Madonna's "American Life" Is When We Should Have Known
She predicted everything we're drowning in, & America has never forgiven her.
(This is a long one, friends, and it may not load fully in email. Click the “open in app” or “online” buttons above the title in your email if need be!)
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion’s famous quote goes.
I moved to Los Angeles the day after Labor Day 2001 just after my college graduation, and it was the bravest, biggest thing I’d ever done, though it didn’t feel that way at the time. This is simply what you did at the turn of the century when you were a good kid with big dreams and a square shape to your peg—you packed up your shit and left Detroit for somewhere, anywhere thriving, some place the world could unfurl itself like a red carpet right up to your doorstep. The 22-year-old’s American Dream.
So on September 4, 2001, I packed up the aforementioned shit and drove to Los Angeles to become a movie star. My roommate Steve and I arrived on September 7, 2001, and the feeling of an apartment full of unopened boxes—my apartment, my boxes—was exhilarating and providential. Like a presentiment. Of what, it turns out I didn’t know, but I certainly thought I did: glitter, brass rings, the magic between the particles of gold dust hovering over the Hollywood Sign as the sun slanted just so through the evening smog and mist. That was the portent—magic and gold dust—and it never occurred to me I could have gotten it wrong. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, you see.
So that was September 7, a Friday. On September 9, a Sunday, there was an earthquake. Only a 4.2, just a singular jolt, but the biggest since the devastating quake of 1994, so it carried with it a certain—well, presentiment. “This is the biggest we’ve had since Northridge,” Dr. Lucy Jones of the US Geological Survey said in the TV press conference later, stopping short of actually saying what you could hear anyway if you were listening carefully: “and that’s not a good sign.”
Steve and I had been buying poster frames and oven mitts at the Bed Bath & Beyond in the hulking Beverly Center, the four-story mall perched atop five decks of parking like a towering cake, the kind of cool ugly only Los Angeles seems to know how to do. (I’m not regular ugly I’m cool ugly). The Bed Bath & Beyond was in the bottom of the thing, wedged underneath all that concrete like a rat warren full of Salad Shooters and shit.
So much of what happens to us does so in mere seconds, but in the remembering, it feels like hours, days, years. My memory is this: I was standing at a rack of large picture frames that towered all the way to the ceiling, looking for the perfect one for my prized The Breakfast Club poster, when they began to sway, and then to sort of judder like an old newsreel. I looked up and the frames way above my head were undulating, and I thought Steve must be on the other side of the rack shaking it to fuck with me. But then my knee buckled and I lurched forward as a sort of evil growl rang out, quick and urgent, a thud and a thump but not really either and seemingly beyond the human experience.
It is the brain’s safety protocol to rationalize what happens to us, and so the thought came that a giant semi-truck must have backed into the wall of the store. To believe otherwise would have meant accepting I am not in control, that none of us is, and that is simply too much to consider, we’ve built Benihanas and invented Motorola StarTacs and I’m 22 and the world is a yellow-brick road under my feet so this can’t possibly be the order of things.
In any case the rumbling thud gave way to a series of unison crashes and shatterings, like a choir harmonizing a single quarter note. As if coordinated to this music, the overhead lights flickered and I realized what was happening—and then it was over. Nothing but a heavy, electric silence which then snapped like a twig into either panic or an unimpressed shrug, depending on how many of these you’d been through. I’ll never forget the woman who simply glanced up at the ceiling, saw that the lights were going to stay affixed to the rafters, and went back to perusing dish towels. As for me and Steve, all we could think to do was laugh, so hard we couldn’t breathe.
That’s the memory. The reality was this: The earth lurched, just once, so hard it buckled my knee and cleared the shelves, but just the one jolt. An egg hitting a wall. The crack of the bat. That’s it. Most of the city didn’t even feel it, which seemed impossible until we heard Dr. Lucy say the quake had been epicentered roughly beneath the Beverly Center itself.
Anyway, we arrived Friday, September 7th and the earthquake was Sunday, September 9th and two days later, on Tuesday—well, you know what happened then.
“In the blink of an eye everything could change”
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” which is probably why we all thought it was an accident. The truth came, of course, in the form of two giant buildings falling before our eyes and incinerating 3,000 people as we watched from our sofas, or our desks or, God help all the New Yorkers and Washingtonians that day, our doorsteps or sidewalks. Or, in the case of a woman I once knew, from the place on the World Trade Center plaza where she looked up after trundling down 90 flights of stairs to see 110 floors of pancaking concrete roaring toward her head, her cue to bolt uptown, where a man grabbed her by the hair and hurled her into a bagel shop a split second before the debris cloud rushed by.
I can’t speak for those who lived through it first-person, but for me, on my secondhand couch in Los Angeles, my memory of the towers’ collapse, like the earthquake, is slow-motion. Katie Couric screaming, Steve yelling “what the fuck?!,” and each floor slamming down one-by-one, a discrete event that happened 110 times and took a horrifying, nauseating, stomach-dropping eternity. In reality, it only took 11 seconds for the world to never be the same.
At 4:00 that day, after the Senate finished singing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps for whatever reason, Steve turned to me and said “I gotta get out of here.” We walked to the Jack in the Box on Highland Avenue, full of just released teens from nearby Hollywood High School, who seemed oblivious to what had happened. I wondered if they didn’t know, or if they just weren’t equipped to process it. In hindsight, it was probably day one of what has become Millennials’ and Xennials’ greatest talent, dissociating while the world burns down around us.
Recently, a clip from an American high school just months after 9/11 went viral on Twitter, posted by someone too young to have lived it with the caption, “2002 looked so chill.” It was a bit like watching old concert footage—“look at all those people, and not a phone in sight”—which tends to make even the youngest among us marvel at how everyone is “just there in the moment.” Even they, the youngest, have a sense that something has gone sideways since back then.
In any case, you can probably imagine how the notion of 2002 being “chill” went over with anyone old enough to remember the terror and rage of the actual 2002.
The very suggestion is proof that even if the world didn’t end on 9/11, a world, the only world up until then, definitively did. So entirely that people born after it see clips of it and think it looks “chill” by comparison to today, having no cognizance that the rot in which we now live, that roar of collapse that hums in the background the way Muzak used to in elevators before we filled them all with screens blaring ads, was simmering in every moment, in every molecule, in every space in 2002, even in that “chill”-looking video clip full of Millennial teenagers.
Which is to say, they look “chill” because less than a year into this new world, they’d already mastered the art of dissociative soldiering-on. What other option did a kid in 2002 have?
“Gather up your hopes, gather up your dreams, just to stay alive is harder than it seems”
“If my ship goes down, no one’s gonna come for me” goes a lyric Madonna wrote in 2002 for a song called “To The Left, To The Right.” It first appeared online in a leaked tranche of hacked work-in-progress cast-offs from her 2003 album American Life, which predicted, even if only subtextually, everything in which we are now boiling to death, a magic trick for which the nation called out in its title has never forgiven her. America hates a Cassandra, and it hates a Cassandra even more when said Cassandra comes, as Cassandras tend to do, in the form of a woman, let alone a Madonna.
While it has thankfully begun to be re-examined, ask anyone but Madonna’s most ardent fans and the first word spoken about American Life will likely be “flop.” Though it debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts—which not even Ray of Light, her conventional-wisdom magnum opus, achieved—it quickly crashed, and it is to this day her worst-selling album of the pre-streaming era. Even Confessions On A Dance Floor, her first album to debut on iTunes so that people could simply buy “Hung Up” and blow off the rest, outsold it. By a lot.
It’s no mystery why. A rumination on fame, celebrity culture, and midlife re-examinations, it is by turns rageful and sad, the chronicle of a deeply unsettled woman whose personal reckonings happened to coincide with a nation’s. It is almost entirely undanceable, frequently ugly, and occasionally wack—all of which is purposeful (well, most of the time), the better to angrily or ironically or angronically jab at America’s, and Madonna’s own, obsessions with celebrity and capitalism.
Clocking irony, though, has never been America’s strong suit, nor has tolerating anger from women. And Americans, to say nothing of music critics, have rarely had time for Madonna unless she’s giving the umpteenth iteration of “Holiday.” American Life is the opposite of that—a diary and a polemic, and not even one about something thrilling like sex.
September 11th and the bizarre new world the internet rolled in just before it hang like a pall over the thing. When she’s done snarling about celebrity in the first act and mooning over Guy Ritchie in the middle one, she’s murmuring and lamenting and wondering what the hell we’re all going to do now. It’s among the most timely, vulnerable, and eerily prescient works ever recorded, and if anyone else had made it—someone free of the supposedly artless stink of pop and queerness, or someone at least with Pitchfork’s imprimatur—it would be considered, even if a flawed one, a masterpiece.
Instead, the line on American Life has always been a sneering eye-roll. Of all people to wax introspective about the trappings of fame and America’s obsession therewith—Madonna? That line of thought didn’t make sense then and doesn’t make sense now: As she herself said at the time, who better to interrogate some of America’s most formative sicknesses—fame, image, materialism, “the American Dream”—than the woman who knows them best? Nevertheless, the slag-off stuck. (It didn’t help that 2003 was the dawning of Madonna at her most Kabbalah-and-children’s-book insufferable, of course.)
“American Life” is inarguably an apt title for an album about the ills of celebrity obsession, because America is nothing if not its biggest export, Hollywood, writ large—louche, decadent, power-hungry, individualistic at all costs, and the single greatest PR coup in the history of the world. The metaphor works in any era, but American Life has extra trenchancy because it was conceived in a time when the world-renowned celebrity culture at its center was rapidly curdling into something else entirely.
“It’s so hard to find someone to admire”
Just two years prior to American Life’s composition, Survivor premiered and changed the cultural order of things forever. Suddenly all pop culture seemed to be was the newfangled “reality television,” and shows like Fear Factor, Temptation Island and The Anna Nicole Show, to name just a few, flooded the airwaves, bringing with them a new paradigm in which fame, previously a by-product of talent or a body of work, was now the product itself. Fame has always been a means to an end wherever art and commerce have met, but in the 2000s fame—or, more often than not, simply infamy—became the end per se.
Around the same time as Survivor’s gate-crash, Us magazine, a high- (or at least middle-) brow monthly culture chronicle in competition with the modish likes of Vanity Fair, rebranded itself as Us Weekly, a British-style tabloid full of paparazzi photos of stars pumping gas and dubiously sourced but reputedly authoritative reports on the minutiae of their lives. Within a very short time, there were a dozen copycats—InTouch, Life & Style, Star, etc.—doing the same thing, jockeying for space next to the Juicy Fruit gum in the grocery checkout line where People and Redbook and other magazines that actually reported articles used to be. Accordingly, people like Survivor’s Colleen Haskell and Richard Hatch began appearing on the covers of all these new tabloids, taking up real estate on both newsstands and in our brains that used to be reserved almost exclusively for the Julia Robertses and Brad Pitts of the world.
It’s hard to remember, 20 years later when this is all simply the norm, how weird and new and unseemly this was at the time. Mocked as she was for her ruminations on fame, Madonna seemed to have seen our present coming while writing American Life. In a 2003 Dateline interview timed to the album’s release, she seemed almost paranoid about the way fame and celebrity seemed to be metastasizing at the time. “I can tell you from my vantage point, which is what most people perceive as the top,” she told Dateline’s Matt Lauer, “that none of those things are really real.” Asked by Lauer to clarify if she was actually saying that the trappings of celebrity are “bull,” Madonna replied, “to a certain extent I am, because I see how obsessed with celebrity everybody is.”
That struck most people in 2003 as too rich by half coming from the mouth of the most famous and famously fame-hungry woman in the world. And, to be fair, ego surely had something to do with it—the fear of being eclipsed by reality television was everywhere in Hollywood in the 2000s. Hell, Lisa Kudrow made an entire show about it, HBO’s The Comeback, just two years after Madonna expressed her jitters to Matt Lauer.
Regardless, the world didn’t take long to prove Madonna’s jitters right. It was only months later that The Simple Life made Paris Hilton a worldwide superstar simply for being rich and having a famous name. It was just four years later that Hilton’s former assistant Kim Kardashian became infamous for a sex tape, a wave she has since ridden to unseat Madonna herself as the most famous woman in the world, reshaping not just the entertainment industry but our entire culture in the process—and doing so almost solely on a platform of bullshit. She’s never had surgery, never taken weight loss drugs, never been anything but “real,” you see—pay no mind to the obvious lies staring you in the face and buy some more SKIMS. And now, she’s a billionaire telling the rest of us we don’t work hard enough.
“None of those things are real,” Madonna said in 2003, before some of the world’s greatest bullshit artists were even a twinkle in the public’s eye. “I see how obsessed with celebrity everybody is,” she said in a year when MySpace was still nascent and Facebook hadn’t even been invented yet and the word “influencer” would have set Clippy off on a spell-check melee. It would still be another seven years before two real-life sisters best known as Paris Hilton’s aunts were so fame-hungry they let cameras record them destroying their relationship in the back of a limo for the season one finale of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the sort of commodification of privacy that is now totally normal but which even Madonna—herself often called the progenitor of reality TV—could only nervously dream of in 2003.
But perhaps there was an even more compelling reason for the discomfiting presentiment (that word again) that seemed to be churning Madonna’s stomach that day in 2003 with Matt Lauer. Just months later in January of 2004, another game-changing reality show would premier, hosted by and centered around the apotheosis of the American obsession with celebrity, a fame-hungry buffoon who would go on to become the 45th President of the United States.
“The world of illusion that we think is real,” Madonna would muse by way of explaining the inspiration for the tour that followed American Life that same year. “We live for it, we’re enslaved by it, and it will ultimately be our undoing.”
“This type of modern life is not for me”
The metaphor of America as unserious, fame-obsessed popularity contest is so on-the-nose it’s downright banal, and yet it was missed almost entirely when Madonna leveraged it on American Life, and eye-rolled away by those who did cotton onto it.
The timing didn’t help—in fact, it was downright catastrophic. American Life was conceived and recorded in 2002, when the disastrous Iraq War was still just a proposal—and one that made very little sense unless you were of a particular jingoistic, Islamophobic bent.
But by the time Madonna and director Jonas Akerlund were in the editing bay cutting the title track’s explicitly, graphically anti-war video that was meant to launch the album, the Iraq War had undergone a lengthy laundering that had a shell-shocked, terrorized, desperate-for-closure American public, including many progressive politicians and citizens (myself, shamefully, among them), contending that blowing up as many Iraqis as possible post-haste was an existential imperative. Accordingly, outrage over the “American Life” video was locked and loaded before it was even finished—which is particularly remarkable given that it never ended up even seeing the light of day.
The video melded the title track’s anxieties about celebrity obsession with the shockingly stupid and bloodthirsty political discourse of the day, depicting a Middle East combat-themed fashion show complete with Jeremy Scott-designed mini-skirt burkas and blown-off limb handbags. In the front rows are a who’s who of celebrity lookalikes gleefully laughing at the increasingly violent fare coming down the runway. In one particularly bracing moment, two small Middle Eastern girls in hijabs wander nervously down the runway to be terrorized by two camouflage-clad soldiers, who high-five while the little girls run off in a panic to the delighted applause of the celebrity audience.
Meanwhile, in the bowels of the fashion-show venue, Madonna and her own military regiment of infuriated women, dressed in the album artwork’s Patty Hearst X Che Guevara regalia, seethe in the stalls of a dingy bathroom about the goings-on upstairs, spoiling for a fight and hoofing one of Madonna’s greatest dance breaks, a delicious mix of collective anger and camp absurdity that she’s never quite hit so masterfully anywhere else.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
After their drills, they drive a car through the fashion show’s backdrop and raise holy hell, delivering “American Life’s” ironic rap bridge about the trappings of Madonna’s fame—a manifestly self-referential joke and lampoon of 2000s “flossy” celebrity culture that everyone insists to this day is in earnest, and mocks accordingly. (I will defend it to my grave as an ingenious blend of rage and silliness that, in the video’s context, feels almost perverse. It’s all the more droll 20 years later for its early-2000s anachronisms—remember when soy lattes and Mini Coopers were status symbols?)
For their part, the video’s fashion crowd doesn’t get the rap either, but in the opposite direction—they think Madonna and her fellow guerillas are just part of the show. They think the same of the maimed, mangled, bleeding troops and terrorized Middle Eastern people—one of them on fire—who shamble down the runway as the fashion show suddenly seems to devolve into some kind of wormhole to the real-life atrocities of war.
It’s not until Madonna hurls a grenade over her shoulder that the crowd finally realizes “nothing is what it seems,” as the song’s final lyric declares. In one of the several, and my personal favorite, alternate endings, the grenade lands in the hands of a George W. Bush look-alike, where it turns out to be nothing more than a lighter with which he sparks a congratulatory cigar—a terrific “fuck you” to a President who’d be locked up in The Hague in a world with any justice.
In any case, the implication was that America was an unserious country with an unserious populace taking cues from an unserious President and unserious elites who mostly couldn’t give a shit about what Madonna called the “catastrophic” human toll of war—a boondoggle so shit-fucked it can only now be estimated at approximately 500,000 people, more than half of which were civilians. And while perhaps nobody on Earth was more insulated from the impacts of the Iraq War than Madonna Louise Ciccone Ritchie, it is nevertheless impossible to argue with her thesis in good faith from the shambolic astral plane of 2023.
The 2003 response was hardly so intellectual. Based solely on behind-the-scenes clips breathlessly reported by MTV even as its brass was insisting Madonna censor herself, the video was lambasted as unpatriotic and traitorous by right-wingers, presumptuous and in poor taste by liberals and the media. The New York Times even went so far as to call the video the thing that would finally end Madonna’s career and at last send her to ignominy.
This, of course, was old hat—the same had been said of countless other Madonna videos over her then-20-year tenure. But Madonna’s 2003 backlash preceded a very different response. On March 28, 2003, eight days after American troops invaded Baghdad, she announced she would be delaying the “American Life” video to make significant edits, partly, she’d later reveal, at MTV’s behest. But only partly.
This alone was shocking. This was, after all, the woman who’d made history by releasing “Justify My Love” solely on home video after refusing to censor its explicit homoerotic sexual content. This was also the woman who defiantly told her former manager Freddy DeMann, “I am NOT. changing. my show” when the Toronto Police showed up to arrest her for simulating masturbation in 1990’s Blond Ambition Tour. Since when did this woman make edits to anything?
For the first time ever, Madonna seemed to be genuinely scared by backlash. Three days later, what seemed like a backing-off became a total about face—she announced March 31, 2003 that she was pulling “American Life” altogether. “Due to the volatile state of the world and out of sensitivity and respect to the armed forces, who I support and pray for,” she said in a statement, “I do not want to risk offending anyone who might misinterpret the meaning of this video.” It was replaced with a hastily thrown-together—and utterly toothless—video composed solely of the original video’s lip-syncing footage.
Between the video debacle, the song’s “rap” bridge going over everyone’s heads, and the general disinterest in and intolerance for the notion of Madonna actually being a human being with thoughts and feelings beyond just winking at a camera with a riding crop in her hand, “American Life’s,” and, it would turn out, American Life’s, proverbial geese were cooked.
Though both did well overseas, in the States the well was poisoned, and by the time the obligatory tour rolled around in 2004, Madonna seemed to be in damage-control mode. The hair was back to blonde, a remix CD was shoved out, and the marketing for the aptly named Reinvention Tour, billed as her first “greatest hits” outing—a concept she rejected with disgust just a year before in an appearance on MTV—made no reference to American Life, even visually.
She did, however, include half of the album in the tour’s setlist, in some truly exhilarating stagings. Nevertheless, when Madonna appeared on The View the following year and was asked to describe the album that would become Confessions On a Dance Floor, she quickly blurted out, “it’s all dance” as if pre-empting some kind of ire. Whatever went down around American Life behind closed doors, it had clearly gotten to her—the look of relief that flashes over her face when The View’s studio audience erupts into applause is unmistakable.
“Won’t let a stranger give me a social disease”
Madonna, of course, was not the only one vilified in 2003 for not marching in lockstep behind George W. Bush. Just three weeks before “American Life’s” cancellation and t-minus 10 days before the March 20th invasion, Natalie Maines, lead singer of The Chicks (then known as The Dixie Chicks), told an overseas crowd that she and her bandmates Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer were ashamed of George W. Bush for what by then seemed a threat of invasion that had passed a point of no return.
An astonishing backlash ensued—from both sides of the political spectrum—aided and abetted by country radio, which had become one of the right wing’s many mouthpieces. Public CD burnings were held, The Chicks’ tour and record deal were canceled, and the bandmates, Maines in particular, were viciously attacked in the media. It is a testament to how much things have changed that it is no longer easy to recall how absolutely shocking such a backlash was at the time.
In 2006, The Chicks revealed just how far that backlash reached in their comeback hit “Not Ready To Make Nice” and then, in far more bracing detail, in the documentary Shut Up and Sing, in which the trio discussed stalking incidents and credible death threats, including against their spouses and children, that necessitated round-the-clock security for them and their families.
Madonna denied throughout 2003 that the fear of being “Dixie Chicked” was the reason she ended up pulling “American Life,” telling Lauer that the video now seemed “inappropriate” since “many of the things that I…was trying to depict or warn people of were already happening in the world”—a view Akerlund insisted was the right choice in a recent 20th-anniversary Rolling Stone oral history of the video.
But the specter of The Chicks’ uproar is impossible to miss in the rest of her defense. “I’m very willing to push some buttons, I don’t have a problem with that,” she went on to tell Lauer, “but I think that what people would misconstrue is that I was slagging off at President Bush…or making light of what’s happening to the soldiers in Iraq, which I am not… People are so volatile that they’re not going to see irony.” Still, when further pressed by Lauer about The Chicks, Madonna doubled down. “I give you my honest to God promise that that is not the reason.”
The story changed, however, once the dust had settled. "I was ready to fight," she said in a 2005 interview with Spanish-language newspaper El Pais, timed to the launch of Confessions On A Dance Floor. “But there came a time when I remembered that I had a family. I saw what the Dixie Chicks suffered… Quite simply, they became the most hated women in the US and I decided that my two children were not going to go through that situation."
Whether or not her concern was based on credible threats of harm like The Chicks suffered, as fans have long theorized, is unknowable. But seeing how the American right treated three women ostensibly of its own ilk—good, down-home Southern girls singing wholesome country music—and especially knowing what we now know about the ways right-wing sentiment has metastasized into open bloodlust over the last two decades, it beggars belief to assume Madonna’s move was simply a dodge to salvage her record sales.
That is what most gets missed in the discourse about American Life, then and now. Madonna’s pulling of the brilliant “American Life” video is widely considered, even among many of her most devoted fans, to be the one truly shameful act of her career, a moment of cowardice in which she bowed to controversy and right-wing animus instead of thumbing her nose like usual. “I bet you she does it even more,” Freddy DeMann famously says, in the 1991 tour documentary Truth Or Dare, of Madonna’s simulated masturbation as she takes the stage moments after the Toronto police’s threats. Pulling a video because Republicans say it’s unpatriotic? To this day, many speak of her decision as if it were a betrayal.
But that fundamentally misunderstands, or at least misremembers, the time. To this day, the insanity of the Dixie Chicks incident—which is to say, literal bloodthirst—gets elided into jokes about hillbillies and white trash and Toby Keith being a troglodyte. But the conservative outrage over The Chicks and other anti-war voices didn’t just evaporate.
It helped re-elect George W. Bush, then gave way to the Tea Party movement bent on ousting Barack Obama for supposedly being a secret Kenyan Muslim terrorist. And as political analysts have frequently pointed out, there is a direct line from the Tea Party of the 2000s to the right-wing extremism of the 2010s that helped elect Donald Trump and then kicked off the 2020s by erupting in the January 6 coup attempt at the Capitol—an event that, much like September 11th 20 years before it, ushered in if not a new world then certainly a new point of no return. It is not hyperbolic to suspect that some of the same people who called for Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi to be dragged to the gallows erected in front of the Capitol and hanged on national television were also among those calling for Natalie Maines to be decapitated in 2003.
Or maybe not. Maybe I am hyperbolizing. Maybe I’m just frightened. Maybe the wild-eyed, visceral anxiety that filled the background of every moment of “chill” 2002 is still too easy to recall. Maybe the slack-jawed dread I felt as I sat in my car in my friend Mark’s driveway on March 20, 2003, staring through the windshield as NPR announced American troops had just officially invaded Baghdad, is still too close to the surface.
Maybe the still impossible-to-believe horrors of everything that came after—Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, the never-ending 2008 financial crisis, Gamergate and Isla Vista, Big Mike and Trayvon, Charlottesville and Kenosha, the NYPD and LAPD driving cop cars into protestors on live television with total impunity, the constant escalation of mass shootings and racial violence and police brutality and right-wing extremism and white nationalism and Christofascism and the thinly veiled dog-whistle calls for the genocide of queer and especially transgender people—all the ways things have steadily, inexorably, without pause gotten worse with every moment that has passed since 9/11—maybe it’s all hijacked my ability to think or feel rationally whenever I hear the angry, disorienting, all-over-the-place notes of “American Life” erupt out of my earbuds. Maybe I’m reading my own angst into something that really is, at the end of the day, just a shitty “flop,” just the cowardly pulled punch of a bloviating diva that everyone says it is.
But we tell ourselves stories in order to live. We didn’t take them seriously when they called for Natalie Maines’ head in 2003. Even after they came within seconds, by The New York Times’ count, of successfully carrying out their plan to capture and execute politicians on TV on January 6, many of us still don’t take them seriously today. But we fucking should.
In the end, Madonna did—first by pointing a finger at them and the structures enabling them in her eerily prescient “flop” 20 years ago, then in her decision to duck and cover to keep her children safe. To fault her for it is willfully jejune. It can’t be said with any confidence that something far worse than being “Dixie Chicked” wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t made the hard left she made. Terror will make people, and a people, do insane things. We are slowly drowning in the proof of that now, a new reminder seemingly every day.
“I know that love will take us away from here”
“I know that love will change us forever, and I know that love will keep us together,” Madonna sings in the chorus of the exquisite “Intervention,” a song that only slyly references the events of 9/11 but shudders and hand-wrings in its aftermath throughout. Its unsettling urgency blooms in the song’s bridge, in what feels like American Life’s most explicit allusion to 9/11: “In the blink of an eye everything could change, say hello to your life, now you’re living. This is it, from now on it’s a brand-new day, it was time to wake up from this dream.”
Those words may seem optimistic, but the song’s minor key and producer Mirwais Ahmadzai’s arrangement, an explosion of clanging, dissonant guitar, drains the optimism from the lyrics. We are never more alive, after all, than when we’re staring death in the face—whether or own, our loved ones’, or 3,000 strangers on TV. Or, as it would turn out, 500,000 supposedly nefarious abstractions in the Middle East.
By the end of “Intervention,” the woman at its center doesn’t seem at all certain that her chorus’ bulwark against despair can hold true. Madonna’s greatest talent as a singer has always been injecting emotion into her otherwise pedestrian voice, and she sings the song’s final line, “I know there is nothing to fear, and I know that love will take us away from here,” as if exhausted by her own optimism. As if conceding the point.
“I bet you she does it even more,” Freddy DeMann said in 1990. But in 2003 a gash had been blown through the bedrock of the country, and out of it bled a rage, a volatile fear, and a primal ugliness so mortifying even the boldest, brashest, middle-finger-flippingest woman alive was so frightened by it she could think of nothing to do but gather up her baby boy and daughter and slowly back away. Twenty years on, with all the water under the bridge, it’s hard to hear or watch American Life and not be left with the sense that we should have known.
“I was just looking for—everybody’s looking for something”
The world at large was falling apart when American Life arrived, but so was my own small corner of it. The previous July, in “chill” 2002, my best friend died out of nowhere. The loss was bad enough, but Michael was also my vicarious tether to life itself—he saw through me, and knowing someone knew my secrets was what kept me together. Now, the stories I told myself in order to live were suddenly illegible.
I’d had a plan. Move to Los Angeles, become a movie star, sublimate all the darknesses I couldn’t name—the hell-worthy failure of my sexuality, the bullying and abuse, the shames and rejections. I’d curse them with the light of renown, beat the odds, exact revenge, win respect. I floored the pedal of the U-Haul and I was free.
“They like the smell of it in Hollywood, how could it hurt you when it looks so good?,” Madonna asks in American Life’s “Hollywood.” I never imagined, staring at the Hollywood Sign from my bedroom balcony in 2003, that the red carpet that rolled up to my door in 2001 would roll itself back up so quickly.
It became my daily ritual to put American Life into my Discman and hike up Runyon Canyon—the hard route, off to the left. “Do I have to change my name? Will it get me far?” she asks in the album’s first words, a relic of a time before SEO when unique names like my own were a hindrance in Hollywood. I’d dumbed mine down on my acting resume because no one can ever say it right, and I was assured that would be a problem in casting calls.
“Should I lose some weight? Am I gonna be a star?” she’d finish as I’d trudge up the hillside, hoping that taking the hard way up would make me thinner faster because the 40 pounds I’d lost weren’t nearly enough around here.
What made American Life perfect for Runyon Canyon was that the album ended just about the time I began my descent. I’d look out over Los Angeles, all the way to the ocean on clear days, and the beauty of it—that exquisite turquoise and beige and green and gold I’ve just never found anywhere else—would fill me just like it had two years before when I’d first arrived. Except now it hurt. I didn’t know then that when the world has cracked apart and you’re broken and grieving and reeling and lost, your brain gets scrambled, and that you don’t have to—in fact you shouldn’t—believe everything it says.
“I go ‘round and ‘round just like a circle,” Madonna sings on “Easy Ride,” American Life’s final track that would play as I descended through the fragrant eucalyptus and scrub oaks of the Canyon. “What I want is to live forever. Not defined by time and space, it’s a lonely place,” she says, and it seemed as good a plan as any. At the end of the summer of 2003—two years almost to the day from when I’d arrived—I sold what I could, packed up the rest, and left Los Angeles. My heart stayed behind, and I’ve only just recently gotten it back. Some of it, anyway.
There's something in the air in Hollywood. I tried to leave it but I never could.
I have a theory that many of us, or parts of us anyway, are trapped in the early 2000s, in 2001 and 2002 and 2003. Psychology tells us trauma locks a part of us in the event forever. Some of us never get out. Others do. But those parts that got stuck never quite catch up.
I wonder sometimes if that’s why everything happening, and that has been happening, is happening. We are trapped in the blood and terror of the early 2000s, trapped in the rage, betrayals, reprisals and in the broken promises that came after. We are all of us mad as hell. We are all of us caught in a loop. We are all of us, albeit in different ways, acting out, all of the time. And because nobody at the helm gives a shit, we just keep going. And going. And going.
“I go round and round just…” Madonna sings in the spiraling ending of “Easy Ride,” never quite able to finish the thought. “Round and round just…” as strings sting in and out, a menacing bassline slinking between it all like a stalking snake. “Round and round just…” Then the beat stops, and the bass ends, and the strings groan to a halt without reaching a resolution, and the album starts over again.
“In the blink of an eye everything could change.” And that, just as it was 20 years ago, is precisely the trouble.
—
Lyrics from Madonna’s American Life album are reproduced under the Fair Use provisions for criticism and comment of the 1976 Copyright Act. No infringement is intended.
Your precision..! I am sick and astonished and consoled and sick and astonished and consoled! Thank you for writing. Really, thank you.
Your powers of perception and ability to “connect the dots” is jaw-dropping. Thank you for this genuinely exquisite amalgamation of socio-political analysis and memoir.