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mtwy · 8 years ago

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Philadelphia Daily News

USA February 28th 1985

Women in Rock Madonna: ‘BOY TOY’ IMAGE

by JONATHAN TAKIFF

Many people are as entranced by Madonna’s tawdry look and brazen ‘come hither’ body movements as they are by her pinched, girlish vocals and percolating disco pop music. Maybe even more intrgued by the physical distractions.

This should not really come as a surprise. Fashion now rules a large hunk of pop culture - in music, art, film, clothing - and artful substance has become a secondary consideration. And whenever cheap thrills are what really matters to the average teenage record buyer, then a girl with ratty hair, naughty clothes, loud jewelry and an enticing exposed belly button is certainly going to create more of a stir than a subtle songstress who dresses conservatively, like everyone else.

But will they love Madonna tomorrow? Can she outlive her “Boy Toy” image, her penchant for posing in lacey undergarments (preferably on a messed up bed), and her musical catalog stressing close encounters of the sexual kind?

Or will she eventually be rejected as a cheap hussy - the kind of girl that boys love to grapple with after the high school dance, but never take home to meet mom?

It’s certainly significant that the nominations committee for this year’s Grammy Awards ignored Madonna completely, even though her debut album, “Madonna,” and follow-up LP, “Like a Virgin,” have clung tenaciously to the top of the charts for an entire year (Making her second only to Prince in importance at Warner Brothers Records). Ordinarily, the Grammys are a celebration and endorsement of just such success.

Could it be something this damsel wore in her R-rated videos - all those crucifixes dangling from her ears and between her legs, perhaps - that put off the Grammy crowd? Blasphemous stuff!

Or maybe they’ve misread the message of, ah, pure romance inherent in her lyrics: “They can beg and they can plead/But they can’t see the light, that’s right/’Cause the boy with the cold hard cash/Is always Mister Right.”

And let’s not overlook her recent No.1 celebration of, um, reborn innocence: “I was beat/Incomplete/I’d been had, I was sad and blue/But you made me feel/Yeah, you made me feel/Shiny and new/Like a virgin/Touched for the very first time/Like a Virgin/When your heart beats next to mine.”

What kind of temperament breeds such a talent?

“From the start I was a very bad girl,” brags 24-year-old Madonna Louise Ciccone, the eldest daughter in a family of six. “I was always in touch with my sexual side.”

Born on Detroit’s tough West Side, Madonna was all of 6 when her mother (also named Madonna) died of cancer, forcing the little girl to grow up fast. “I really felt like I was the main female of the house. There was no woman between my father and me, no mother,” she recalls.

Life turned even weirder when Madonna was 8 and her father, a Chrysler engineer, announced that he was going to marry the family’s housekeeper. “It was hard to accept her as an authority figure and also accept her as being the new No.1 female in my father’s life. My father wanted us to call her mom, not her first name. I remember it being really hard for me to get the word ‘mother’ out of my mouth. It was really painful. I hated the fact that my mother was taken away and I’m sure I took a lot of that out on my stepmother.”

Madonna says she gew loud and aggressive to get attention among all her brothers and sisters, and always had “this thing” about nuns and crucifixes. “I went to three Catholic schools as a child with uniforms and nuns hitting you over the back with staplers. I lived in a real intergrated neighborhood. We were one of the only white families there.” Later, Madonna’s large family moved to Pontiac, Mich., where she lived next to Bob Seger and attended Pontiac Catholic High School.

Her father didn’t believe in leisure time: he always wanted her to be doing homework or reading the Bible. Madonna rebelled by throwing herself into the world of the fantastic. In eighth grade, she appeared in her first movie, a Super 8 project directed by a classmate, in which an egg was fried on her stomach. (That belly was obviously hot stuff, even then!) She acted in plays, studied piano, loved movies, danced to Motown hits in backyards, and finally let dance become the central focus of her adolescent life. She’d take all her school classes early so she could take dance classes in the afternoon. Then at night her ballet teacher served as her “introduction” to glamour and sophistication. “He used to take me to all the gay discotheques in downtown Detroit. Men were doing poppers and going crazy. They were all dressed really well and were more free about themselves than all the blockhead football players I met in high school.”

Madonna won a dance scholarship to the University of Michigan, then quit after a year to take on the real world. “I moved to New York in ‘78. I was only 17, I had $35 in my pocket and knew no one. I told the taxi driver to take me to the middle of everything. I was let off in Times Square.”

Madonna won a work-study scholarship with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s third troupe - the farm team. “Still, I thought I was in a production of ‘Fame’,” she recalls with a laugh. “Everyone was Hispanic or black, and everyone wanted to be a star.”

But they couldn’t keep this ambitious girl down on the farm for long. Through Ailey, Madonna met Pearl Lange, long the lead soloist for the famed Martha Graham troupe, who taught her the modern Graham technique. Madonna later worked as a Lange’s assistant. “It was interesting work. The style is very archiac, angular and dramatic. Painful, dark and guilt-ridden; very Catholic.....I was always an outcast in my ballet classes, the freak. I didn’t have long hair pulled back in a bun. Mine was short, and I used to dye it different colors.

“I would rip my leotards all the way up to my chest and then safety-pin them all the way down. I couldn’t stand all those horrible little ballerinas who hadn’t seen anything of the world except for their dance classes. They came from really rich families and bored me.”

Not willing to wait for her big break in serious dance, Madonna started going to musical theatre auditions. Catching the attention of French disco singer Patrick Hernandez’s management, she was asked to join his show, and was promised she could be a star, too, with a little guidance. “They took me to Paris and gave me everything: a vocal coach, a dance teacher, an apartment and a chauffuer. They were like the French mafia, very wealthy and had come into even more money through Patrick. They knew I was talented but had no idea what to do with me.”

Eventually tiring of this scene, too, Madonna returned to New York and decided to devote herself to music. Befriended by a rock group called The Breakfast Club, she shared a loft with them in an old Queens Synagogue and, when they went off to work, she taught herself to play instruments using their small home studio. When they needed a drummer, she was ready.

Later came her own band called Emmy (from her nickname). That one broke up over a dispute with her manager, who saw Madonna as a Pat Benatar-like rock belter. She had other ideas.

“I’m proud of the fact that I started out as a rhythm-and-blues-oriented disco singer. It gave me more of an identity. I feel that the pop charts are finally opening up to urban contemporary sounds like Herbie Hancock and all those other people who are making great street records. Detroit has always been hip to it but finally mid-America is hearing it for the first time.”

On her first album, songs like “Borderline,” “Lucky Star” and “Holiday” moved Madonna from disco play to R&B radio and then to Top 40 and MTV. Her second album, produced by Nile Rodgers of Chic, and featuring the same musicians who’ve lately been backing up David Bowie, also has broken her through to rock radio. “It’s more pop-oriented than my first record, more accessible and it shows my growth as an artist and a vocalist,” she assesses.

But can Madonna’s paper-thin vocal sound cut it live, a situation in which voice-thickening echo chamber devices stand out much more obviously, and even the sexiest body moves don’t look like much from 100 yards away? We’ll see this Spring, as Madonna embarks on her first concert tour, featuring equally trendy British gay/political rock group Bronski Beat as special support act.

An acting career is her next burning ambition to fulfill. In 1979, Madonna played the part of a punk in a cheap, psuedo-French art flick. “A Certain Sacrifice.” The film is belatedly going to be released, to cash in on her name recognition, and the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine describes Madonna’s part in the film as “a quasi-dominatrix who has three sex slaves.” But Video Insider editor Steve Apple, who recently screened it, says that “any suggestion this is a porno movie is a lie. There’s a violent scene in which she’s raped, and there’s a half second of frontal, upper torso nudity, but that’s it. The producer of the movie was hoping Madonna’s management would come up with some money to bury the movie, but they won’t even give him a kill fee.”

With her clothes on (sort of), Madonna is currently on view as a nightclub singer in “Visionquest” and soon will be seen in a featured part in the much hyped “Desperately Seeking Susan.”

#1985 #philadelphiadailynews #magazines #thevirginera

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