Maybe the most vexing thing about the near unanimous praise for Madonna’s fifteenth studio album, Confessions II, is that what people (especially critics) seem to most enjoy about it is the fact that it marks arguably “the first time” Madonna has capitulated so freely to “looking back.” Oh sure, she’s been game enough to engage with “throwbacks” when it comes to her various “personae” over the years (one notable instance being at the 1999 MTV VMAs, during which she “oversaw” a group of drag queens emulate her most iconic looks before she presented Paul McCartney to the audience so that they, in turn, could present the final award for Video of the Year together). But when it comes to music itself—both sonically and lyrically—Madonna has always been decidedly present- and/or future-facing.
Indeed, this was the quality she was so often praised for…at least during the twentieth century part of her career. And even a small part of the twenty-first. Namely, when Music was released in the first year of that century, 2000. Then, as American Life came along in 2003, the real backlash began. One that was different and more distinct than what happened to her in the 1992-1993 period, when she was deemed by the media at large to have taken her “sexual shtick” too far. No, with American Life, there was something else at play entirely.
Certainly, there was the usual rhetoric about how she was “too old” (at forty-four/forty-five) to be doing anything, let alone continuing to “play pop star,” but there was something else going on as well. A sudden and unprecedented contempt for Madonna’s “audacity” in continuing to experiment with and explore varying musical styles and sounds. Worse still, her gall in still having “things to say.” Both about her personal life—in its present state—and politics. Some might insist up and down that the backlash during this album cycle was a combination of Madonna speaking on things she “shouldn’t” (the Bush administration and the Iraq War) and the music genuinely being “not good.” But the real ones know American Life is in Madonna’s top eight best albums (along with Like A Prayer, Erotica, Ray of Light, Confessions on a Dance Floor, Rebel Heart, Madame X and, now, Confessions II). However, the truth is that the public expects musicians of all genres (but especially pop stars) to start “looking back” once they reach a certain “point” (read: age). Madonna, up until now, patently refused to do that. In truth, founded her entire career on the concept of “forward motion.” “Running, rushing” (to quote some words from “Drowned World/Substitute for Love”) as fast as she could into the future. In no small part to avoid the pain of the past, filled as it was with loss for her (whether it was her mother or some of her closest friends).
Yet, as many have noted of Confessions II, she seems more willing than ever to confront the past head-on, with one of Madonna’s (perhaps least revered) biographers, Lucy O’Brien, weighing in on the matter with an article for The Guardian titled, “Madonna was always anti-nostalgia. But looking back on Confessions II has revitalized her music.” Almost as if to say nothing on the last four albums (for the new theory is that she started to go “to shit” when she made a 360 deal with Live Nation circa 2007, the year before Hard Candy would be released) was worth a damn. As if songs like “Give It 2 Me,” “Love Spent,” pretty much everything on Rebel Heart, “Medellín” and “Crave” weren’t also career highlights in her catalogue. So it is that O’Brien remarks, “With the newly released Confessions II, Madonna finally stopped chasing trends and allowed herself to do what she had long resisted: reflecting on her past, navigating the dance music that is in her DNA and finding creative freedom in looking back.”
Another review from Miscelana also echoes, “Madonna has finally decided to do something she avoided for most of her career: she has chosen to look back.” The “wow” factor of this continues to be overstated in still another article for Vulture titled, “Madonna Finally Remembered She’s Madonna,” in which it is said, “It’s a treat for a pop star who so furtively avoids circling home base to slide back to the lower Manhattan arts playgrounds that boosted her music and film careers” and that the new album “puncture[s] her façade of timeless, unflappable cool.” First of all, Madonna isn’t that much of a stranger to looking back. She began doing so, in that subtle kind of way, at the abovementioned 1999 VMAs. And secondly, she’s constantly referencing her New York era (not least of which was by writing a song called “I Love New York”), almost to the point where it’s like a kind of Tourette’s.
In 2000, Madonna’s ability to “look back” came in the form of a video backdrop that played during her live performances of “Music” (e.g., at the MTV EMAs or Brixton Academy, and then, during her 2001 Drowned World Tour). A montage of all the women she had been over the years that secured one of her many nicknames: the queen of reinvention. When asked what it made her feel when she looked at that montage video, Madonna said “tired.” So yes, 1) even “back then,” she was addressing the passage of time and 2) highlighting the fact that maybe the secret to her “Energizer bunny” nature is that, by not looking back so often, she can keep going without the weight of all she’s done suddenly making her feel quite tired indeed. For it is daunting and exhausting to ruminate on all that work. All those iterations.
Then, in 2004, she made a “concession” to a “greatest hits” tour that wasn’t officially billed as such, though everyone seemed to know Madonna felt obliged to pepper in the hits if she wanted anyone to also listen to her American Life fare. Even going so far as to repurpose that word she previously described as “demeaning” (not to mention reductive) when used in reference to her: reinvention. Nonetheless, she called it The Re-Invention Tour, with sixteen of the twenty-four songs played being “hits” that came before 2003 (namely, “Vogue,” “Frozen,” “Express Yourself,” “Burning Up,” “Material Girl,” “Hanky Panky” [a real curveball in the setlist], “Deeper and Deeper,” “Die Another Day,” “Bedtime Story” [as a video interlude], “Don’t Tell Me,” “Like a Prayer” [this is arguably when it started to become a staple of her live performances], “Into the Groove,” “Papa Don’t Preach,” “Crazy For You,” “Music” and “Holiday”).
The “looking back” continued in 2005, with Confessions on a Dance Floor itself, which marked the first time Madonna talked of a “return to the dance floor” as if she ever really left it. Indeed, all of her studio albums, except Bedtime Stories and American Life, are rooted in dance music. Yet the marketing “gimmick” behind COADF was that it was Madonna returning to her club roots. One such club, of course, being Danceteria. The place that launched her record deal after Mark Kamins played “Everybody” for the crowd. And in the spirit of that song’s significance to her life, Stuart Price remixed it for the purpose of being played during Madonna’s ‘05 promo tours for the album (see: her performance at KOKO or at G-A-Y). Framing her past within her present was, to be sure, very much a part of the first Confessions album.
But even on subsequent records, including Rebel Heart and Madame X, Madonna was lyrically reflective. Take, for example, “Veni Vedi Vici” and “Rebel Heart” from the former or “Extreme Occident” from the latter, during which she sings, “I came from the Midwest/Then I went to the far East [to her, that means New York]/I tried to discover/My own identity.” She then adds, “Life is a circle.” Something she also noted on 2003’s “Easy Ride” with the lyrics, “I go round and round just like a circle/I can see a clearer picture/When I touch the ground I come full circle.”
As she also has once again on Confessions II. Yet because her “sense of nostalgia” is apparently more noticeable on this album, there is a sudden rush to praise her for “admitting” to something like sentimentality or frailty. In short, what it boils down to for the people splooging over the notion that she’s “finally” being “forced” to reflect on her past because of her age, ergo her acknowledgement of mortality (which recently made itself quite known via her brush with death in 2023 due to a bacterial infection), can perhaps be found in a line like the one from another review in The Washington Post titled “We Are All Madonna Now”: “Her inability to fully control her world is humanizing.” For a public that has spent decades dehumanizing her, it is, thus, somewhat surprising to learn that, all along, they only wanted the last god in the “pop music pantheon” to descend slightly from her cloud and get down to the same level as the normals.
And so, perhaps what Madonna decided to do with this record, one that evidently so tickles those who have been wanting her to openly admit she’s “old” by looking back, is in keeping with a certain Friedrich Nietzsche quote: “When the exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more delicate fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not merely kindness of heart—it is simply his duty…”
Genna Rivieccio
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