Who's That Girl / You Can Dance

After True Blue established her as the diva of the decade, able to go toe-to-toe with Prince and Michael Jackson in terms of both record sales and cultural relevance, everything became available for Madonna - songs, scripts, you name it.  This was a tantalizingly brief period during which the concept of Madonna acting didn’t make your right eye start to twitch…

Unfortunately, while she might have been great at picking songs, she clearly didn’t have the same aptitude for picking scripts.  With the world at her doorstep, she picked the script for a “zany” comedy called Slammer, to some degree an ‘80s takeoff on Bringing Up Baby, about a street-smart girl falsely accused of murder.  On paper this premise could work, but Madge’s take on Nikki Finn is more annoying than endearing.  Griffin Dunne and a cougar named Murray deliver the best performances in this dippy mess of a film, although Madonna looks great, which in the ‘80s is all that mattered, right?  Anyhow, the film - renamed to Who’s That Girl at Madonna’s suggestion after she’d written the title track - rightly bombed, although she did win one award for it: a Razzie, for Worst Actress.

Don't make me sic my pussy on you...

The soundtrack though, featuring four new Madonna songs, was a huge hit.  Over half the soundtrack consisted of tracks by ultra-’80s acts like Club Nouveau and Scritti Politti (just typing the names gives me a migraine), while Madge’s contributions were if anything a throwback to her Like A Virgin sound, courtesy producer Stephen Bray.  This might be the first and only time a new Madonna release regressed stylistically in quite that manner.

I recall a critic somewhere at the time saying she'd gone back to the well one time too many with these similar songs but I just loved the record’s two big US hits, the title cut and “Causing A Commotion”.  This was pretty much the last gasp of her classic, shrink-wrapped ‘80s sound, apart from one cut I’ll talk about in a moment, and she’s seldom revisited these tracks since (they’ve been largely absent from hits packages and her tours) which is a pity because they’re both great earworms.

Who cares if she can act- she looks great!

“Who’s That Girl” was a transatlantic #1, and came with a frankly somewhat bizarre, dull video.  I liked the song if not the video, but thought “Causing A Commotion” was the best of the pair, even if it wasn’t quite as successful, making it to only #2 and not meriting a video (for the studio version, anyhow - a live performance did get released to MTV, but it wasn’t quite the same).

Both cuts have great bridges - I’ve mentioned before that she wrote some of the best in ‘80s pop - and “Causing A Commotion” in particular works like a charm.  There’s a great transition into it, a kind of echoing, thunking sound that kicks it off. How'd they come up with that? It's fantastic! Stephen Bray, who co-wrote and produced these cuts, was arguably the most successful collaborator Madonna ever had (at least, when it came to straight-ahead pop).  The lyrics and change in tone for both bridges is just perfect (the "light of my life" bit for "Who's That Girl" and the "hope you find what you're looking for" passage of "Commotion").

Oh, and she name checks (or is that title checks?) "Into The Groove" on “Commotion”’s bridge, as well!  It ain’t Joni Mitchell, but as pop goes it’s damn solid, but also the end of a string of ‘80s-defining hits.

Her other cuts for the film aren’t quite as successful.  “The Look Of Love” was a big hit in the UK, but wasn’t released here.  I know the chorus to "The Look Of Love" well and like it alright, but the verse does nothing for me. Watching the video (which is about all of Who’s That Girl you should be safely exposed to) I'm struck by the production of the tune, which is pretty unusual for Madonna. It's a bit Peter Gabriel, a bit Miami Vice. Very '80s, but not very Madonna - it sounds nothing like True Blue to me, or even Like A Virgin, and might even be a bit dated for '87. I'm not surprised to see it's a Pat Leonard tune - too complex to be Stephen Bray, but also lacks one of his solid earworm melodies in the verses. The chorus is really solid though - almost makes me wish they’d worked on fleshing it out a bit more.

It's odd “The Look Of Love” wasn't released as a single in the US, but maybe they figured this market wouldn't be as receptive.  Part of me feels like this is a nice "album cut" but not a hit. While it's no "Crazy For You" or "Live To Tell", I love the unusual (for Madonna) atmosphere of the piece, and it's very cinematic.

Stop! Or I'll act!

"Can't Stop" I have no memory of at all from the time. Kind of a mess - I can see why it vanished without a trace. Is it my imagination, or is it slightly Pat Benatar in spots in the verses?

It occurs to me that Madonna - pushing thirty - was just about as old as she could be and still play a role like Nikki Finn. Which maybe is one of the reasons why she agreed to do the film - that door wasn't going to be open much longer.  Still, the film did her movie career no favors - Desperately Seeking Susan this thing ain’t.

Warners headed into the Christmas ‘87 shopping season without a new record from their biggest act.  The solution was one of those dance remix compilations, which in the case of Madonna made a lot of sense, as she was a club superstar, the one-woman Bee Gees of the ‘80s.

More Latin-tinged Madge

You Can Dance was the first Madonna CD I bought on release. I think by this point I owned everything up thru True Blue, which at the time was probably my favorite (tho I always liked the debut and was always surprised at how strong it was - certainly better than I expected). I thought for a remix album You Can Dance was pretty good - "Spotlight" is a great track if not quite as solid as some of her other singles (it was only released in Japan). It does stand out as a flashback to her older style, and like the Who’s That Girl hits is a bit more dated than most of True Blue (whose sessions it hails from), but I loved her old style so didn't have a problem with that.  Wave goodbye to that style, because that’s the last we’d hear of it.

I thought the flow of the record was fantastic - great party record. And a good selection of tracks to remix, including a few that weren't hits but should have been - "Where's the Party", "Everybody" and "Physical Attraction". I've often wondered if the plan was to release one or more of these as singles in addition to the new track "Spotlight". 

I'm not a huge fan of the "Everybody" remix - the boop boop sound is annoying in this version, and the clanking drums spoil the groove. But the mixes of "Holiday" and "Physical Attraction" are great. "Over And Over" gets even more annoying with this orchestra hit-laden mix. Fortunately, they don't spoil "Into The Groove", which appears here in two mixes, both of them good.

There's something of a break in the flow after "Where's The Party" and we get three different mixes of songs already represented on the album, which I think was a bad choice. Worse, they're a set of dub mixes, stripping off Madonna's vocals, which might have been a good idea on some of the helium-voiced material off Like A Virgin but isn't such a great idea for these three cuts. The dub mix of "Holiday" is kind of sad affair, because her vocal in the original is one of her best. It does highlight what a great backing track "Holiday" had, but if I were gonna do dub mixes of Madonna's work up to this point, I'd definitely focus on Like A Virgin and the wonderful work Chic did. "Into The Groove" gets a dub mix as well, although they leave more vocals in this one, and go a bit crazier with the editing. It's not awful, but feels unnecessary and not particularly inventive. Oddly, they close the album with a dub mix of "Where's The Party", although it's not particularly "dub" since it still has lots of Madonna vocals. It feels a bit sparse for a finale.

Given her catalog up 'till this point, I feel like You Can Dance was a serious missed opportunity. I probably would have avoided any repeats and limited any dub mixes to Like A Virgin, which had the best dance-oriented backing tracks. I'd have included at least a couple of mixes that were more dramatic reworkings of prior hits than we get here. I probably would have tried to salvage another album cut from obscurity ("Think Of Me"? "Shoo-Bee-Doo"?), and finally I'd have put a little more polish on the "Everybody" and "Physical Attraction" mixes and then spun edits off as singles themselves (especially after "Spotlight" sorta flopped). 

Anyhow, not the worst remix album as remix albums go, and worth it in America just to bag "Into The Groove" on CD (not to mention "Spotlight"), but largely a missed opportunity.  Surprisingly, she still managed to move a couple million of these things worldwide, including a million in the US back when that was still a really huge number.

It occurs to me Madonna probably didn't want to film a bunch of videos for these old tracks, since she was busy working on other stuff. "Spotlight" didn't get a video, did it? That was a big limitation back then - not a lot of stuff became a hit during this period without exposure on MTV…

This was an odd lull in her career.  The Who’s That Girl tour was a big success, but she was taking an extended break from the charts - a risky move, especially considering how badly her movie flopped.  Everything about this period was a bit commercial and bland - conventional.  A lot of her edge seemed to have evaporated.  This was a woman who dated Basquiat and hung out on the edge of the Warhol scene?  Hmmm.

With her sound seemingly regressing a bit, it wasn’t clear if Madonna was going to adapt to the changing pop climate - and that climate began changing rapidly in 1988.  At the time we had no idea what was going to come next, but I don't think anybody quite expected what we got in the spring of '89. We weren't in Kansas anymore, folks - that Madonna was back.

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In case you missed 'em here are overviews of Madonna, Like A Virgin and True Blue.