[note: this is my analysis of the title song from "American Life" - not the entire album.]


Madonna's "American Life" single is one of the most brilliant songs released in years. It's catchy, ominous, and thought-provoking. Combining the cold, inhuman electronic pulsing of Madonna's previous album "Music" with soft, folky acoustic strumming, it creates a unique contrast paralleling the lyrical content.

The lyrics of the song are built on mutual tensions, between fact and fantasy, expectations of self and society, biological and social reality, materialism and lack thereof.

To really understand the brilliance of this song, one needs to view it in context. I don't especially admire Madonna's decision to pull the anti-war video that went along with the song, and I imagine that it adds another layer of contrast and philosophical content. The video, as we know, featured such narrative elements as Madonna throwing a lit grenade at George W. Bush, who uses it to light a cigar. Thus, she drew a direct connection between the lyrical content of the song - which focuses on the lack of a fulfilling "modern life" - and the war.

I know some listeners who've questioned the underlying themes of the song - they say "isn't Madonna the material girl?" Viewing the song within the context of Madonna's entire body of work, one sees clearly that it's a development from the lyrical themes of her earlier song "Drowned World/Substitute for Love". In that song, from the "Ray of Light" album, she sang, "I traded fame for love without a second thought / It all became a silly game - some things cannot be bought." That's where the irony began - after all, each of Madonna's albums sells more copies than the last, and it's clear that she hasn't tried to retreat from "fame's spotlight" to any extent.

Here, then, Madonna confronts the listener with an even more bizarre contradiction, as befits her role of one of the eternal chimeras of the music world.

The song begins with Madonna's tense singing: "Do I have to change my name? Will it get me far? Should I lose some weight? Am I gonna be a star?" Then the catchy beat kicks in, but its way of pulsing forward and retreating into a repeated beep adds a feel of drama and conflict, paralleled in the vocal melody, which essentially takes the beat down in key. As the beat swoops downward in key, Madonna's voice rises. Here's the proof that she truly knows how to craft a song: the interplay of voice and electronic beat are remarkable.

She sings "I tried to be a boy / Tried to be a girl / Tried to be the best / Tried to be the best." Okay, so far - she's playing on gender confusion (a persistent theme in her work) and continuing her own self-mythologizing. An intriguing lyrical contradiction comes a moment later: "It's more easily said it's always been the same / This type of modern life is not for me / This type of modern life isn't for free." If it's always been the same, why focus on "this type of modern life", why not life in general? The answer comes in the acoustic bridge, over which Madonna sweetly croons (with a layer of vocoder adding an unsettling edge of dehumanization): "American life / I live the American dream / You are the best thing I've seen / You are not just a dream."

It's the American life specifically that's the problem. Her mention that "You are not just a dream" is a reference to her own impoverished past and the great future that nonetheless awaited her.

After some restatement of the song's main lyrical themes, and some creative modification of the main beat to keep it all interesting, there comes the glorious and acclaimed rap segment. A few critics of the songs have completely misinterpreted this part of the song: they think it's Madonna's attempt to jump onto the white rap bandwagon that's already leaving its dust behind. They're wrong, however: it establishes another contrast in the song, the contrast between depth and banality. Those oft-quoted lines -

I'm drinking a soy latte
I get a double shoté
It goes right through my body
And you know I'm satisfied

- are indeed quintessentially dumb, and how anybody could interpret them as being a serious attempt at a statement is beyond me. Look at context, people! Yes, she "drives [her] mini-Cooper," yes, she's "feeling super-duper" - yes, she's "doing yoga and Pilates" and "checking out the hotties" - but then come the brilliant lines:

I'm digging on the isotopes
This metaphysic shít is dope
And if all this can give me hope
You know I'm satisfied

Here, again, we get a direct reference to her past: nothing could embody "metaphysic shít" more than her "Ray of Light" period. But the plaintive statement "...if all this can give me hope / You know I'm satisfied" tells us that she recognizes the pretension and ultimate hopelessness of such endeavours.

The song bleeps its way to its ambiguous end:

I'd like to express my extreme point of view
I'm not a Christian and I'm not a Jew
I'm just living out the American dream
And I just realized that nothing is what it seems

The utter banality of that final line - it's shopworn, we've heard it before, it's an unbelievable cliche - completely contrasts with its own truth. Nothing is what it seems, but to say it is to be reviled for being unoriginal - and rightly so!

We've seen, of course, that Madonna is capable of writing intelligent and creative lyrics, and the quality of her craft is such that she's capable of making the deliberate choice to go for stupid cliches, lyrics-wise. That she does so demonstrates that she sees a lack of originality in American culture.

Madonna is indeed the Material Girl, but here she points to dissatisfaction with that lifestyle. Not only does she do music videos and movies - she also does yoga, Kaballah, and Frida Kahlo paintings. Are these gestures toward spiritual depth and culture actually sincere? The song develops that ambiguity, and ultimately leaves us with it. The contrasts throughout the song point to that dual aspect of Madonna's personality - and only a closed-minded critic could overlook the insincerity of the song's more shallow gestures.

Recommended: Yes