Don't have much to say about either Madonna project from this era - her ballads collection Something To Remember or Evita - other than it was clear Madge was doubling down on the slow, classy, pretty ballads in the wake of the monster success of "Take A Bow". Commercially I suppose this made sense, up to a point. But Madonna was never just about ballads, and the disturbing run of them began to make it sound like she'd been taken over by a pod person. From the planet B'oring.
It was nice to get single hits like "This Used To Be My
Playground" and "I'll Remember" collected in one place, since
they hadn’t appeared on a proper Madonna album before. When coupled with tasteful, ballady album
hits like "Rain", the collection helped to demonstrate that Madonna
could, in fact, do justice to ballads (and write 'em, too).
Hello, Mr. Evita
Producers! Here's my audition tape!
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| It's sure breezy where love don't live... |
That having been said,
the record has a lot of drawbacks. The dark, technoized "I Want You"
covers aren't all that, and certainly don’t merit the repeat performance. The
remix of "Love Don't Live Here Anymore" is slightly better than the
original - and the video is nice - but still, meh. "One More Chance"
plays like a bizarre attempt to cash in on Extreme's "More Than
Words", and sounds just as false and dated now as that description
implies. "You'll See" is the Latin-tinged sequel to "Take A
Bow" and plays like it was written to accompany the sequel video. It's a
bit of a rambling mess with a melody that I have to struggle to remember - not
a common problem for a Madonna hit. "The Look Of Love" off Who's
That Girl was better than this, which brings up the biggest problem with Something
To Remember - quite a few of these cuts would be better forgotten.
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| Even her videos started to feel recycled - "I'll Remember" was "Rain" without the water |
The title cut of course
never got the attention it deserved off I'm Breathless, but then it
wasn't released as a single this go around either, inexplicably. It was
certainly more deserving than the other singles spun from this release.
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| From Erotica to nostalgica |
Mostly, this record shows
Madonna hitting middle age and appearing to make a play for the light rock
audience, home of your Celine Dions and such. It felt very much like all
of the fun and most of the unexpected was about to be discarded, as Madge made
a play to become a more respectable pop act for her aging fans. Today this stuff only seems to get played by Muzak systems, alongside old Amy Grant records and other sonic wallpaper from the era. Madonna was still having (some) hits and moving truckloads of records, but not one of these songs feels essential or uniquely Madonna, for that matter. Anybody from Paula Abdul to Paula Cole could have charted with these cocktail circuit things.
There's also something cloyingly feminine about many of these cuts, twee. I've got no problem with a huge dose of genuine estrogen - bring on the Kate Bush - but overwhelmingly these cuts feel more Stepford than Sappho, like Madge is conjuring up some ultrafemme familiar she could use to infiltrate mainstream America. Where's the woman who was chomping cigars on Letterman and dropping the F-bomb 14 times?
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| I prefer my Madonna stoned, cursing like a sailor and giving Letterman that coronary |
Ultimately, Something To Remember was a
half-botched release, not all that unlike You Can Dance had been the
prior decade. Madonna's focus clearly wasn't on her music career, and it
showed.
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| Madge made a lovely fascist |
As for Evita,
never saw it beyond a few clips, never had any desire to. I have heard the
soundtrack, or at least much of it, but only recall the singles really. Not an
Andrew Lloyd Webber fan, not a Peron fan, really nothing about this entire
project attracts me in any way. I guess I'm glad Madonna finally got to play
the part she wanted to play. As far as I'm concerned, the best thing to come out of it was this parody with chimps that TBS used to run.
As has often been noted
since, the whole thing is directed like one long music video - a friend of mine
(who did see the film) observed as much at the time. However, it's not directed
like a good music video, which is a huge problem. It's directed like a
long, boring music video ("Another Suitcase In Another Hall" is a
good example) done by a director who doesn't really understand what makes for a
good music video.
One wishes Madge had
brought along David Fincher...that could have made for a pretty stunning Evita
- one I might have actually been interested in seeing. Probably would have cost
a billion dollars to film, though...
At some point even Madonna must have realized she'd gotten what she wanted, but had traveled far up a career cul-de-sac in the process. Was she really gonna spend the rest of her life dicking around in her distant cousin Celine Dion's wheelhouse? How dreadful.
But if not there, where?
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| Eat it, Patti LuPone |
In case you missed 'em, here are overviews of Madonna, Like A Virgin, True Blue, Who's That Girl / You Can Dance, Like A Prayer, I'm Breathless, The Immaculate Collection, Erotica, and Bedtime Stories.
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