Madonna
GHV2: Greatest Hits Volume 2 (Maverick/Warner Bros.)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2002

Nobody ever said Madonna was stupid. Shallow, perhaps. Washed up, a bunch of times. Manipulative, certainly. But it is her very calculation that nettled those who would tag her as a bimbo and release her back into her natural habitat. The damn woman wouldn't go away, and even those who couldn't stomach her reluctantly admitted that she was, if nothing else, a shrewd businesswoman. The fact that she was able to stick around long enough to keep finding new buttons to push was evidence enough of that.

GHV2 is our reward for letting her play us for the second consecutive decade, and despite the bosom-centric photo on the reverse (tres Exile in Guyville, yes, but Liz never would have gotten there first if Madonna hadn't started the race), the CD plays like the veil of misdirection lifting to reveal... um, very possibly the best singles artist of the 1990s mainstream. To complain that GHV2 consists solely of previously released material (albeit in mostly non-album mixes and edits), unbaited by new or unreleased recordings as per the industry standard, is, quite frankly, to miss the point entirely. Madonna being Madonna, a compilation of her best and brightest demands not simply a reevaluation of her oeuvre but a recontextualization. Entering into a full semiotic analysis of the songs, the lyrics, the sequencing, even the hundreds (yes, hundreds) of photographs from all stages of her career (including years outside the bailiwick of the album) that fill up the packaging, would require a dissertation; just dealing with the song titles alone could take up a chapter.

Smart cookie that she is, Ms. C. throws the first pitch, providing the liner notes with a comical essay by her husband's associate Dan Cadan, who goes out of his way to intentionally misinterpret the songs (you know, I'm pretty sure that "Deeper and Deeper" is not about a gay miner). Having been denied a straightforward recapitulation of Madonna's Nineties (though the essay's fairly informative in its way), the stage is cleared of all debris both relevant and not, and the story she has to tell on GHV2 unfolds in more-or-less chronological sequencing. In true Madonna fashion, the only context worth a damn is her own solipsistic self.

And so it is only now, four paragraphs in, that I get to the music itself, so clearly is the public image inextricable from the performer. If the question throughout the Eighties was what her next role was going to be (slut? CEO ice queen? Catholic-school lunch lady?), she must have realized as the Nineties loomed that she was running out of ways to shock us, and so she latched onto the only thing she hadn't really tried: singer. On GHV2, you can hear her voice, always the weakest weapon in her arsenal, finally shedding the girliness in which she wrapped herself throughout the 1980s and maturing into a richer, more handsome instrument. The protective babydoll sheen makes its last stand in "Human Nature," which is like a belated final chapter to Madonna's first decade; it's telling that the most effective lines are the apologia whispers that seem funnelled straight into our earholes and not the lyrics proper.

What's also clear throughout GHV2 is that if Madonna has never herself been an innovator, her strength has always lain in being an early adopter and effective enterpreneuse whose acknowledgement and acceptance of her limitations is implicit in her judicious choice of material and, most of all, collaborators. Babyface's "Take A Bow" is the closest thing to a misstep here, as it sounds more like him than her, but conventional wisdom at the time suggested that she needed a hit, and by God, he gave her one, well before his tinkly-chandelier style became a time-bound cliche (which is precisely why it's the closest thing to a misstep here). Mirwais's cuts, meanwhile, fairly teem with gimmickry; it gets in the way of the song during "Don't Tell Me" but it's invaluable to "Music," where it becomes the song simply by virtue of there being nothing else there. The best in Ms. C. is brought out by Shep Pettibone and William Orbit, and GHV2 admits as much: they're the only producers, aside from Mirwais, who show up more than once (Orbit's tracks alone account for fully 1/3 of the disc). Pettibone provides thrumping disco and sex with a beat; when Madonna sings, "I'll give you love, I'll hit you like a truck/I'll give you love, I'll teach you how to..." in "Erotica," her failure to hit that oh-so-expected rhyme isn't coyness so much as a decision on her part to dispense with the talk and just do it. For his part, Orbit takes the blips and wibbles of electronica into a pop arena that didn't know it needed them, so that even the Ace of Base groove that fuels "The Power of Goodbye" provides ample buoyancy, while "Frozen" anticipates the advent of Dido by exactly one year.

So does that mean that you should cling to copies of Ray of Light and Erotica and call it a day? No, you ingrate; there's that pesky context issue again, and trapped inside separate jewel boxes, Maddy's songs not only can't communicate with each other but also face contamination from the rest of the decade's pop (and anti-pop) music. Collected in one spot, however, the singles form a sort of running dialogue whose very subject is pop (and anti-pop) music, which is to say Madonna, with an added subtext of the disappointment inherent in success (which is to say Madonna again). Music's wildly undervalued "What It Feels Like For A Girl" serves as both a celebration and a reprimand, while "Drowned World/Substitute For Love" laments the sacrifices made for what she now knows is immaterial. Heard back to back in a sequence that generates ten of the most intense and sheerly pleasurable minutes of pop music committed to disc, the two songs jointly confront the contradictions between image and desire, want and need, surface and substance. These are themes that repeatedly surface on GHV2; she does what she knows she shouldn't ("Human Nature," "Deeper and Deeper" and lucky Austin Powers refugee "Beautiful Stranger," which glows in sympathetic company), is punished for things beyond her control ("Don't Tell Me") and finds dissatisfaction when she gets what she wants ("The Power of Goodbye").

These themes find their fullest expression, and are most tightly intertwined, in GHV2's lone selection from Evita. The icky, Oscar-winning "You Must Love Me" is mercifully absent, perhaps because it is clearly redundant, and Madonna will not stand for redundancy. Its title taken as a command, not a revelation, "You Must Love Me" is instead utterly usurped by "Don't Cry For Me Argentina," which threatens to consume Madonna's entire catalog over the course of its 4 minutes and 50 seconds. Despite an arrangement and melody that practically begs Anni-Frid and Agnetha to leap in and ask Fernando if he can hear the drums, it slowly reveals itself as the pivot around which the entire second decade of Madonna's career spins. The lynchpin song from a bad but perversely well-regarded musical, it unambiguously begs for respectability on so many levels (including the purely literal one) that it makes one woozy; in her inclusion of the song and in the lyrics themselves (which could have been tailor-made for her, just as Evita is the perfect allegory for her career), Madonna manipulates us into loving her while pretending to grovel. It is a spectacular performance. Given the calculation, ambition and, God yes, talent of the woman giving it, a woman who is constantly attacked for purposeful actions predicated on an obviously keen intelligence, it couldn't not be.

With the exception of "Bedtime Story," which immediately follows it (possibly to stave off any doubts, possibly acting as a honeymoon romp), everything before "Don't Cry" concerns (or, if you're so inclined, is) sex, while everything after deals with love and empowerment. This is, I would dare say, the grand plan of Ms. C. In essence, GHV2 is a document of Madonna's perfect domestication. It's as though, having spent the Eighties seducing us and demonstrating her prowess as a provider of cheap kicks, she has slowly tipped her hand throughout the Nineties to reveal what an ideal lover/friend/mate she really is. We wake up one morning and realize (as she knew all along) that she is The One, familiar enough to be comfortable with and surprising enough to keep things interesting. We cannot imagine life going on without her, and this, over all else, is her art. All hail the once and, yes, future Queen of Pop, Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone Penn Ritchie. Long may she reign.

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