What Miss Jackson was working through with sex on The Velvet Rope is comparable to what Madonna is doing with religion and doubt on American Life. I've been frustrated with the inordinate amount of shit that the American Life album has been put through, because none of the many reviews that trash the record seem to have made any effort at figuring out what distinguishes the stuff that doesn't work from the stuff that does. Too much Mirwais, simple songwriting, way too much embarrassingly simple acoustic guitar crap, and too much synth-fartistry bereft of melody. Add in misplaced rapping (which I actually agree with), and you have what all the criticism of this record boils down to.
The thing about the American Life album that no one seems to address is the arbitrariness of it. Close listeners sense the same effort put into the great tracks as the shitty ones, and I fear that Madonna's infatuation with Mirwais' sound is rooted in his absolute consistency. The programming and squelchy synth noises on "Love Profusion" are no different than the ones on "I'm So Stupid" and "Nobody Knows Me," yet the former is an amazing song and the other two fall completely flat. I can't give you technical reasons as to why, but the feeling that I get from the American Life album several months later is that a Madonna/Mirwais track is a coin toss. Sometimes you get something transcendent (Love Profusion, Nothing Fails), sometimes you get crap (Nobody Knows Me, Paradise-Not For Me). And the utterly frustrating thing about that is that there's nothing you can say as far as constructive advice other than diversifying and getting a few more hands on the track.
The song "American Life" is aggro and very lyrically simple, but may in fact represent one of the more daring statements by a performer since John Lennon's "Imagine," in its matter-of-fact denial of religion and its dogma (see also "Nothing Fails" and "X-Static Process"). Even your most violent and sexually explicit gangsta rap records will in some way make reference to some kind of established religious morality (and the only one that brings provocative theology in its gangsta/Gawd mentality is Pastor Troy's sublime "Vice Versa"), but La M's "I'm not a Christian and I'm not a Jew" is in fact expressing a very extreme point of view, one that probably alienated a lot of potential record buyers. To release that sentiment in your first single from a new album is balls defined, which only just balances out the withdrawal of the original version of the song's video.
In its original form, the American Life video was fearless, incendiary, and, along with Johnny Cash’s “Hurt,” the most provocative piece of short-filmmaking I’d seen this year. But the whole ‘pulling the video so as not to get Dixie Chicked’ thing shows something from Madonna we haven’t ever seen from her before- fear. She sings that she’s living the American dream- in London, with her kids and her ‘filmmaker’ husband. Was there anything so horrifying as her blundering her way through “Like a Virgin” during that Bravo special? Has she that totally turned her back on the songs and culture that made her an icon? I still get pissed when I realize that I’ll never get a chance to see Madonna perform my favorite song of hers (“Dress You Up”) in concert, but, to be brutally honest, if that Drwoned World tour was any indication, that may be for the best. All I have to say is that she needs to take her spiritual enlightenment and make peace with some of her older songs, and quick.
