American Life [ECD] [PA] - Madonna > Reviews > IS MADGE SHOOTING BLANKS?

Author's product rating:   

Originality	Average
Lyrics	Standard
Quality and consistency of tracks	Mixed
How does it compare to the artist's other releases	Average
Value for Money	Satisfactory

Advantages:	A couple of good tracks
Disadvantages:	Hampered by some bad 'uns

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

With a new Madonna album on the horizon, scheduled for early next year, perhaps it is time to dip into the archives for a retrospective look at her most recent album to date, YEAR'S 'American Life'. This was arguably Madonna's most ambitious work to date, striving for critical respectability while attempting to still remain commercial. It was a balance she just about managed to strike, but this is possibly one her weakest albums to date. The album suffers primarily from a lack of quality control; a lot of the songs seem slapdash and as though they were put together in a spare five minutes in the studio, while the album also suffers due to its repetitiveness, with a lot of the songs tending to blur into one undistinguishable mush rather than standing out, which rarely happens on a Madonna album, one finds.

Mirwais Ahmadzai is back at the helm on production duties and continues with the themes continued on Madonna's massive 'Music' album, with electronic bleeps and blurps and all kinds of fiddly gadgetry going on in the background. One of the most striking characteristics about 'American Life' is that it's a very introspective album, much more so than 'Music' ever was. It's an aural dissection of what it is like to be Madonna, what it's like to inhabit Madonna's world. Sometimes this works wonderfully ('Nothing Fails', for example), but elsewhere, as on 'Nobody Knows Me', the result is contrived, forced and unconvincing, as though Madonna, the multi-multi-multi-multi-multi-multi-millionairess singer, writer, dancer, author and icon is plagued by a victim psychology, that she is a deeply troubled lass underneath all that wealth and Material Girl posturing.

The title track opens the album, and for all its bounce it ultimately falls flat, made worse by the lamest, flattest rap since Vanilla Ice first tried to lay down a few rhymes. Sounding off about her Mini Cooper (it's 'super duper', don't you know) and her nannies, butlers and chefs, its woefully embarrassing and something of a career low. It was feted as Madonna's big political song, but as far as political statements go, it's a bit of a lame duck, a rather robotic, vapid and empty affair lacking in distinction and Madonna's characteristic verve. It has no payoff for a song which was being lauded as 'the big political number', the rap ending with the inconsequential "I'd just like to express my extreme point of view/I'm not a Christian and I'm not a Jew/I'm just living out the American dream/And I just realised that nothing is what it seems", which leaves you wondering: so what? The proposed video for the song also betrays something about Madonna. The initial cut, a political video attacking the war on Iraq, was cut at the last minute and replaced with a mundane one of Madge singing in front of the flags of the world. It seemed like a bit of a damp squib from a lady who had once challenged the establishment with her risqué videos, including dancing with a black Jesus in the 'Like A Prayer' video… has Madonna lost her cutting edge?

Elsewhere, things don't get better. 'I'm So Stupid' is inane and has very few redeeming features, while 'Intervention' is desperately dull and can really send you to sleep. 'X-Static Process' is confused both lyrically and musically; unsure of what direction it wants to go in, a messy affair that is really weak.

'Mother & Father' is initially a highlight but suffers from having two different songs in one. It begins as a wonderfully elegiac mood piece where Madge evokes the spirit of Kate Bush before building up to a disco pulse that sounds like it has come straight from 'Saturday Night Fever', while the lyrics deal with typical Madonna themes of parenthood, religion and the death of her mother. But then all of a sudden the rap kicks in and the end result is totally disappointing ("My father had to go to work/I used to think he was a jerk"). If the song had been cut in half, and the rap part jettisoned then it would have made for a rather brilliant song, but so devastatingly awful is the middle to end of the song that it kills the whole thing dead.

This is not to say that this is an album devoid of highlights. 'Hollywood' is up there with Madonna's best singles, its cheery electronic guitar offset by lyrics which hint at something darker lurking underneath ("How could it hurt you when it looked so good?"), while it's closing mantra of "Push the button/Don't push the button/Flip the station/Change the channel" is rather brilliant. There is, of course, the dark irony that one of Madonna's best songs is about a place in which she has been spectacularly unsuccessful, as time and time again Madonna has proved that acting just isn't her forte. I saw 'Shanghai Surprise' on TV the other day and it's every bit as bad as they reckon, while Madonna seems to be doing an impression of the Cuprinol Man throughout, so wooden is her performance.

Anyway, getting back on point… the tear-stained and poignant 'Nothing Fails' has echoes of 'Like a Prayer' and deserves mention for the way it builds and builds from a simple few chords on the guitar to a full gospel choir at the end, and is undoubtedly one of the stronger tracks on the album. 'Die Another Day' was attacked by Elton John for being the worst Bond theme of all time, the rotund piano man suggesting that he could have done a much better job. Perhaps that's why he's so angry all the time, because he keeps getting overlooked for Bond themes… and while he is wrong about it being the worst Bond theme of all time (Rita Coolidge's 'All Time High', from Roger Moore's awful 'Octopussy', surely?), he does have a point. It sounds unlike any other Bond theme, a strange, jittery, stop-start electronic number that would have Shirley Bassey spinning in her grave if she were dead. But it is by no means a bad song and fits in with the rest of the album very well.

However, you do get the impression that both Madonna and Mirwais are beginning to run out of ideas. The lone guitar and series of keyboard bleeps formula can only run for so long, and it's a theme that Madonna has employed for some years now. The material here, of varying strengths, sounds indistinct from one song to another, as it all seems to have been written from the same formula. It is noteworthy that the songs that do break from this format, such as the magnificent 'Nothing Fails' are the better songs on the album. While not the disaster zone that some critics painted it to be, 'American Life' is still a bit of a mess as an album, with stronger cuts blighted by calamitously weaker ones.

Apparently, next year Madonna is due to release her follow-up to 'American Life', tentatively titled 'Defying Gravity'. Early newspaper reports suggested that she was making a rockier album influenced by the sounds of 2004's darlings (and 2005's nobodies) the Darkness, which is quite an eerie prospect. Let's hope that the end result isn't quite as bad as it sounds. What Madonna needs to do is go for something simple, uncomplicated and unpolitical, something that reconnects her with her roots rather than intentionally going for the big statement, which inevitably will backfire. 'American Life' had such promise but ultimately failed to deliver. Next year will come the true test of Madonna's capabilities, when we shall see if she will regain her untouchable status in the pop sphere or if she'll follow Michael Jackson into the pop dumpster.

'American Life' is available from Amazon.co.uk for £10.99