Fever (19 page)

Disco would be the playground for the more long-running female campaign, even if punks and dancers were as intimate enemies as Mods and Rockers were back in the sixties. That the disco boom had thrown up Australia's Bee Gees as international pop totems only sealed its middle-class, substance-free fate. Before you could blink, Barry Gibb was duetting with Barbra Streisand (always the trend hitcher, never the trend), proving that disco was plain old show-biz as usual.

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All this makes Madonna's triumph as early as 1983 something of a marvel. By grafting a tough, aggressive, independent, ambitious, unashamed feminist rock sensibility onto a diva queen's glory, Madonna married radical ideas with mainstream taste. The result was a new kind of woman in pop: somebody who played to both sides of the show-biz aisle, to both the hipsters and the hoi polloi, the critic and the consumer. Beyond that, Madonna sang for both women and the men who hadn't caught up with feminism, the backlashed and the backlashers.

Early on, Madonna's chief MTV rival was the bouncy Cyndi Lauper, who created a free-for-all image around a cheeky pop style to produce an irrepressible hit, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” that set the feminist debate back at least a decade to some ears and made it sound almost quaint to others. To watch Lauper romp through her video was to be certain that she meant the song only half-seriously, and that overeager analysts were bound to get stuck in their own interpretations. But soon there were op-ed pieces about how the song could be interpreted as demeaning, and whether or not Lauper was the kind of role model future feminists really wanted to adopt.

Lauper had pipes, but she was completely outflanked by Madonna's moxie, marketing savvy, and relentless ambition. The broad humor in Lauper's music was appealing, but in the end it lacked depth, and her career slumped almost immediately into bad movies and forced comebacks. Madonna, on the other hand, seized the brass ring as if she deserved it, and she tackled themes that were more progressive than previous feminists had dared.

Madonna's major theme was power and control—ironically, not so much
female
control, although by virtue of her sex the feminist overtones were hard to ignore. She wanted respect not as a woman, but as a talent, as a star, as a celebrity in bold capital letters. Jon Pareles got it right when he said Madonna's was the triumph of “style
as
substance,” and only peripherally as a feminist figure. “Lucky Star” was her first hit, and it gave her instant caché on the club circuit for sounding black (again, race trumped gender). But the early triumph was 1983's “Borderline,” a relentlessly catchy song about falling too hard—the heart dragging the head down into the muck—that foretold Madonna's greatness.

All of a sudden, there were two camps: those who admired her grit and determination in the face of ridicule, and those saw her rise as analogous to Ronald Reagan's: a triumph of image over ideas. (Her early hit “Holiday” seemed to couch Republican “optimism” in glossy sex appeal.) But the debate boiled down to some very simple concepts: feminists were suddenly embarrassed to find themselves criticizing a glamorous woman who was simply exercising sexual freedom and getting famous for it. Wasn't that what feminism was about—lifestyle choices without regard to patriarchal assumptions? There was a way in which the anti-Madonna league seemed even more small-minded than the anti-disco league, putting down a whole class of (often great) music simply because of its media hype.

Susan Faludi's section on Madonna in
Backlash
revealed this bias. She dwelt on the pop star's preference for frilly underwear as outerwear, the rise of the Victoria's Secret mail-order catalogue, and made a trip to a Victoria's outlet to do her reporting. Faludi was determined to portray Madonna as a force for regression in the faltering feminist revolution, but there was little indication that she'd ever listened to a Madonna record or caught a concert. (And this was supposed to be a cultural critique that restored your faith in feminist thinking.) Her Victoria's Secret expedition gathered the usual quotes from women about why they were shopping for such items: because of their boyfriends or because everybody else was doing it. Faludi positioned these quotes to patronize an entire subculture that wore such accoutrements the same way Madonna wore Catholic crucifixes as jewelry, with ironic flair that worked both as seductive equipment and power ploys. Does Faludi really think her readers saw Madonna's “Boy Toy” belt buckle as anything less than hilarious?

Madonna is a special case—as she'd be the first to tell you—but her larger position as the most famous woman in pop history raises some larger connections. She's been discussed as Marilyn's ultimate redemption: the sex goddess in control of herself and her career, far bigger than any single record, video, or film. The “Material Girl” video pays homage to Monroe's “Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend” sequence from
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes;
but in a paradoxical way, Madonna's self-destructiveness, unlike Marilyn's, fueled her renown—go watch
Truth or Dare
again. Her duets have been mostly offstage, whether it's with consorts like Warren Beatty (inverting the macho stereotype) or the writer-producers she collaborates with, like Patrick Leonard or Stephen Bray. “Justify My Love,” however, inspired Lenny Kravitz toward some of his best work. Her marriage to Sean Penn was a grand Hollywood farce, complete with a paparazzi flip-off from the bride at her own reception, but few thought this ambitious dancer would last with the young, hot-headed, homophobic actor. (He recovered with more style than Madonna, however; answering David Letterman once, Penn simply replied, “We've never met.”)

Madonna claims “Fever” on
Erotica,
the lush 1992 CD that got obscured by her disastrous
Sex
book. Her version updated Peggy Lee, to be sure, but in the context of Madonna's ongoing war within herself between overbearing personality and sex goddess, this track sounded laid-back and outré while her
Sex
book seemed strained. Had it been a single, or a centerpiece of her stage act, the song might have unfolded further and given her more of a reason to sing instead of act. As it was, this “Fever” purred with dance floor smarts, and dramatized how much adult sexual turf women had claimed since Peggy Lee.

Madonna's birth to a daughter, Lourdes, out of wedlock in 1996, made her second marriage, to British director Guy Ritchie, seem anticlimactic—and maybe even more of a career move. With Ritchie she had a son, Rocco, just before their 2000 nuptials. Perhaps it's more illuminating to think of Madonna as the female Elvis: the persistent global phenomenon who's underrated as a no-talent hack; the careerist who shaped styles and trends to her inimitable sensibility; the triumphant live performer who traded in boatloads of star capital groveling for Hollywood respectability.

Much as Madonna seemed to fulfill all the promise of Marilyn, and perhaps even Tina Turner, the overtones to her success were limited. Blacks bought Madonna's dance music, to be sure, but who would be the black Madonna—Janet Jackson? And Madonna's carnal exploits with a black-skinned Jesus (in the “Like a Prayer” video) only won her a huge financial and PR windfall when Pepsi pulled its ads—it wasn't a larger victory for race-mixing or religious freedom. Moreover, Madonna and Tina court their audiences on completely different levels, with Madonna imperious and Turner the very picture of down-home sass. It would be hard to imagine Madonna without Tina, but even harder to imagine them sharing a stage without the younger (and bigger) star folding first.

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By the 1990s, an alternative rock figure, Britain's PJ Harvey, emerged to play shadow games beside Madonna's soap opera. Harvey stormed the indie scene with a series of records that made a lot of goth guys like Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson look merely mannered. A striking waif raised in a right-wing artists' commune, Harvey put on enough dark mascara to resemble the local performance artist who hung out at the morgue looking for song material. Like Madonna, she had a visual flair for mocking the middle class—one of her best head shots featured her impassive gaze from beneath a head of curlers. But she made herself ugly to get at how women suffer. Her early achievements
Rid of Me,
in 1993, and
To Bring You My Love,
in 1995, were about loss;
Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea,
in 2000, was about conquest. Each CD veered between playfulness and morbidity. Coming after years of “naturalistic” rockers who tried to make out as though their onstage personas matched their “regular” personalities, Harvey's approach was refreshing: dolling herself up was just step one of her assault on “femininity” and male vantage.

Tracks like “Long Snake Moan” twisted catchphrases like “get my mojo working” into “get my voodoo working” and gave them a kitschy aftertaste that sounded at once natural and delightfully artificial. Her willingness to plunge into darkness was heroic all by itself, and gave her a certain aesthetic license; she didn't seem preoccupied by “feminism” or “parity” nearly as much as she seemed artistically riven. When her man left her “Dry,” her revenge fantasy sharpened both the literal and the figurative meaning of the term. “Send His Love to Me” was marinated in extravagant self-loathing and mocked the very idea of a song that would call itself “Send His Love to Me.” In numbers like “Monsoon,” a cannonade of self-doubt became liberating. Her musical extremes matched her mood swings: long, slow fade-ins ushered in strange, contorted blues figures, then faded to soft, fearsome quiets. She became a critical favorite without any interest in crossing over, but didn't have any of the trite punk defensiveness about commercialism, either: she happily opened shows for the Pretenders and U2. Where Madonna's ambition subsumed itself, making her popularity triumphant yet strangely one-dimensional, PJ Harvey held out hope for everybody else, brewing up potions of deliverance for anybody, man or woman, who simply craved difference.

Each of these women—Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt, Rosanne Cash, Patti Smith, Deborah Harry, Chrissie Hynde, Madonna, and PJ Harvey—shared a hard-earned humor, a cynicism about men that didn't obscure their affection, and a long-term vision for their role in rock that defied what had come before. These were the same women who watched the closing credits of George Lucas's
American Graffiti
(1973)—which didn't mention a single female character—with disgusted inspiration. Like the female characters in that film, they were all seductive, powerful, uninhibited women who refused to trade in their sex appeal for smarts, and whose writing and larger personas kept you guessing about where rock women were headed. Mary Richards, the local TV news producer, couldn't have kept up with everything these women were putting across, although, like everybody else, she would have been bowled over by their verve, determination, and professional swagger. The truth was, rock had outgrown Richards' sensibility long before she went off the air in 1977. Can anyone imagine Mary Richards keeping up her end of a conversation on men with Chrissie Hynde or Deborah Harry? Or PJ Harvey giving a “gruff but lovable” cliché like Lou Grant the time of day? If none of these women were as big as they deserved to be (Madonna in unstable mixtures of aesthetics to popularity), that might have been because they sought to transcend gender with substantive bite. It would take another twenty years after Moore left her hit show for Ellen De-Generes to come out as gay on the cover of
Time,
and even then her sharply written sitcom got canceled one season later. By that point, the openly gay rocker Melissa Etheridge married a woman who carried David Crosby's baby by artificial insemination, got divorced, and sustained her career more on gay politics than on good songs.

If rock's men were still more powerful, more domineering, more popular than rock's women, at least the most powerful and controlling of men struggled with his views of women openly. The man who disliked being referred to as the Boss found his truest voice in a divorce album released before his own marriage fell apart, and crusaded for the type of male sensibility that became the only rational response to antimale feminism: someone whose jock physique belied an artistic temperament, whose musical style was as retro as his vision of manhood was progressive. Finally, here was a rock man who took on injustice and inequality as he steered his working-class ethic toward worldwide success. As somebody once wrote, if Bruce Springsteen hadn't come along, some rock critic would have had to invent him (and some went ahead and invented him just the same). Springsteen envied Elvis Presley as much as he feared his fate, and turned such regard into themes that transfigured rock manhood yet again.

CHAPTER 6

Walk Like a Man

Bruce Springsteen is Elvis Presley's closest rock relative: the irreducible American rock icon, the giant talent who came out of nowhere (Freehold, New Jersey) to map a whole new world for men in rock. Along with being rock's next great man, the next leap in its evolving ideas about manhood, he's also the only American rock star worthy of comparison to the original Elvis, and the only one to take on gender themes with a writer's zeal. Through his coming-of-age stories, shadowboxing an overbearing father whose class fatalism threatened his intoxicating boyhood ideals, Springsteen staged the soaring energy it takes to grapple with manhood in our era.

As his writing capacity grew, Springsteen self-consciously gathered and summarized all of rock history. And he bet everything he had on his live show, which was literally a way of life even after his third recording,
Born to Run,
hit big in 1975. Onstage, Springsteen became a living metaphor for how rock culture can help make sense of all the bewildering signals surrounding manhood. Part of this process was his evolution as bandleader: his E Street Band was comprised of old chums (guitarist Miami Steve Van Zandt, bassist Gary Tallent, organist Danny Federici) and Broadway pit pros (pianist Roy Bittan and drummer Max Weinberg, who replaced Ernest “Boom” Carter in 1974). Before he became a rock icon, Springsteen's sprawling ambition consumed the singer, songwriter, guitarist, and bandleader in him, to the point where half the excitement of a given show was hearing perfectly competent musicians transcend themselves in order to keep up with their leader. His weaknesses were a prolific muse that led to wordiness, and production, where he regularly leaned on his longtime manager and former
Rolling Stone
editor, Jon Landau.