Sunday, July 20, 2014
I want to be a Material Girl
My first 50s retro dressing fantasy was second-hand. It was Madonna doing Material Girl, imitating Marilyn doing Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend. By then she'd done Like A Virgin, which helped build my fairytale princess and bride fantasies.
But to this day... I want this dress.
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I think this track does for me what Material Girl does for you; it conjures up an ambience and some kind of path. When I first heard it I didn’t know that the lyrics and the dancing were picking up on a branch of New Yorkish gay/drag queen subculture, only realized that a few years later, but the music and the text really captures something much wider than that. The song had me hooked as soon as I heard it. It’s a beautifully crafted and produced track (the keyboards and bass have none of the dated thumpiness of may late-eighties dance tracks, and there's no overflow of booming gated drums) effortless vocals too, and the long remix (the second link here) on that twelve-incher (which I still have a copy of in good condition) is one of the best dance remixes I’ve ever heard. Epic, hugely evocative, well paced and emotionally capturing, all of those…
ReplyDeleteClearly Madonna borrowed some elements of it for her Vogue single – the basslines and beat are fairly similar, especially to those on the remix – but Deep in Vogue is, in my opinion, the much stronger piece. It has…a vibe of real danger, passion and personal peril that “Vogue” is lacking. Madonna is singing of a dreamland state that you can jump in and out of on your own, Deep in Vogue is about a journey (“it wasn’t easy, no one two three/Took a long time to learn to feel free”) into the open, into the city, into a personal future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG44JJ6Ihyo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4AV9-xJ6lQ
It's certainly more involved in the origins (although Malcolm McLaren not so much) and very interesting.
DeleteMadonna's always been about playing with her image, since her pre-fame punky-New-Wave days seen in the really early work like Holiday. (Also a cute look... fingerless gloves, mmm!)
The production and sound are brilliant too, they really haven't aged at all (the record sounds a bit silkier, smoother than the slightly angular sound on Youtube, more enveloping all through). I love that languid saxophone solo before the repeat on the long version, it has a peculiarly New York elegance to it.
DeleteAnd yes, fingerless gloves, dark leather skirts, dark tank tops, flurry hair that halfway goth look Madonna had early on, it really looks fresh and appealing even now.