Madonna - True Blue
(hear “Papa Don’t Preach)
Madonna - True Blue
Surprisingly, given the lasting effect of Like A Virgin and in particular its title track, True Blue is a much better album, although its title track confusingly bland. The hits are generally better constructed. If they are less memorable it is because they are perhaps not as shocking, but shock wears out. If Papa Don’t Preach, Open Your Heart, Live To Tell, True Blue, and La Isla Bonita are lower high points, White Heat, Where’s the Party and Jimmy, Jimmy are higher lows, and as a result the album seems like it was made to listen to, rather than just to further Madonna’s career like Like a Virgin’s virginal slugfest.
These songs were written by someone thinking, though not quite thinking of anything more important than pop music. Out in the world of knowledge, it must be common that Papa Don’t Preach is a response to Billie Jean, given how directly inverted is its theme. As such it’s effect in the culture must have been incredible, counterbalancing the cocky force of male dominated pop music. That the song touches on sex and religion (even obliquely on abortion, as if to show that controversy’s ante can always be upped) puts it right in the heart of Madonna’s 80’s persona, which is the only persona that can be called truly hers. While Like A Virgin must instantly spring to mind when you think of Madonna songs, it doesn’t catch her religious spirit, which begins of course with her name.
Papa Don’t Preach has a truly obscene bass line. It sounds like the sort of smarmy fellow that a father would warn his daughter about. (I mean the one panned hard right, which almost sounds like a keyboard slap bass simulation…)
Meanwhile Madonna manages to sing like a genuinely perplexed human being stuck between confronting, pleading with, and seeking advice from her father, especially on the line “I’ve made up my mind”. The lyric “Maybe we’ll be all right” speaks deeply to this confusion, especially when found among the mostly determined, declarative song.
The ambiguity of the word “baby” is finally put to use in a popular song. She says “I’m not a baby” in the beginning. I remember that as a naive 10-year-old I only heard her speaking of her boyfriend with the line “I’m keeping my baby”. “My friends keep telling me to give it up” - the relationship? A child? Or is it just a slang expression for not taking something too seriously? One ambiguous term would be suggestive, but both together make it clearly intentional. While the general consensus is that the song is about abortion, there is no specific determinant in the lyrics that it is.
What is going on with rhyming on this album? Open Your Heart rhymes “me” with “key” with “me” with “key”, Papa Don’t Preach rhymes “baby” with “baby”.
True Blue and La Isla Bonita are the sort of genre pieces which people rely on when they don’t have better ideas. Here, at least Madonna manages not to be embarrassing, like, for example, Shania Twain’s “Juanita” on Up(!) or Bill Callahan’s fiddle-faddle on Woke On A Whaleheart. The reason these songs succeed is that Madonna’s voice has evolved into a tool which, though it can never be as joyous as on her first album, can sort of flatly interpret everything that comes through it without getting in the way. While it’s not in itself a great sound, she must be seen as a genius for flattening it instead of trying - and failing - to increase it in the manner of your average egotistical singer of popular genres.
1 year ago
