Saturday, September 14, 2013
MADONNA LOUISE CICCONE ( born
August 16, 1958) is an American singer-songwriter, actress, author, director,
entrepreneur and philanthropist. Born in Bay City, Michigan, she moved to
New York City in 1977 to pursue a career in modern dance and performed in the
music groups Breakfast Club and Emmy. In 1982, Madonna signed
with Sire Records (an affiliate of Warner Bros. Records) and
released herself-titled debut album the following year. She has since
released a series of successful albums, including the Grammy Award winners Ray
of Light (1998) and Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005).
Many of her songs peaked atop record charts, including "Like a Virgin",
"Into the Groove", "Papa Don't Preach", "Like a Prayer",
"Vogue", "Frozen", "Music", "Hung Up",
and "4 Minutes".
Madonna is known for continuously reinventing both her music and
image, and for retaining a standard of autonomy within the recording industry.
She attained immense popularity by pushing the boundaries of lyrical content in
mainstream popular music and imagery in her music videos, which became a
fixture on MTV. Critics have praised her diverse musical productions which
have also been known to induce controversy.
Madonna received generally positive reviews for her role in Desperately
Seeking Susan (1985), though her later film appearances received mixed
commentary. She received critical acclaim and a Golden Globe Award for Best
Actress in Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for Evita (1996),
but has received harsh feedback for other performances. She has been recognized
as an acclaimed businesswoman, involving herself in fashion design, writing
children's books, and film directing and producing. In 1992, she founded
entertainment company Maverick as a joint venture with Time
Warner, which also included the label Maverick Records. In 2007, she
signed a US $120 million record, touring and merchandising 360° deal with Live
Nation, resulting in her leaving Warner Bros., her label since 1982.
Madonna's music has been the subject of much analysis and scrutiny
by critics. Robert M. Grant, author of Contemporary Strategy
Analysis (2005), commented that what has brought Madonna success is
"certainly not outstanding natural talent. As a vocalist, musician,
dancer, songwriter, or actress, Madonna's talents seem modest." He
asserts Madonna's success is in relying on the talents of others, and that her
personal relationships have served as cornerstones to the numerous reinventions
in the longevity of her career.
Madonna's approach was far from the music industry wisdom of
"Find a winning formula and stick to it." Her musical career has been
a continuous experimentation with new musical ideas and new images and a
constant quest for new heights of fame and acclaim. Grant concluded that
"having established herself as the queen of popular music, Madonna did not
stop there, but continued re-inventing."Musicologist Susan McClary wrote
that "Madonna's art itself repeatedly deconstructs the traditional notion
of the unified subject with finite ego boundaries. Her pieces explore, varios
ways of constituting identities that refuse stability, that remain fluid, that
resist definition."
Mark Bego, author of Madonna: Blonde Ambition, called
her "the perfect vocalist for lighter-than-air songs", despite not
being a "heavyweight talent." Madonna has always been
self-conscious about her voice, especially in comparison to her vocal idols
such asElla Fitzgerald, Prince and Chaka Khan. According to
Freya Jarman-Ivens, Madonna's talent for developing
"incredible" hooks for her songs allows the lyrics to
capture the attention of the audience, even without the influence of the music.
As an example, Jarman-Ivens cites the 1985 single "Into the Groove"
and its line "Live out your fantasy here with me, just let the music set
you free; Touch my body, and move in time, now I know you're
mine." Madonna's lyrics often suggest an identification with
the gay community. Santiago Fouz-Hernández believes that when Madonna
sings "Come on girls, do you believe in love?" in "Express
Yourself", she is addressing both the gay audience and the heterosexual
female. Even in the Erotica era, with its often
adult-oriented lyrics, the songs appear free-flowing and gullible ("So
won't you go down, where it's warm inside" — "Where Life Begins"
from Erotica).
Madonna has a mezzo-soprano vocal range. She
started her musical career with songs that she described as "soulful pop
music". Madonna recalled in a 1983 interview with Island magazine
that she had wanted to grow up as a black kid. "First of all, all the
black girls in my neighborhood had these dances in their yard where they had
these little turntables with 45 records and they'd play all this Motown stuff
and they would dance, just dance, all of them dancing together and none of the
white kids I knew would ever do that. They were really boring and stiff. And I
wanted to be part of the dancing. I didn't like my friends. I had to be beaten
up so many times by these little black girls before they would accept me and finally
one day they whipped me with a rubber hose till I was like, lying on the ground
crying. And then they just stopped doing it all of a sudden and let me be their
friend, part of their group."
On her 1983 debut album, Madonna's vocal abilities and personal
artistry were not fully formed. Her vocal style was similar to other pop stars
of that period like Paula Abdul, Debbie Gibson, andTaylor Dayne. The
songs on Madonna reveal several key trends that have continued
to define her success, including a strong dance-based idiom, catchy hooks,
highly polished arrangementsand Madonna's own vocal style. In songs such
as "Lucky Star" and "Borderline", Madonna introduced a
style of upbeat dance music that would prove particularly appealing to gay
audiences. The bright, girlish vocal timbre of the early years became
passé in Madonna's later works, the change being deliberate, since Madonna was
constantly reminded of how the critics had once labelled her as "Minnie
Mouse on helium", because of her early voice.
Madonna's second album, Like a Virgin (1984),
foreshadowed several trends in her later works. It contained references to
classical works (pizzicato synthesizer line that opens "Angel");
potential negative reaction from social groups ("Dress You Up" was
blacklisted by the Parents Music Resource Center); and retro styles
("Shoo-Bee-Doo", Madonna's homage to Motown). Madonna's
early style, and the change that she ushered in it, is best evident in the song
"Material Girl". It opens with Madonna using a little-girl voice, but
following the first verse, she switches to a richer, more mature voice in
the chorus. This mature artistic statement was visible in True
Blue (1986). The song "Papa Don't Preach" was a significant
milestone in her artistic career. The classical introduction, fast tempo and
the gravity in her voice were unprecedented in Madonna's œuvre at that time.
With Like a Prayer (1989), Madonna again entered
a new phase, musically. The album introduced live recorded songs and
incorporated different genres of music, including dance, R&B and
gospel music. Madonna continued to compose ballads and uptempo dance
songs for Erotica (1992) and Bedtime Stories (1994).
She tried to remain contemporary by incorporating samples, drum loops and hip
hop into her music. Her voice grew much deeper and fuller, evident in the
tracks like "Rain" and "Take a Bow". During the
filming of Evita, Madonna had to take vocal lessons, which
increased her range further. Of this experience she commented, "I studied
with a vocal coach for Evita and I realized there was a whole
piece of my voice I wasn't using. Before, I just believed I had a really
limited range and was going to make the most of it."
Continuing her musical evolution with Ray of Light,
the track "Frozen" displayed her fully formed vocal prowess and her
allusions to classical music. Her vocals were restrained and she sang the songs
in Ray of Light without vibrato. However, the intake of breath
within the songs became more prominent. With the new millennium came her
album Music in which Madonna sang in her normal voice in a
medium range, and sometimes in a higher register for the chorus. A change
was also noted in the content of the songs, with most of them being simple love
songs, but with an underlying tone of melancholy. Her next record, American
Life, was characterized by "a thumping techno rhythm, liquid keyboard
lines, an acoustic chorus and a bizarre Madonna rap", according to Q magazine. The
"conventional rock songs" of the album were suffused with dramatic
lyrics about patriotism and composition, including the appearance of a gospel
choir in the song "Nothing Fails".
Musically, things changed with Confessions on a Dance
Floor, which returned Madonna to pure dance songs, infusing club beats and
retro music, but the lyrics continued to be about paradoxicalmetaphors and
reference to her earlier works. In her studio album, Hard Candy,
she mixed R&B and hip hop music with dance tunes. The album also had songs
whose lyrics were autobiographical and expressed support for helping
Africa. Fouz-Hernández commented that "Throughout her career,
Madonna's manipulation of her voice shows us that, by refusing to be defined in
one way, she has in fact opened up a space for new kinds of musical
analysis." With MDNA, Madonna returned to the electropop genre
she flirted with on Like a Prayer andMusic. Neil
McCormick of The Daily Telegraph noted the attempt was feeble,
compared to her previous classics in the genre.
Madonna has sold more than 300 million records worldwide and
is recognized as the best-selling female recording artist of all time by Guinness
World Records. Time considered her to be one of the
"25 Most Powerful Women of the Past Century" for being an influential
figure in contemporary music. Madonna is the best-selling female rock
artist of the 20th century and the second best selling female artist in
the United States, with 64.5 millioncertified albums. Considered by Forbes and
other publications as a cultural icon, she is often referred by the
international press as the "Queen of Pop".
In 2008, Billboard ranked her at number two,
behind only The Beatles, on the Billboard Hot 100
All-Time Top Artists, making her the most successful solo artist in the history
of the chart. She was also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in
the same year. In 2012, she was crowned the "Greatest Woman In Music"
by VH1. As of 2013, some sources report that Madonna's net worth has
crossed over one billion dollars.
In The Madonna Companion, biographers Allen Metz and
Carol Benson noted that more than any other recent pop artist, Madonna had used
MTV and music videos to establish her popularity and enhance her recorded
work. According to them, many of her songs have the imagery of the music
video in strong context, while referring to the music. Cultural critic Mark
C. Taylor in his book Nots (1993) felt that the postmodern
art form par excellence is video and the reigning "queen of
video" is Madonna. He further asserted that "the most remarkable
creation of MTV is Madonna. The responses to Madonna's excessively provocative
videos have been predictably contradictory". The media and public
reaction towards her most-discussed songs such as "Papa Don't Preach",
"Like a Prayer", or "Justify My Love" had to do with the
music videos created to promote the songs and their impact, rather than the
songs themselves.Morton felt that "artistically, Madonna's songwriting is
often overshadowed by her striking pop videos."
Madonna's initial music videos reflected her American and Hispanic
mixed street style combined with a flamboyant glamor. She was able to
transmit her avant-garde downtown New York fashion sense to the American
audience. The imagery and incorporation of Hispanic culture and Catholic
symbolism continued with the music videos from the True Blue era. Author Douglas
Kellner noted, "such 'multiculturalism' and her culturally
transgressive moves turned out to be highly successful moves that endeared her
to large and varied youth audiences". Madonna's Spanish look in the
videos became the fashion trend of that time, in the form of boleros and
layered skirts, accessorizing with rosary beads and a crucifix as in the video
of "La Isla Bonita".
Madonna has been honored with 20 MTV Video Music Awards—the
most for any artist—including the lifetime achievement "Video Vanguard
Award" in 1986. In 2003, MTV named her "The Greatest Music Video
Star Ever" and said that "Madonna's innovation, creativity and
contribution to the music video art form is what won her the
award." Her videos "Die Another Day", "Express
Yourself", "Bedtime Story", and "Give Me All Your Luvin'"
are some of the most expensive music videos of all time.
Madonna's emergence occurred during the advent of MTV; Chris
Nelson from The New York Times spoke of pop artists like
Madonna saying, "with its almost exclusively lip-synced videos,
ushered in an era in which average music fans might happily spend hours a day,
every day, watching singers just mouth the words." The
symbiotic relationship between the music video and lip-syncing led to a desire
for the spectacle and imagery of the music video to be transferred to live
stage shows. He added, "Artists like Madonna and Janet Jackson set
new standards for showmanship, with concerts that included not only elaborate
costumes and precision-timed pyrotechnics but also highly athletic dancing.
These effects came at the expense of live singing."Thor Christensen of
the Dallas Morning News commented that while Madonna earned a
reputation for lip-syncing during her 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour, she has
subsequently reorganized her performances by "staying mostly still during
her toughest singing parts and leaves the dance routines to her backup
troupe ...rather than try to croon and dance up a storm at the same
time."
To allow for greater movement while dancing and singing, Madonna
was one of the earliest adopters of hands-free radio-frequency headset
microphones, with the headset fastened over the ears or the top of the head,
and the microphone capsule on a boom arm that extended to the mouth. Because of
her prominent usage, the microphone design came to be known as the
"Madonna mic". Metz noted that Madonna represents a paradox as
she is often perceived as living her whole life as a performance. While her
big-screen performances are panned, her live performances are critical
successes. Madonna was the first artist to have her concert tours as
reenactment of her music videos. Author Elin Diamond explained that
reciprocally, the fact that images from Madonna's videos can be recreated in a
live setting enhances the realism of the original videos. Thus her live
performances have become the means by which mediatized representations are
naturalized. Taraborrelli said that encompassing multimedia, latest
technology and sound systems, Madonna's concerts and live performances are
deemed as "extravagant show piece, a walking art show."
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