All this useless beauty

Thanks to the pristine, prettified and precious new album "North," a longtime Elvis Costello die-hard finally dies. Hard.

By Shannon Zimmerman

Topics:Music

For many years, I had no credibility on the topic of Elvis Costello. I was a rabid fan for way too long. A gigantic promotional poster for “Get Happy!!” hung on my bedroom wall for most of my teenage years, and when I was 15 and living in Memphis, my best friend and I convinced my mom to drive us down to Atlanta to see Elvis and the Attractions kick off the “English Mugs” tour (for the “Trust” LP) at the fabulous Fox Theatre on Peachtree Street.

Now my mom, who by far prefers the earlier Elvis, had no intention of going to the show, and she insisted on bringing some company along for the eight-hour ride and overnight stay. So into our two-door Chrysler Cordoba (with its rich Corinthian leather, natch) piled me, my buddy, my sister, my aunt, my cousin and, oh yes, even my grandmother. Mom also insisted on road-trip soundtrack rights: An 8-track of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5 and Odd Jobs.” The entire way.

I’ve never been the same since.

But that has less to do with the Dolly album (which, like the film it’s loosely based on, ain’t half bad) than with the show Costello put on, which was great. Even more significant is the fact that I actually got to meet the man after the gig. Along with a relatively small contingent of fellow fanatics, my friend and I staked out the hotel where the band was staying and waited impatiently in the lobby for a sighting.

And waited and waited. Just as we were about to give up and head back to the hotel dejected, we spied Jake Riviera, Costello’s famously combustible manager, pitching a fit at the front desk. We thrilled to every syllable of his British-accented invective. Even better, just as Riviera appeared to be simmering down, the members of the band Squeeze — which had opened the show — rounded the corner, heading posthaste, it appeared, for the bar.

Pimply-faced teenagers who looked even younger than our tender years, we knew our chances of making it into the hotel’s swank watering hole were, shall we say, less than zero. So we did what any self-respecting pair of geeky fanboys would do under similar circumstances — headed Squeeze off and proceeded to pepper them with questions about how the band would change now that pop crooner Paul Carrack had replaced spastic Farfisa man Jools Holland. Polite Englishmen all, the band fielded our queries and even signed multiple copies of “East Side Story” with complete graciousness.

We were most impressed — but the big Kahuna had yet to appear.

Just after Squeeze made its great escape, I spotted Pete Thomas, the Attractions’ lanky drummer, strolling nonchalantly into the hotel lobby. Next came bassist Bruce Thomas, keyboard maestro Steve Nieve and then, finally, the man himself. Short, sheet-white and bespectacled with the shades he wears on the “Trust” album cover, Elvis sauntered to the center of the lobby escorted by a bevy of beauties and two large bodyguards. At 15, I was already a foot taller than him, but it didn’t matter: I was clearly in the presence of rock ‘n’ roll genius.

“Gr-great show, Elvis,” I managed to stammer while reaching down to shake his slightly pudgy hand.

“Yeah, Elvis. Really great,” said my pal.

We were a smitten pair, hopelessly devoted to this fount of bitter wisdom and pithy melody. And then Elvis Costello — Mr. Revenge and Guilt himself — said the only two words he’s ever addressed to me specifically. I, of course, will never forget them.

“Thank you,” he replied, and then made for the elevator, entourage in tow.

Anticlimactic? Not at all. If anything, the encounter sealed my fate. Later in my career of obsession, I would write a letter to Rolling Stone defending “Punch the Clock” — admittedly not Costello’s finest hour — as a “spirited and soulful classic” after a reviewer gave it a so-so write-up. In what I took as a brazen act of contempt, the magazine published my screed above another complaining about a review of the Doobie Brothers’ “Farewell Tour” LP.

That was then, however. This is now. I still like “Punch the Clock,” but to my ears, Costello hasn’t made a great disc in a long, long time.

As anyone who’s seen him in concert recently can attest, he’s still an engaging live performer. But his albums have become tough to take — mannered and ponderous (as opposed to the short, sharp stab of his early work), lousy with studied and self-impressed crooning, boatloads of over-emoting and, most depressingly, say-nothing words that aren’t even well-crafted. Costello was once the master of the cutting remark, a Dylan-esque wordsmith capable of conjuring and dismissing Winston Churchill, apartheid and the National Front with just a single, improbably well-turned phrase.

Now he’s a navel-gazing romantic who apparently let all those Gershwin comparisons go to his head.

Consider the man’s latest opus, “North.” It’s another of his non-rock excursions into Bacharachian la-la land, an album positively larded with orchestral refinement and Brill Building aspiration. Trouble is, there’s nary a memorable melody among the disc’s 11 tunes. Sure, sure: Tracks such as the disc’s pillowy opener, “You Left Me in the Dark,” and the jazz-inflected “When Did I Stop Dreaming” are technically impressive, subtle and understated showcases for Costello’s octave-scaling range decked out with a supple brass section and Nieve’s gorgeous piano flourishes. But as Costello once understood implicitly, just because you can do something fancy doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. Emotional resonance trumps technical proficiency in just about every realm of art — pop music most of all — and for all their flash and panache, most of the tracks on “North” are just musical Rube Goldberg devices: intricate, fussed-over structures that never lead anywhere worth going.

Costello is a genuine talent, of course, and so there are a handful of exceptions scattered among “North’s” shiny rubble. “You Turned to Me” begins as a somber piano ballad before taking a left turn toward a bright melody that cuts against the track’s vaguely bitter words. The lovely “When Green Eyes Turn Blue,” which glides on a swell of strings, woodwinds and brass, has the feel — if not the tune — of a future standard. And when Costello sits down for a turn at the piano on the relatively unadorned “Let Me Tell You About Her,” he promptly delivers the disc’s most fetching song.

Still, as that track’s words allow, “Some things are too personal/ Too intimate to spill.” And for all his vocal bravado and feats of musical derring-do, Costello seems to be holding a lot back on “North.” The whole thing is humorless, too — a hallmark of his non-rock work. It’s almost as if Costello himself fears that he’s just a talented poseur in this idiom and that flashing any of the incisive wit that marks his best records would give the game away. Even the liner notes seem like so much résumé puffery, duly noting that Costello “arranged and conducted” most of the disc’s worked-to-death tracks. This from a man who once listed himself (on the credits for the mighty “King of America”) as “The Little Hands of Concrete.”

Look, I know how this sounds: Some longtime fan prefers the guy’s early records. What a surprise. Believe me, though, no one could be more disappointed than I am. I was inclined to think “The Juliet Letters,” Costello’s pretentious 1993 collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet, was an ambitious one-off, charming for the way it rubbed your face in the man’s outsized ambition. And though it came with a depressingly pompous title, I still think 1996′s “All This Useless Beauty” got the mix of orchestral reach and pop-rock grasp just about exactly right.

But that’s the last Costello disc I can wholeheartedly recommend. Even last year’s much-ballyhooed “return to rock” (“When I Was Cruel”) seems forced and stodgy, as if the man himself wasn’t so interested in that particular batch of tunes.

And why would he be? “North” makes it emphatically clear — even, finally, to the likes of me — that Elvis Costello left the building a long time ago and is now in hot pursuit of boring old songbook respectability.

What a way to make a living.

: Shannon Zimmerman writes about music for the Washington Post, the Village Voice and other publications. More Shannon Zimmerman

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Whitney Houston’s lessons in love

As a girl, the late diva's songs taught me about love. As an adult, she showed me about loss and pain

VIDEO

By Sarah Hepola

Whitney Houston at Wembley Stadium in 1988. (Credit: Reuters)

Topics:Whitney Houston, Editor's Picks, Music, Nostalgia

In seventh grade I owned the cassette tape of “Whitney,” the second album by Whitney Houston, which was true of pretty much every 12-year-old female in America. I played the hell out of that tape. I used to spend afternoons in my bedroom, lip-syncing those songs to my bedroom wall, because that’s the kind of kid I was. Always longing for an imaginary audience. I did not want to be a writer back then, or the president of the United States. I wanted to be a pop star. And in 1987, there wasn’t any pop star more elegant or talented than Whitney Houston. Daughter of a gospel singer, niece of an R&B legend, smashingly beautiful — she was practically anointed by the gods for greatness.

The song I loved the most on that tape was “Didn’t We Almost Have It All.” Fourth song, first side. I would perform the song to the wall, then rewind it and perform it again. Play, rewind, repeat. I can still hear the squiggle of the tape in my head as I pressed on the jam-box button just long enough to find the song’s opening once more. This is a lost art in the age of the iPod, but back then, knowing how many seconds to rewind a cassette was a sign you truly understood its rhythms. You had literally learned the music backward and forward.

“This again?” my brother would ask as the tinkling synthesizers kicked in. My brother was a metalhead, who loved the righteous anger of AC/DC and Judas Priest and did not give a rip for the likes of Whitney Houston.

He did not get a choice in the matter. Here is how the song begins:

Remember when we held on the rain, the nights we almost lost it?

Once again, we can take the night into tomorrow

Living on feelings, touching you I feel it all again

It’s a bit mundane, frankly. It’s a fill-in-the-blank tale of a broken relationship. Funny how every love story sounds the same but feels so different when you’re inside it. That’s the poignancy of love stories, I guess. You’re never alone. Then again: You’re never unique.

But this song is all about the chorus. It is a song constructed almost entirely of its irresistible chorus — half a dozen times in less than five minutes — and the chorus launches a mere 45 seconds in. No foreplay, no footsie under the table, no lingering glances and sighs. This song grabs you by the collar and sticks its tongue down your throat.

It’s a really fantastic chorus, by the way. It’s OK to sing along:

Didn’t we almost have it all, when love was all we had worth giving?

The ride with you was worth the fall, my friend. Loving you makes life worth living.

At 12 years old, I had never been in love. I had never even kissed anyone. And so it’s peculiar that I experienced this song so powerfully. The agony. The crashing emotion. The ka-pow of it all. Why did I feel it so intensely? What was it teaching me? I wonder if all these songs of woe and regret didn’t warp my sense of romance. I wanted to grow up and fall in love, but more to the point: I wanted to grow up and lose that love, because that’s when the real drama began. I understood, even then, the delicious pain of being brokenhearted.

The chorus returns, a little different this time:

Didn’t we almost have it all, the nights we held on till the morning?

You know we’ll never love that way again. Didn’t we almost have it all?

This song climaxes so quickly. Not even a minute into it, and we’re already basking in Whitney’s vibrato, the glorious burst of sustained sound that would become her signature. The woman could push a note like nobody else, squeeze it and feel it up till the listener wanted to cry for mercy. But when you peak this early, it’s hard to know where to go next. The excitement is unsustainable, and for the next three minutes the song will throw out its back trying to one-up itself — a series of elevated key changes, strings atop swell. The song wants you to know the singer is bleeding.

For the moment, though, it pulls back. Whitney’s voice grows subdued. We get more of the back story, which, naturally, is like every back story we’ve ever heard.

The way you used to touch me felt so fine

Kept our hearts together, down the line

A moment in the soul can last forever, comfort and keep us

Help me bring the feeling back again.

I can understand why people hate Whitney Houston. I mean, these lyrics are dreck. It’s cooler to love the big, dirty riffs of Van Halen, the gritty excess of Guns N Roses. But I still find the stadium ballads of the mid-1980s strangely moving. The REO Speedwagon, the Air Supply, the Chicago, the Bryan Adams. The cheesy, lighter-held-aloft songs. They are not clever. They are not sly. They have the temerity to be earnest and unblinking, nothing but a desperate plea to be loved. Like a boyfriend who dims the lights and scatters rose petals in the bathtub. Please, baby, come back to me.

Or, as Whitney Houston sings it:

Didn’t we almost have it all? When love was all we had worth giving?

The ride with you was worth the fall, my friend. Loving you makes life worth living

I finally did fall in love in my sophomore year. He was sweet like my father, charming like my older brother. I still adore him. We drove around in his Chevy Nova listening to David Bowie and Elvis Costello. I began to understand that Whitney Houston was bad and not to be encouraged. We made fun of “I Will Always Love You,” the No. 1 song that would not go away in 1992, the year we graduated. We wanted to stab that song with knives; we wanted to punish it somehow. We were not the only ones turning on Whitney. That was the year Nirvana hit. Culture was edging away from the light and toward the dark, and there was Whitney in the video for “I Will Always Love You,” singing her heart out in the middle of an empty winter landscape as Kevin Costner walked away.

My boyfriend and I broke up at the end of high school, and I secretly bought the cassingle to “I Will Always Love You.” I listened to it in my bedroom, over and over. Nothing could touch the pure emotion of that song. I listened to “Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” too, and it was exactly the comfort I wanted, like pulling an old teddy bear off the shelf and cradling it in your arms as you cried.

Didn’t we almost have it all? The nights we held on to the morning?

You know you’ll never love that way again. Didn’t we almost have it all?

“Didn’t We Almost Have It All” is a good breakup song because it grows temperamental. It’s not just a lament. It’s a bit of a tantrum. It’s all so unfair, Whitney is telling us. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. We had it all, and then we did not. How could that possibly happen?

And I like this part, the growl in Whitney’s voice, like she is stomping her foot.

Didn’t we have the best of times, when love was young and new?

Couldn’t we reach inside to find the world of me and you?

We’ll never lose it again. Cause once you know what love is, you’ll never let it end.

After college, I stopped paying attention to Whitney Houston. I guess a lot of people did. There was a reality show, and crack, and debasement that defied easy explanation. It was easy to shove it off on Bobby Brown — the controlling spouse, the bad influence — but she was the one who stayed with him. The reality show made her seem coarse and a little bit mean. When she told Diane Sawyer that “crack is wack,” it was like she was participating in her own satire. This was unanticipated. Crack addicts were not supposed to look like Whitney Houston.

The thing is, I’ve met other crack addicts since then, and they don’t look the part either. That might be the one characteristic they have in common, other than an addiction to smoking crack. I never did drugs; I was a boozehound, a pure-bred lush. But I understand that you have to keep pushing to get the same feeling. You level out, and so you need more. You level out again, and you need more again. Play, rewind, repeat. It’s not just the crack or the booze that destroys people. It’s the always needing more.

I once heard drug addiction described as nostalgia. Chasing the perfection and the abandon of that first time.

Didn’t we almost have it all? The nights we held on to the morning.

You know you’ll never love that way again.

I was reading a book about Marilyn Monroe when I heard that Whitney Houston had died at the age of 48. Monroe’s is the ur-diva downfall, and these tragedies have elements in common: Drugs, a questionable taste in men, the inability to live up to a public persona, success like a rocketship. And they had beauty, of course. Uncommon, breathtaking beauty.

Earlier that afternoon, I had been taking a walk with a friend. I am 37, she is a little older, perhaps 39. We were talking about how hard it is for gorgeous women to age, because they get too accustomed to the oxygen of male desire. One of the good things about never being the best-looking woman in the room is that you never have to stop being the best-looking woman in the room. It is a dangerous game to base your meaning and self-worth on other people’s admiration, because it will inevitably recede, and I don’t think anyone would understand that better than Whitney Houston. It must be agonizing to hold the world’s attention in your palm, and then to feel it slowly drain away.

Didn’t we almost have it all?

After I learned about Whitney Houston’s death, I went searching for this song on YouTube. It is such a corny song, I know, but it made my heart pound nonetheless. I love it completely, without reason, the way you feel about a high school sweetheart, the way you feel about a drug, the way you feel about a song you loved when you were dumb and splendid and 12 years old.

I listen to songs over and over again. I have always been like this. I asked my mother, who is a therapist, why I did this, and she said maybe I was trying to unlock a song’s mystery, to master it in some way.

And I do notice different things every time I hear this song. I notice a quiver in the voice, a breath, a pause. I notice how the song ends by asking the same question twice, different each time. First it is defiant. Then it is sad and vulnerable.

Didn’t we almost have it all? the song asks. And I don’t know the answer to this question. So I press repeat, and listen to it once more.

: Sarah Hepola is an editor at Salon. More Sarah Hepola

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A voice that touched us all

Like Michael Jackson, another icon lost to addiction and fame, Whitney was an awe-inspiring, genre-crossing pioneer

By Annie Zaleski

Whitney Houston performs during the Billboard Awards at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on Dec. 7, 1998. (Credit: AP)

Topics:Whitney Houston, Music, Celebrity, Editor's Picks

On Thursday night, Whitney Houston appeared at the Kelly Price & Friends Unplugged: For The Love of R&B pre-Grammys event. Amateur YouTube footage of the singer’s performance hinted at hysteria: Audience members screamed her name and flashbulbs exploded as she crooned the Christian hymn “Jesus Loves Me” in a sultry lower register as a duet with Price. The version of the song was gentle and tempered, although Houston’s beatific looks and animated gestures imbued it with quiet jubilance.

The performance feels sickeningly eerie on the heels of Houston’s death Saturday at 48. Both the song and her duet partner were links to the singer’s decorated past: Price featured on her Grammy-nominated 1999 single “Heartbreak Hotel” and a studio version of “Jesus Loves Me” appeared on the soundtrack of “The Bodyguard,” the 1992 album which made Houston a megastar. What’s more, she looked healthy and sounded strong; there were no warning signs that the brief appearance would be her last. (Though the photos of her returning to the Beverly Hills Hotel on Friday night tell a different story.) Houston, whose reputation was marred by a turbulent marriage to R&B star Bobby Brown (and a disastrous reality show about their lives together) and well-publicized struggles with addiction, finally seemed well enough to reboot her singing career.

Despite erratic public behavior and increasingly unsteady live performances, Houston always had fans who rooted for her recovery, who wanted her to recapture her powerhouse voice and magnetic personality. Born into music royalty — her mom was the gospel icon Cissy Houston, her cousin Dionne Warwick and her godmother soul great Aretha Franklin — the New Jersey native cut her teeth singing gospel in church, modeling and acting. By the time she earned a record deal, Whitney (like Madonna, Prince and Michael, one name was enough to identify her) was an enviable combination of glamorous and casual. On 1985’s “Whitney Houston” and 1987’s “Whitney,” her spin on contemporaneous soft rock, R&B, soul and gospel was mature but not stuffy or beholden to formality; on early hit singles, she struck a balance between playful longing (“How Will I Know,” “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” “So Emotional”) and serious balladry (“Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” “Saving All My Love For You”). To little girls growing up in the ‘80s, Whitney Houston and Madonna were the artists you emulated and sang along to (loudly); they were the powerful, confident women you heard on the radio all the time, the pair you strove to be like.

However, Houston was also more than likely the artist your mom (if not grandmother) liked, which helped her ease gracefully into an adult career. That period arguably started with her dual starring acting role/soundtrack appearances on 1992’s “The Bodyguard,” a movie in which Kevin Costner played her protector. If her ‘80s tunes made her a household name, her interpretation of the Dolly Parton-penned “I Will Always Love You” sent her into the stratosphere. To this day, Houston’s soft-rock re-do of the country hit endures as an awe-inspiring performance: octave-dancing vocal prowess, nuanced emotional longing and the kind of subtlety hard to find in today’s mainstream music, in the form of her dramatic pause near the end of the song before she launches into the climactic, “And I…will always love youuuuu… .”

Houston would never top “The Bodyguard” and its monstrous success. (Besides “I Will Always Love You,” the soundtrack spawned the torchy hit “I Have Nothing” and a disco-soul remake of Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman.”) And although she continued to evolve into a graceful R&B singer and rack up winning singles — throughout the 1990s, hits came from the soundtracks of “Waiting To Exhale,” “The Preacher’s Wife” and “The Prince Of Egypt” and her 1998 solo album, “My Love Is Your Love” — her problems with drugs and a chaotic marriage soon took a toll on her public persona. Rumors of substance abuse swirled around her — something not helped when marijuana was found in her and Brown’s luggage in 2000 — and in a 2002 interview with Diane Sawyer, a defensive Houston uttered these infamous sentences: “Crack is cheap; I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Let’s get that straight, okay? We don’t do crack, we don’t do that. Crack is wack.” The latter catchphrase caused an uproar and did irreparable damage to her reputation.

But Houston persevered — and eventually came clean about her private turmoil. In a 2009 Oprah Winfrey interview, a calmer Houston — her voice noticeably raspier and lower — was open about abusing cocaine and marijuana, and admitted the post-”Bodyguard” era was tough: “By ’The Preacher’s Wife,’ [doing drugs] was an everyday thing. … I would do my work, but after I did my work, for a whole year or two, it was everyday.” Her marriage to Brown was troubled, she told Oprah, including a time when he spit in her face in front of their daughter, Bobbi. The couple divorced in 2007.

In recent years, Houston’s fortunes ebbed and flowed. 2009’s “I Look to You” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and the song “Million Dollar Bill” also hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play charts, but lukewarm-to-critical reception marred her 2010 world tour and she entered outpatient rehab as recently as May 2011. Still, in her recent public appearances she seemed upbeat and healthy; it seemed plausible she could follow in the footsteps of Tina Turner, who rejuvenated her career after extricating herself from an abusive domestic situation.

But with her premature death, it’s hard not to compare Houston to Michael Jackson, another ‘80s megastar who died young, crippled by addiction and the burdens of fame. Like the King Of Pop, Houston was a pioneer, one who broke open racial barriers so that other soul/R&B artists could have a shot at mainstream success. “The Bodyguard” was Houston’s “Thriller,” the career albatross from which she could never escape. And just as MJ reinvented the concept of the male pop star, Houston did the same for women. She was vulnerable and girlish, but never let those qualities undermine her talent, something fellow huge-voiced diva Mariah Carey took to heart. And Houston exuded confidence in every aspect of her career — of course because of her voice, but also because of her expressive interpretations. She could have bludgeoned listeners over the head with just the sheer power of her voice — but instead, Houston approached her songs like an actress inhabiting a character, squeezing emotion from every lyric with sincerity, grace and elegance.

: Annie Zaleski is the managing editor of Alternative Press magazine. More Annie Zaleski

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Whitney Houston dies at 48

A look back at the glorious career and biggest hits of the troubled pop diva

VIDEO

By Salon Staff

Singer Whitney Houston is shown during the Whitney Houston "I Look To You" CD Listening Party held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Thursday July 23, 2009 in Beverly Hills, California.

Topics:Music, Editor's Picks, Whitney Houston

Before the tragic tabloid headlines, the “crack is wack” denials and the tumultuous marriage to Bobby Brown, pop/soul diva Whitney Houston towered over the music world in the mid-1980s and early ’90s.

Houston died Saturday in Beverly Hills, on the eve of the Grammy Awards. She was 48.

: More Salon Staff

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How Madonna liberated America

As the pop icon prepares to play the Super Bowl, a celebration of the way she changed sexual mores forever

By Sara Marcus

Topics:Music, Super Bowl, Editor's Picks

When Madonna takes the stage at halftime of the Super Bowl this Sunday, she’ll be the first female solo performer to do so since Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake played peek-a-boo in 2004. Ever since Nipplegate, Super Bowl programmers have avowedly played it safe, booking a string of hoary grown-man rockers such as Paul McCartney and The Boss, known quantities not prone to random disrobing.

By and large, the halftime show has become the live-performance equivalent of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an honor bestowed long after an artist’s peak. So Madonna, once the baddest good girl or best bad girl in pop, is now safe prime-time fare? No shocker there. But even if Madonna hasn’t had a mega-hit since Justin Bieber was in diapers, that’s far from the point. Madge will be bringing two other fabulous Ms. M’s — Minaj and M.I.A. — onstage with her, which is exciting, but that’s not the point either.

No, the point is that this Sunday will be an opportunity to celebrate the changes Madonna brought to American culture at the height of her career. Her visionary assault on American prudery, her revelatory spreading of sexual liberation to Middle America, changed this country for the better. And that’s not old news; we’re still living it.

If this sounds elementary to speak of now, it’s only because we’ve spent so long in the world Madonna made that we can hardly imagine it any other way. But throughout the 1980s and into the ’90s, her protean personae and erotic gambits were consistently a step ahead of what Middle America was ready for. She dared us to catch up with her. Remember, she (and the fans who fell in love with her in second grade, ahem) came of age in an era when a U.S. president could reasonably believe that he could confess to having committed adultery in his heart — not in an open marriage or on the Appalachian trail, folks —without sounding utterly ridiculous.

In the early ’80s, when the Material Girl owned the dance floor at Manhattan nightclubs and reveled in the downtown scene’s polysexual utopia, the political advances of feminism and gay liberation had stalled out and were hurtling toward backlashville. By the end of that decade, when gay rights laws were being repealed in cities across the country, Madonna was bringing the ball culture of gay and transgender blacks and Latinos — the true voguers — to junior high school gymnasium dances worldwide, popularizing an ecstatic ethos of freedom, sexual and otherwise, sprung directly from big-city club scenes that millions of suburban kids might never get to experience firsthand.

In an era when photographers and performance artists were being blasted in the halls of Congress and the courts of public opinion for using religious iconography or homoerotic images or referring to self-gratification, Madonna hit upon danceably glamorous versions of all of these things. She managed to smuggle the values of the sexually fluid, multiracial art underground into the dead center of American culture before the old-school guardians of moral rectitude could gather their forces to protest.

Oh, they did protest — most memorably in 1989, when her “Like a Prayer” video led the pope to bar her from performing in Italy and made Pepsi back out of sponsoring her next tour — but the forces of censorship were no match for the marketing and dramaturgical genius of Madonna. In “Truth or Dare” and “Sex” and the “Justify My Love” video, she brought pervyness into the mainstream, and it remains firmly lodged there to this day, as we can see in everything from the ubiquity of porn stars to Rihanna’s career.

So what if Madonna has been a garden-variety celebrity since then, balancing slight nuttiness (Kabbalah, hydrangeas) with backward-glancing stunts (Britney) amid a backdrop of mostly unexceptional music and the odd cinematic triumph (“Evita”) or flop (“W.E.”)? The woman remade American culture. And that’s more than enough to justify my love for her.

: Sara Marcus Sara Marcus is the author of Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution." Follow her on Twitter: @thesaramarcus. More Sara Marcus

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Lana Del Rey and the new culture of failure

The controversial pop sensation is somehow more interesting for her spectacular flameouts than her music

By Stephen Deusner

Lana Del Ray

Topics:Music, Editor's Picks

Aside from the basic facts about Lana Del Rey — the most pertinent being that Del Rey is the stage name of Lizzy Grant, formerly a promising folk-pop singer with a so-so album under her own name and a millionaire father bankrolling her career — music writers can’t seem to agree on anything at all. She’s too fake or just fake enough. She’s too detached or just detached enough. She can’t sing or she’s a gifted singer. Some reviewers have called her new debut full-length, “Born to Die,” “the album equivalent of a faked orgasm,” and others have deemed it “not just irritating but almost morally objectionable.” Others have praised “her preoccupation with Hollywood archetypes of American femininity” and called it “close to pop perfection.”

But thanks to the upstart pop star’s disastrous performance on “Saturday Night Live” a few weeks ago, Del Rey inspired fountains of Internet ink dissecting her persona and the critical responses to her persona before most people even knew who she was — let alone had a chance to gripe about hearing her songs all the time. She was Twitter famous — Rebecca Black famous — which these days is more famous than you get by releasing a hit album. Now that she has released a hit album, however, the response from critics and fans has been fascinating for what it reveals about the pop-culture machine — as well as the idea of success in America.

Consensus seems to be forming that “Born to Die” is neither as bad as her detractors claim nor as great as her defenders argue. The album is occasionally compelling, but it’s rarely daring. It’s catchy, but more often strained. There are a few fine songs, but many more that stumble about awkwardly. Perhaps more telling, “Born to Die” is most interesting when it’s terrible. Critics are quoting clumsy lyrics about drinking top-shelf liquor and taking bodies downtown, and certainly there are cringe-worthy lines weighing down all these songs. But Del Rey is a risky songwriter, peppering her lyrics with concrete imagery and specific nouns, depicting her world in exacting detail. On “Off to the Races,” she paints an afternoon skinny-dipping as an all-American tableau: “White bikini off with my red nail polish / Watch me in the swimming pool, bright blue ripples.” It’s often evocative, immersing listeners in her private world, but too often the details seem off; lines about “Pabst Blue Ribbon … on ice” and “Jesus on the dashboard” break the spell and deposit you right back in the real world.

Some observers have detected a knowing wink in Del Rey’s performance, as though there’s an element of parody in a song like “National Anthem,” on which she hints she’s “blurring the line between real and the fake.” But that song is bad-movie bad, one of several tracks that drag down the second half of “Born to Die.” Like “Manos: Hands of Fate” or “The Room,” it confounds all critical faculties and almost dares you to read too much into it. As the song wanders from a perfunctory verse to a vacant chorus, it picks up lyrical detritus in its wake, the most famous being:

Money is the reason we exist

Everybody knows it, it’s a fact

Kiss kiss

Is this a Swiftian satire of pop culture in the “Real Housewives” era, or is Del Rey actually embracing a Randian view of existential capitalism? Does it even matter? A bad song is a bad song, no matter its intentions. Besides, even when she begs, “Tell me I’m your national anthem,” her expressionless vocals come across not as ironic, but sourly uninvested.

Neverthelesss, of this writing, it was No. 1 on the iTunes album chart, with the deluxe edition (featuring three additional tracks) at No. 2. That’s higher than Adele and Leonard Cohen, Kelly Clarkson and Coldplay. For an artist with more ups and downs in her short career than the Republican primary, that’s a fairly impressive feat, more or less assuring a decent showing when Billboard announces its definitive sales chart next week. That’s the rub for many observers: Del Rey has achieved a level of success that many feel she hasn’t earned yet.

But pop stars are rarely born; more often they’re made, whether via the popularity of a YouTube clip or the machinations of the musical-industrial complex. It’s not that Del Rey has been heralded and celebrated before she has had a chance to develop her talents and get some experience under her belt. Rather, it’s that Lizzy Grant has been heralded and celebrated before she’s had a chance to truly develop Lana Del Rey as a character. Back in August, she came across as fully formed on her debut single, “Video Games,” billing herself as a “gangsta Nancy Sinatra” and taking full advantage of the mystery that surrounds every new artist.

But that was three minutes; “Born to Die” is just under 50 minutes (the deluxe edition comes in closer to an hour), and Del Rey can’t command the audience’s attention for that length of time. There’s no consistency, no sustained point of view as she toggles between Sue Lyon in heart-shaped glasses and Tura Satana in ass-kicking boots. Her voice has some dramatic range, but at this point there doesn’t seem to be much internal logic to how she deploys it from one measure to the next. Of course, we’re not supposed to develop a fully formed impression of Lizzy Grant from “Born to Die,” but we should come away from the album with some idea of who Lana Del Rey is.

Music, it would seem, is merely a means to an end for her, rather than an end in itself. These songs are tools by which Del Rey partitions out her idea of our collective consciousness, and much like Lady Gaga’s debut album, of course titled “The Fame,” “Born to Die” treats celebrity like the inevitable outcome of simply making a record. “Baby, love me ’cause I’m playing on the radio,” she sings on inevitable single, “Radio.” It’s a pretty desperate plea, not least because it assumes that people still listen to the radio.

Perhaps more than the fact that it aspires too blatantly to celebrity, “Born to Die” is divisive because it’s lifestyle music for a lifestyle that Del Rey arguably hasn’t achieved yet. It’s entitlement pop that puts the cart miles before the horse. Del Rey has become a dubious figure not because she’s playing the poor little rich girl during a recession, but because these songs collectively imply that the 99 percent really want to be the 1 percent. If she has turned herself into what she thinks we all want, then we resent her for thinking so lowly of us.

Whatever the case, writing about Lana Del Rey may actually be more interesting than listening to her music. In fact, there are much better pop albums that never receive a fraction of this press, from the compassionate and complex anthems by Swedish singer Robyn to the latest release by tUnE-yArDs, which topped the recent Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll and deals with some of the same issues that Del Rey takes up, only with much more nuance and passion. So Del Rey joins the ranks of Rebecca Black, Charlie Sheen, Tim Tebow, Newt Gingrich — people we debate and discuss not because they excel in their profession, but precisely because they do not. Success has become mundane and predictable — and, as everybody knows, too easy to have bestowed upon you. Spectacular failures, however, are always unique and uniquely fascinating.