop is how totally it's orphaned from these subterranean rhizomes the connection to which DEFINE the Rockist. She hasn't written the track herself, Madonna buys tunes from songwriters, unlike the things just previous to it she hadn't strapped herself to the underground with people like Mirwais and William Orbit (didn't she try Liam Howlett, Goldie AND The Aphex Twin, all of whom told her to walk). She's just gone 'Dash it all!'

Beautiful Stranger is written and produced by Madonna and William Orbit

 

[Tim F]

I'm not sure if I agree with all the distinctions you're drawing Matt.

Like most pop songs "Beautiful Stranger" is fairly susceptible to rockist rehabilitation on the following grounds:

- it revives the sixties when (so the old story goes) pop was good, meant something etc.
- it was co-written/produced by William Orbit, a serious artist (arguably)
- whereas most pop singles are (allegedly) going for lowest common denominator appeal, "Beautiful Stranger" is clever, knowing, designed for listeners with a decent working knowledge of music history etc.
- I actually suspect Madonna did write the lyrics - there's a certain awkwardness to them which is characteristic of her work from Ray Of Light onwards (thankfully here the effect is quite charming).

Of course none of these points get to the heart of why "Beautiful Stranger" is actually any good, or even distinguish it particularly from, I dunno, Ocean Colour Scene or something...

My point is that you can make an argument along the lines of the above for practically any pop song if you strain hard enough - this is actually a point Simon raised (from the other side of the fence) in the pop thread, ie. that rockism can explain good music of any type if it tries hard enough. Where I disagree with Simon is that I think it either doesn't explain it very well (see the points above) or it has to betray a number of its own principles - if you have to stretch rockism to such a tenuously fine thread in order to capture what is good about a particular song (and in doing so ignore countless other tenants of rockism) then it seems like a waste of time in the first place.

And this gets back to the hinge-point of your position: "You might say those tunes are all Pop, yeah and I say maybe they became Pop but they weren't conceived as Pop and we'd fucking argue all day."

The problem with this binary ("actual pop" vs "becoming pop") is that there's no such thing as "actual pop". Pop is always a tendency within music rather than an actually definable property. This is because pop has no central, timeless defining components beyond catchiness and populism (you could add songfulness I guess, but it's a sort of base-level songfulness). And since "catchiness" and "populism" themselves are historically mutable terms, what you're left with is a category that exists almost entirely on the basis of perceived consensus alone - something is "pop" because we say it is.

This means that there is no music that doesn't inhabit the term "pop" somewhat ambivalently - the enjoyment of most pop songs always rests on how it both satisfies the requirements of being pop music and <i>simultaneously</i> strikes us as being something else, satisfying some other, different and often quite odd/unusual impulse(s). This is true of both "Wannabe" and "O Superman" - the proportions of popness to oddness may be different but it is still the relationship b/w the two that is what makes both unlikely and enjoyable propositions (and anyway "Wannabe" is pretty odd!). This is a big part of why it is so satisfying to see stuff like "O Superman" or "Games Without Frontiers" or "Rewind" enter the charts: not because they're not "pop songs" (they are), nor because they're not conceived as pop ("Rewind" certainly was), but because the friction between pop and oddness is heightened.

Even when people talk about a pop song in a way that seems to celebrate its genericism (e.g. Jamelia's "Superstar") I tend to find that the genericism they're talking about is not <i>on the side of pop</i>; rather it's a generic take on a certain style that happens to end up in the charts a lot - be it rock, R&B, hip hop, 2-step etc. etc.

So what's happening here is a situation where the potential "oddness" of a piece of music (and the style of music it belongs to) has been eroded by the ubiquity of that style, rather than by the fact that it is a "pop song" per se. To recapture that oddness, a given piece of music in such a situation does not need to rebel against the dictates of pop (though obviously producing e.g. an R&B song that is blatantly uncatchy and unappealing is one way to do this - although that doesn't necessarily stop it from entering the charts anyway!) but to position itself against the expectations of its own style. So e.g. when I think of most of the the really amazing R&B tracks from the last few years ("Crazy In Love", "Never Leave You", Teedra Moses's "Complex Simplicity", Kiley Dean's "Keep It Moving", "1 Thing"), their distinctiveness does not come from confounding <i>pop's</i> expectations, but rather confounding <i>R&B's</i> expectations - and often that very strategic approach is precisely what causes their chart success!

Conversely, in the great generic R&B of the last few years (to some extent "Superstar" but for me a more appealing example would be Christina Milian's "Whatever You Want"), my enjoyment is generated by the manner in which the music accords with and builds upon the store of stylistic tricks and approaches which <i>R&B</i> has developed rather than from some magical (and non-existent) "pure pop" quality - this song is neither more nor less "pop" than the decidedly more unusual "Never Leave You".

All of this stuff feeds into how we might look at the way that "Beautiful Stranger" works - you're right that it's "orphaned" insofar as it doesn't necessarily belong to any particular genre <i>apart from</i> this nebulous concept of pop. But orphanhood (ie. ungrounded polystylistic eclecticism) and pop are not, of course, inherently linked, or Goldie's "Mother" would also be pop. What Madonna and Goldie are both doing here is forging links between to styles; the difference perhaps is that Goldie wants you to see the joins, the faultlines between jungle and his vision of orchestral expressionism (as if the two are to some extent mutually exclusive), whereas Madonna's performing an act of conflation: for her purposes 60s psychedelia and late 90s dance-pop are the <i>same thing</i>. You could say that this sort of conflating move is a "pop" trick but it's not solely an "orphaned chart pop" trick - ie. Shut Up & Dance's "The Green Man" uses the same stylistic sources as Goldie's "Mother" (breakbeats, classical strings) but uses the same conflationary action as "Beautiful Stranger" does (classical string riffs <i>are</i> hardcore riffs) - yet unlike Madonna, SUAD were firmly rooted in a particular style (hardcore techno). On the other hand, SUAD are perhaps being <i>more pop</i> than Madonna here because while Madonna is at least showing some respect toward the whole concept of 60's psychedelia, SUAD are quite happy to strip their sampled classical strings of any meaning except their brute physical catchiness.


"The Green Man" is better than "Beautiful Stranger" which is better than "Mother" - this much is clear. It's less clear cut how and to what extent each of these is "pop", and what relationship this has to their quality. Despite nominally being a "popist", I tend not to think about music in these terms anyway - as the above perhaps indicates, the musical strategies that each employ are not necessarily owned by either pop or non-pop, and you can evaluate the success of each without ever actually using the word "pop".

 

[stelfox]

That the track is inseparable from the video is another reason its a quinessential piece of Pop. Here's a handy rule of thumb: any piece of rock music (in the sense of Rock-ist) which has a video made for it is always a crap piece of music, almost without exception, perhaps 'Windowlicker' but certainly none of the other Aphex Twin tracks. Here's another rule of thumb: if the video is a good as the song whatever the track's background in the murk of cult, it's Pop. Obvious really.[/url]

no, just look at get ur freak on. this period of hyperrhythmic, late-90s golden age r&B/hip hop productions is smack-dab in the middle of the "rock" canon, if you're defining rock as music endorsed by mainstream critical opinion, sanctioned by the tastemakers that be. timbaland is viewed as auteur by everyone from the wire to mojo yet is still emphatically pop. the hype williams vids from this period were seminal - a real interface of the auditory and the visual. video and music are virtually inseparable, because they fit like a savile row suit. however, look at each as a separate text and both stand up equally strongly. in the case of this one track (and a lot of others), the relationship between video and music is really interleaved and symbiotic and a long, long way from the idea of video being little more than a flashy commercial for a lacklustre song.

 

[Woebot]

Thankd to everyone for straightening me out on the (key!) points. It is by William Orbit etc (laughs)

Heart of Glass

Well, I may be a voice of one, but I'll always see Blondie as a "Rock" group. The belonging to a 'scene' (Talking Heads, The Ramones, Heartbreakers, Television etc etc), the speficic geopraphical location (CGBGs, Manahatten), the scenius-style dalliance with Rap, krikey even Lester Bangs wrote a book about her/them (though I think he prolly argued they were as an icy construct as was possible in the realm of 'Rock')

My point is that you can make an argument along the lines of the above for practically any pop song if you strain hard enough - this is actually a point Simon raised (from the other side of the fence) in the pop thread, ie. that rockism can explain good music of any type if it tries hard enough. Where I disagree with Simon is that I think it either doesn't explain it very well (see the points above) or it has to betray a number of its own principles - if you have to stretch rockism to such a tenuously fine thread in order to capture what is good about a particular song (and in doing so ignore countless other tenants of rockism) then it seems like a waste of time in the first place.

Hmm. I think the point I'm (actually quite graciously!) making here is that to talk about things as "Rock" isnt always illuminating. I wouldnt dream of trying to draw up a Rockist support of Madonna, except that is if I was determined to make her sound worthless and beneath contempt (ha ha ha ha), which in most cases WOULD be an appropriate angle.......

The problem with this binary ("actual pop" vs "becoming pop") is that there's no such thing as "actual pop". Pop is always a tendency within music rather than an actually definable property. This is because pop has no central, timeless defining components beyond catchiness and populism (you could add songfulness I guess, but it's a sort of base-level songfulness). And since "catchiness" and "populism" themselves are historically mutable terms, what you're left with is a category that exists almost entirely on the basis of perceived consensus alone - something is "pop" because we say it is.

Its good to hear you stating so clearly the central tenets of "Pop", "catchiness" and "populism" thats very lucid. That there are "no central, timeless defining components" is as far as i'm concerned what defines it. On the other hand its pretty clear to me that the "opposition" to that "Neo-Rockism" if you like is thus: http://www.dissensus.com/showpost.php?p=21117&postcount=1

That the opposing schema isnt defined by inverse qualities "non-catchiness" and "unpopularity", we can get our heads round that can't we? There's no sleight of hand there.

This means that there is no music that doesn't inhabit the term "pop" somewhat ambivalently - the enjoyment of most pop songs always rests on how it both satisfies the requirements of being pop music and simultaneously strikes us as being something else, satisfying some other, different and often quite odd/unusual impulse(s).

I'd disagree with you there! Thats the Rockist in you Tim, looking for the bulwarks of culture/thought behind the purely disposable. Pop is white light and white heat isnt it?

But orphanhood (ie. ungrounded polystylistic eclecticism) and pop are not, of course, inherently linked,

Of course. Though I'd use that connection to actually define what it is that is most quintessentially "Pop-like" about "Pop music".

 

[Tim F]

Matt I should begin by noting that I thought your original post was well-written <i>and</i> gracious - if I seem to charge into these things quite furiously it's only because the whole topic interests me.

"Its good to hear you stating so clearly the central tenets of "Pop","catchiness" and "populism" thats very lucid. That there are "no central, timeless defining components" is as far as i'm concerned what defines it.
On the other hand its pretty clear to me that the "opposition" to that "Neo-Rockism" if you like is thus...

That the opposing schema isnt defined by inverse qualities "non-catchiness" and "unpopularity", we can get our heads round that can't we? There's no sleight of hand there."

I'd agree that "neo-rockism" isn't simply valorising the unpopular etc. Having said that, one of the problems with setting up two counter-reguating systems of neo-rockism ("prioritising Geography, Tradition, Community and notions of Integrity.") and popism (prioritising...?) is that this split tends to emphasise the perceived radical differences between two pieces of music at the expense of recognising similarities; but the very fact that pop and neo-rockism are not directly oppositional also means that they are far from being mutually exclusive. My point about explaining "Beautiful Stranger" in terms of rock - and, implicitly, "The Green Man" in terms of pop - is that music always spills over these artificial borders. What we should be looking at is the way the flooding actually works for us - does it excite us? Are we swept
away by it?

This is one of the reasons why I don't really agree with the often-stated claim (by anti-rockists frequently) that anti-rockism is about "judging a style on its own terms" - not because I think we can judge all music in terms of rock or some other norm, but because I think the greatest part of the value of a piece of music is lies in how it distinguishes itself <i>from</i> or <i>within</i> style. Or maybe a better way of putting that is not that this is <i>why</i> the music is valuable, but rather that this is how we perceive and conceive of its value. If a listener is not being lazy about how they think about music, the search for the “terms” which explain it adequately should always be a bit of a scramble…

"I'd disagree with you there! Thats the Rockist in you Tim, looking for the bulwarks of culture/thought behind the purely disposable. Pop is white light and white heat isnt it?"

What is it about your/our/my reaction to pop that makes you think it is a <I>purely disposable</I> "white light/white heat" experience? My take is that there's always "bulwarks of culture/thought" behind any experience, regardless of its intensity. I should note that I’m not automatically ascribing to the differential quality of music some revolutionary/rebellious capacity. The "something other" I'm referring to here doesn't have to be particularly radical! It just has to be something that makes us remember the song <i>beyond</i> its qualities of catchiness/populism - some quality of differential novelty. It's not a grand and noble process really - it's the way consumerism works. If this weren't the case then I don't think the sound of pop would change so readily.

The answer-back to this might be "but doesn't the constantly morphing nature of consumerism = disposability?" I don’t think it does, not in the narrow sense of disposable: the disposable commodity is that which not only <i>can</i> be thrown away, but which we also feel no qualms about throwing away - it has no personal value to us beyond a very straightforward use value. Are there any actually disposable products which excite the popular imagination? Not really, because that would contradict their purpose. We're in the realm of nappies, contact lenses, food wrappers and razors here...

Pop music is also disposable in the sense that capitalism is a disposable culture: we create desire for products in order to justify creating more products in order to generate profit, rather than creating products to fulfill once and for all a pre-existing need. BUT this is the way all music works: the desire is created by the piece of music appearing to achieve something distinct and individual - ie. it is not disposable in the narrow sense of the above, where one disposable nappy is essentially the same as another. Instead the exact opposite is the case: for the pop music listener, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera are no more commensurate or equivalent than Kano and D Double E, and the same pop song sung by both of them would be considered differently. The closest equivalent to actually disposable music is probably DJ loop minimal techno - where the music is conceived of and received as a simple building block in a DJ set, lacking its own distinct personality or "individuality". And even that doesn't fit the metaphor really, because in context it becomes irreplaceable (Jeff Mills or whoever might make a totally distinctive, one-in-a-million set out of singularly indistinct rhythm loops).

The third, simple and silly definition of "disposable pop" is the idea that "they" (pop consumers) simply go out and buy any catchy tune that is marketed to them and will automatically forget about them as soon as the marketing impetus is gone (the "who remembers NKOTB now???" argument). This rests on the "will it stand the test of time" consideration which neo-rockism, if it is to have any credibility whatsoever, would have to reject: after all the "ardkore continuum" is based on a similar pattern, with entire styles (ardkore, jungle, techstep, speed garage, 2-step, grime) being enthusiastically embraced and then rejected according to how the music fits into a certain social and cultural matrix.

"Of course. Though I'd use that connection to actually define what it is that is most quintessentially "Pop-like" about "Pop music"."

I tend to see orphan-pop as being a vision of pop, certainly, and one which people like Madonna basically have no option but to push (Madonna is at the stage now where no style she chose to adopt would appear “natural”, “organic” etc.) but not necessarily pop at its most quintessentially “Pop-like”. But then I may have a very different working definition of pop than you! (for myself I tend to think of “pop” as the stuff which I listen to which is catchy, which I could imagine other people finding catchy, and which I have an emotional connection with. I.e. a great deal of stuff from all over the place including the “underground”).

As a side note, one thing that interests me is how different styles of music exhibit weird mixtures of orphanhood and belonging. Drill & Bass and breakcore are good examples of this: in some ways cut off from the primal generative locus of jungle, music from these sub-genres nonetheless "belong" to the community of that sub-genre, and increasingly the music produced appears more internally referential than externally referential - ie. it's picking up on threads already being spun within the scene rather than directly mutating "proper" jungle for its purposes.

What we can see from this is that styles and more general attributes (such as orphanhood) don't intrinsically "belong" together - the construction of a musical identity is always a process of articulation, a gathering together
of different components into a structure which, if it is successful enough, will always have the appearance of inevitability... Every successful articulation of “pop” using certain elements will appear to reveal an (quint)essential truth about pop…

 

[hint]

I tend to see orphan-pop as being a vision of pop, certainly, and one which people like Madonna basically have no option but to push (Madonna is at the stage now where no style she chose to adopt would appear “natural”, “organic” etc.) but not necessarily pop at its most quintessentially “Pop-like”. But then I may have a very different working definition of pop than you!

The thing which I found most striking when watching this video was how "natural" it seemed. How many other artists (particularly new artists) could you imagine pulling something like this off?

Here we have Madonna, decked out in clothes that essentially look like they've come straight off the rails at Miss Selfridge, dancing in front of a camera on her own... yet it doesn't look awkward... doesn't look rubbish! I may be wrong, but there doesn't appear to be any obvious reliance on choreography - at least not to the same extent as Usher's performances, for example.

It demonstrates what I would define as pop - catchy tune + unique personality +...(God, I'm going to have to say "X Factor", aren't I).

In my opinion, that footage of her doing Holiday on The Tube walks all over this particular clip in terms of "great pop"... but still there's a gaping chasm between Beautiful Stranger and something like Since You've Been Gone when it comes to textbook pop thrills (even though I certainly prefer the latter as a song).

 

[henrymiller]

i own this record.

 

[Rachel Verinder]

"She Comes In Colors" by Love to thread.

"Heart Of Glass" was produced virtually at bayonet point by Mike Chapman. Blondie were no more a "rock" group than the Sweet (and in my happy little autistic glam/skronk world that is A Good Thing).

 

[version]

I only recently learned this tune was Madonna. I thought it was just some random 90s band when I heard it in the film.

 

[Leo]

and some vintage Tim F insights...