Slave To The Virgin

It is a truth universally acknowledged that rock music is made by shaggy earnest warriors who write and perform all their own material, eating nothing but authenticity and excreting truth/talent/realnessism.  Whereas pop tends to be the product of a court dominated by the wizard, sculpting, svenagli-ing, creating and curating the sounds put out there by the young queen.

Bullshit.  They may not be acclaimed songwriters per.se. but I would back both sovereigns here to eat most dragon slaying ninnies for breakfast.

Here be mighty lady records: Madonna Like A Virgin and Grace Jones Slave To the Rhythm.

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I never bought any of the records wen I was a teen but I was always a bit of a Madonna fan without really acknowledging it, I remember her just exploding out of the traps around the time of Like A Virgin and every song she released just seemed clever, danceable and fun.  Obviously as a mopey teen, desperately wanting to be misunderstood, marginalised and marinated* the last thing I wanted to do was have actual, real fun in the 80’s; that was far too mainstream.

I wised up later and Justify My Love was the first Madonna I bought, partially lured in by the Kravitz connection.  Make what you will of the fact that I had to be tempted into the works of our biggest female musical star by a dude and you’d probably have been right.

Regardless, I remember Madonna being everywhere, girls wearing those fingerless lacy mitten-y things, the sheer naughtiness of ‘Like A Virgin‘, how surprisingly good Desperately Seeking Susan was and just how outrageously sexual she seemed**; a sexuality that was not just levelled at men but was taken on by girls as a liberating thing; because of a certain unthreateningly ordinary quality she had, is my theory^.

I remember one young sophisticate of my acquaintance, Phil, wearing a Madonna badge on the front of his trousers ‘so her head’s near my cock‘.  He soon discovered how flawed the idea putting a sharp prick adjacent to his less sharp one was; Darwinism in action.

Whatever, Like A Virgin succeeded because time/place/person/culture/promotion was just so but mostly because the tunes were brilliant.  1537 candidate for favourite person on Earth, Nile Rodgers produced the LP^^ and Bernard Edwards and Tony Thompson play on 4 tracks, making Like A Virgin 44.4% Chic, which can be no bad thing.  More importantly even, is the fact that Madonna’s personality is stamped all over everything here, as it always was going to be, setting a marker down and giving a pleasing unity to it all.

The singles are all superb and smart, you know that, but what about the rest? I was pleasantly surprised by the inoffensive pop kicks of ‘Angel’, ‘Over and Over’ and particularly ‘Stay’; it ain’t all good ‘Shoo-Bee-Doo’ is the aural equivalent of finding a big jobby on your windscreen on a hot day.  Madonna’s version of the Jimmy Nail classic ‘Love Don’t Live Here Anymore’ is a surprising pleasure, really well produced and executed, with the best vocal on the LP.

The best accolade I have read about Like A Virgin is the following (about the song ‘Dress You Up’) from no lesser authority than Tipper Gore:

“Popular culture is morally bankrupt, flagrantly licentious and utterly materialistic—and Madonna is the worst of all.”

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Now Grace Jones was no sane person’s idea of a malleable poppet, a true force of nature with a BDSM-heavy live show, aggressive interview persona and thoroughly difficult reputation to boot.  1985’s Slave To The Rhythm was a decidedly odd enterprise by any party’s standards.

Slave To the Rhythm begins, as all LPs should begin, with Ian McShane speaking.  Yup, Lovejoy (or Al Swearengen, if you prefer) kicks off the whole shooting match here.

‘Slave To the Rhythm’ the song was conceived as the follow-up track to Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’, it was offered to the band initially but then given to Grace.  Produced by the ZTT team behind FGTH, Trevor Horn and Paul Morley*^, packaged in the same daftly, yet winningly pretentious manner as their Scouse charges Slave To the Rhythm is a definite oddity for such a big LP.

The kicker about Slave To The Rhythm is that it is an album based around a single track, ostensibly an 8 tracker it features 6 different versions of the title track – a new wave one (‘Jones The Rhythm’, pretty good), a slower R+B one, the unlistenable ‘Operattack’ version and the one we all know, amongst a couple of others. The rest of the album comprises interview snippets, some nice ambient bits, readings from Jean-Paul Goode’s (Jones’ partner, image creator and father to her son) autobiography and readings from something called ‘The Annihilation of Rhythm’.  

The title track? we know that, it’s a cracker, as is the video mosaic’d together from other sources, a car advert, a bit of live video and the creation of the LP cover art.  It bloody works though:

Except the title track we know and love isn’t really, truly called ‘Slave To the Rhythm’, it is actually called ‘Ladies And Gentlemen: Miss Grace Jones’ and they make you wait until the last to hear it.  You can interpret it as being about slavery and dance, personally I think it’s about sex, sex, sex.  Maybe that’s just me though.

Slave To the Rhythm is an interesting thing but oddly for an LP that is so much about the singer, there is annoyingly little of her here.  She is credited as ‘Breath, Blood and Voice’ on the album, but we only really get the latter.  The singer is a bit subsumed by the machine here and a dearth of real inspiration and depth.

Bonus point – Dave Gilmour plays (uncredited) guitar on the LP, he turned up, played his bit, whilst producer Trevor Horn was being sick into a bin every few minutes due to food poisoning and that was that.

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A word on image, something that’s always hugely important in pop^*.  Both Like A Virgin and Slave To the Rhythm have absolute all-timer image setting LP covers.  Madonna’s photos taken by Steven Meisel are incredible, the at-first-glance wedding dress/second-glance fetish-y appeal are perfection itself for setting pop iconography ablaze, here was a woman in charge of her own sexuality playing with the whole Madonna/whore type thang, looking assured and beautiful in the process; the post-action bedhead back cover photo even more so.

Jean-Paul Goode’s sculpting of Grace Jones’ image into something mechanistic, exotic, alien, playful and supremely 80’s is every bit as striking – although, personally I think better seen on the LP covers of Living My Life^^^ and Island Life.  I like the way it was very much a collaborative effort with her too, to celebrate her otherness and exoticism.

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Iconic as both LPs are I would far rather listen to Like A Virgin, much as I dig Slave To The Rhythm as an artefact, who’d have thunk it? maybe I am just a material girl after all.

1009 Down.

*used as a placeholder until I can think of a better, big impressive ‘m’ word.

**for the time, her words, looks and videos are all astonishingly vanilla for 2020.  

^am perfectly happy to mansplain female sexuality to any ladies reading.  Oh, maybe I’ll just shut up then. Sorry.

^^bar one track I’d never heard of, some filler tune called ‘Into The Groove’ or something.

*^also of Art of Noise, who’s sound I can detect sometimes in amongst all this.

^*we always pretend less so in rock, but that’s just a dirty lie.

^^^I may have to steal my son’s copy.