HER HOME MOVIE

Well, I stuck with the Madonna doc for about 30 minutes. A very long 30 minutes, to be honest. Fast-forwarded through the rest. I'm now more bemused than ever. The thing I still don't understood about Ms Ciccone is why grown-ups take her seriously whereas almost everyone used to chuckle (and quite right too) at Donna Summer. There really isn't much difference between them. I suppose Summer was a puppet whereas Madonna holds her own strings - and has bigger amps. Is that all there is to it?

Had to smile at the review by the Guardian's Rupert Smith ("I love Madonna. I can't help it - it's probably genetic.") He was particularly taken by the risible anti-Iraq war sequence:

There was iron in the woman's soul. She attempted, in her grandstanding way, to counterbalance Republican stupidity in an election year. She pumped out anti-Iraq War messages to audiences containing people who actually booed her. She publicly praised Michael Moore, which is enough to get crosses burning on your lawn in your more redneck neighbourhoods.

Let's get this straight, shouting out the tubby one's name in front of an audience in mid-town Manhattan doesn't put you in the Gandhi league.

As for Moore himself he was in full-on ever-so-humble mode in his brief appearance, and was thus a bit of a disappointment. But the music, oh dear, the music. Says Smith: "The songs from her weak-as-water album American Life sounded great, thanks to [Stuart] Price's beefy arrangements."

Come again?  I suppose you could pay Benedictine monks to set down the collected works of Jeffrey Archer on illustrated parchment. Wouldn't make them good novels though, would it?

ENCORE: I'd forgotten that Camille Paglia, queen of campus kitsch, really does take disco very seriously indeed. Her Salon review [possibly firewalled] of the Material Girl's new album is so absurdly pretentious it's almost enjoyable. Extracts are no doubt already winging their way to Private Eye's Pseuds Corner. Here's my candidate:

I for one do not dance to dance music; disco for me is a lofty metaphysical mode that induces contemplation.

She doesn't like the new album ("tinny shrillness, sonic clichés, and intermittently clumsy or muddy layering") and fears that her heroine has lost her way:

When I wrote in my polemical 1990 New York Times op-ed that "Madonna is the future of feminism," there were squawks of disbelief on all sides -- but that is exactly what came to pass over the next decade....Madonna is her own Hollywood studio -- a popelike mogul and divine superstar in one... Unfortunately, her public life has dissolved into a series of staged photo ops. She has become a fashion icon more than a music pioneer....Why turn every private moment, including motherhood, into commerce and publicity? ....In cannibalizing her disco diva days, Madonna runs the risk of turning into a pasty powdered crumpet like the aging Bette Davis in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"

Wasn't that obvious right from the beginning? Or perhaps some academics are too busy deconstructing the Zeitgeist to listen to the beat.

(Via The Corner)

Comments

[Jack Tanner]

'She publicly praised Michael Moore, which is enough to get crosses burning on your lawn in your more redneck neighbourhoods.'

Any sightings of this phenomonon? No?

[Chan S.]

No difference between Madonna and Donna Summer? Respectfully beg to differ: Donna Summer can sing.

[Jack Tanner]

I was going to make that exact same point and despite some earlier problems Ms. Gaines is a very humble, decent person.

[Clive D]

No offence intended re Donna S's voice. Yes, she's definitely the better singer. I just don't like the records.
If you're old enough to remember her heyday, when she was all over the airwaves, isn't it interesting how rarely you hear the songs now? I guess that gives me hope that Madonna may one day become extinct. (I'm one of life's optimists!)

[PooterGeek]

Donna Summer's the real deal. Check out her recording of Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life". Quincy Jones produced it. I'm told Mr Jones knows a thing or two about jazz.

As for Madonna, I'm no fan, but I don't think I've ever heard her sing out of tune on record---and she was recording long before it was possible to fix that kind of thing discreetly. Apart from being a good dancer and a competent singer she has succeeded because she has always managed to find something new to wear that the little girls who buy pop singles can imitate and has always managed to find someone new to do all that tiresome music stuff.

[Clive D]

Pooter, so we should file Madonna under "nu-pop"? [Private joke, sorry]