Madonna Foorumi - Finland

HOW MADONNA GOT HER GROOVE BACK

Madonna is returning to her dance-floor roots for her latest triumph
By NEIL STRAUSS

Have you ever witnessed a Madonna moment?

Allow me to share one with you.

It begins with the words “nice boots.” Those are the first words Madonna says to me when we meet. The next words are “I approve,” letting me know that we are now in her world, where a strict code of standards and practices applies.

But this is not the Madonna moment. She is just, in her own way, being fun and friendly.

The Madonna moment comes two hours later, when she changes into knee-high silver boots for a television performance.

As she walks past, she looks down her nose at me and says, “Who’s got the better boots now?”

This is a Madonna moment.

One can’t help but wonder sometimes how this boy-crazy outcast from Michigan ended up selling some 250 million records worldwide. But watch her closely for a while, and that answer will come in a Madonna moment, when, despite the ego-shedding lessons of Kabbalah, her competitive nature emerges.

She is probably a good person at heart. And if not, she’s at least struggling to be good. But there’s a tripwire in her head, and when it’s crossed, you understand that it’s no accident she became one of the most famous women in the world and has retained that title for more than twenty years.

There are Madonna moments in her tour documentaries, when she refers to herself as “the boss” and “the queen” when talking with her crew and dancers. And there was a golden Madonna moment on Late Night With David Letterman in October, when Letterman offered her the smaller of two horses to ride. Mistake.

“I don’t want a tiny one,” she snapped. “I want a big one. I want the prettiest one. Well, I want the best horse.”

Madonna moments are not bad things. They are the telltale signs of a woman who believes she deserves the best the world has to offer — the best boots, the best horse, the best career, the best stage show, the best seat on the plane. For the most part, thanks to her confidence, intelligence and single-minded work ethic, she’s gotten it.

That is, until she had her first experience with mortality a few months ago. In a well-reported incident, Madonna attempted to ride an unfamiliar horse at Ashcombe, the eighteenth-century estate in western England that she shares with her husband, director Guy Ritchie. She fell from the horse, breaking eight of her bones. It was the first time she’d ever broken a bone and a wake-up call to her own vulnerability.

“It was the most painful thing that ever happened to me in my life, but it was a great learning experience,” she says. She is sitting on a private plane that is taking off from a Royal Air Force base south of London. Its destination is Germany, where the members of Green Day will soon experience a Madonna moment of their own.

Madonna version 2005 is a woman in flux. She is part spiritualist, part narcissist; part provocative sex symbol, part children’s-book author; part artist, part mother; and, thanks to her new aerobi-disco look, she is part retro, part futuristic. She doesn’t even live in one place; she spends most of her time in London and has homes in New York and Los Angeles. She is a contradiction. And she will always be one. This is because her true genius is a facility for learning. She is a quick study. One of the only things consistent about her career is her ability to absorb and incorporate knowledge at an alarming rate, allowing her to stay one step ahead of critics, competitors, fans and trends. Some accuse her of being pretentious since she started speaking in a British-tinged accent, but rather than being an affectation, it is simply further evidence of her adaptability and spongelike nature. Before I leave her presence, she will actually count on her fingers the things she’s learned from me. I’ve served my purpose.

Her new album, Confessions on a Dance Floor, integrates the lessons she learned from her previous album, American Life. Perhaps her most poorly received album (unjustly so), this was Madonna restyled as a pop-culture Che Guevara and anti-materialist girl, brooding about her life and the culture she’s part of. It is her folk album. Confessions on a Dance Floor is the antithesis.

If American Life was for the head, Confessions is for the feet. It is pure groove. It is her equivalent of a mash-up album. It takes snippets from forty years of dance music (Giorgio Moroder, Tom Tom Club, Abba, Pet Shop Boys, Stardust, the Jacksons), mixes in snatches from her own back catalog (”Like a Prayer,” “Papa Don’t Preach,” “Die Another Day”) and filters it all through club-cool electronics in a nonstop mix. At the helm is Stuart Price, who in addition to being the musical director on Madonna’s last two tours is an English DJ, remixer and recording artist (known as Les Rhythmes Digitales) who is equal parts Beck and Daft Punk.

Even in a form-concealing black sweat shirt, Madonna looks thin and fragile. At forty-seven, she cuts a more spartan and elegant figure than the navel-bearing, crucifix-dangling, hair-moussing Madonna who burst into the national pop consciousness in 1983. She is now Esther, Madge, Lady Madonna with children at her feet, or, as her staff calls her, simply M.

“Do you want to see where the bone broke?” Madonna asks as we talk about her horse tumble.

She pulls her sweat shirt aside and proudly displays the battle scar: a collarbone that, at its midsection, disconnects and juts up into the skin.

“She’s broken hers, too,” Madonna says, gesturing to Shavawn, her former nanny and current stylist. Shavawn is helping her massage the bone with some sort of vibrating machine that Madonna says has helped it heal faster. “She’s the person who made me get on the polo horse.”

“I didn’t make her,” Shavawn protests.

“She did,” Madonna insists. “It’s her fault.”

“I didn’t,” Shavawn repeats.

“Because she was the person who instigated it, she had to be my caretaker,” Madonna continues. “She slept in the room next to me the whole time.”

“You’re guilting her out,” I protest in Shavawn’s defense. Even though Shavawn is laughing, inside she must feel bad. Who wants to be responsible for breaking their boss’s bones? That is, assuming they like their boss, which Shavawn clearly does.

“I don’t have to,” Madonna says. “She guilted herself out.”

Suddenly, Madonna sounds a lot like my Jewish mother.

It is at this point that I notice the carry-on bags that both Madonna and her manager have brought on the airplane — they are both filled with popcorn. I make a note to ask about it later, when we’re not on the subject of medical emergencies.

Despite being taken to the hospital, Madonna says that the day after the accident, she decided to take a helicopter to Paris for her birthday. Hopped up on morphine, she felt little pain.

“I’m a lot of fun on morphine,” Madonna says with a laugh. “At least I think I am.” She pauses and looks at Shavawn for confirmation. “But I’m not fun on Vicodin.”

Her manager, Angela Becker, who is also sitting on the plane along with Madonna’s hair and makeup team, clarifies. “Do you know the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?” she asks. “I’ve never seen a transformation like that in my entire life.”

“I only tried Vicodin once,” Madonna says. “I was in a lot of pain, and everyone kept telling me to try Vicodin. But they kept saying, ‘Be careful. It’s so amazing. You’re going to get addicted.’ So I called five people to get advice before I took it, and they all told me I was going to love it.”

“She went on a walk with me,” Shavawn blurts, as she packs up the bone machine. “And it was really scary.”

“Drugs have a weird effect on me,” Madonna continues. “They do the opposite with me. I just chewed the entire inside of my mouth. I bitched at everybody. And I was in more pain. It was the worst experience of my life. So I’m happy to say that none of my pharmaceuticals — and I had a plethora of them given to me — influenced me.”

Madonna’s lack of interest in drugs is another reason for her success: The biggest career killer is the mixture of a person who’s very confident in her judgments with drugs that impair those judgments.
“I just like the idea of pills,” she says as she stretches her legs on the wall of the cabin. “I like to collect them but not actually take them. When I fell off my horse, I got tons of stuff: Demerol and Vicodin and Xanax and Valium and OxyContin, which is supposed to be like heroin. And I’m quite scared to take them. I’m a control freak.”

Just the other day, Madonna was in Portugal, where she obsessively rehearsed the first live performance of her undeniably catchy electropop single “Hung Up” thirty times for the MTV Europe Music Awards. The result: She not only stole the show but, nearing fifty and wearing a leotard, still managed to be the best-looking woman on the stage that night.

For Madonna, whose stage productions have become as career-defining as her albums, the next project is to start planning a tour for the new year. “I want to make people feel like they’re inside a disco ball,” she says, beginning a show description that in part sounds like a non-ironic version of U2’s Popmart. “I want to explore the idea of making the dancers more personalities in the show and having their stories come out. And we want to devise a sound system that’s surround-sound, because the standard system in a sports arena is crap for people watching, and it’s crap for people onstage.”

(Excerpted from RS 988, December 1, 2005)