JAMES: The Best Of

 

(#584: 4 April 1998, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Come Home (Flood Mix)/Sit Down/She’s A Star/Laid/Waltzing Along/Say Something/Born Of Frustration/Tomorrow/Destiny Calling/Out To Get You/Runaground/Lose Control/Sometimes/How Was It For You/Seven/Sound/Ring The Bells/Hymn From A Village

 

For most people, the best music “of all time” – meaning “their time” – is the stuff they heard and patiently absorbed when they were teenagers, before work, marriage, families and decay got in their way. They cling to these songs, those bands and singers, for the remainder of their lives because they remind listeners of a time when they (the listeners) still had life.

 

For me, however, the memory of those times, emboldened by selective amnesia and hindsight, is far more potent than their music. I think of the music I listened to when I was about to leave school, or university, and although I can pinpoint exactly why and where it hit me, I really cannot listen to the music itself.

 

Joy Division? I started backwards with them. I heard Closer before Unknown Pleasures and the singles before either. I thought, and still think, that the twelve-inch of “Atmosphere” and “She’s Lost Control” is their finest achievement. Closer, in particular its second side, meant a lot to me, newly out of secondary education and thrust into a world with which I didn’t really know how to deal, every classmate now automatically a professional stranger. It made me conjure up unimaginable worlds in my mind. The Smiths? Well, they hit me like everybody else. In retrospect their records could be viewed as generally disappointing – but at the time they felt magical and different to me.

 

The common denominator, apart from Manchester, is that I don’t and indeed can’t listen to either group’s work any more. If I catch them on the radio, my heart and mind can’t touch what I hear. These were different times, I was a different person then, who absorbed and responded to different things in different ways. and I have moved on since those days. At least I like to think that I have; it could of course equally well be the case that I’m exactly the same person in different settings. Yet so many people can’t, and won’t, move on.

 

I think it’s a bit like that with James. Everybody has their individual or collective memory of this odd band, who indeed didn’t stop existing – a six-year break in the noughties notwithstanding - and will be returning to Then Play Long a lot later. Usually these memories are of them on stage, where it is said they far outperformed what they managed on record. All I recall is the Saturday of the 1991 Reading Festival, where James topped the bill but had to follow a spectacular set by Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine. They didn’t succeed; they stumbled onstage at around twenty past midnight on Sunday, when most of the audience was already stumbling back to their tents or homes, and failed to kindle any fire.

 

Equally James have one of the most undyingly loyal of all fanbases. In British pop, possibly only Gary Numan, Steven Wilson and James Arthur come close. Tim Booth seems generally able to weave a special bond with his audience, and they with him. They trust and love him and his colleagues. Who are the other ones again? Oh, one of them is the bass player Jim Glennie, who gave the band their name. Well, there you have it.

 

It’s likely that Fontana were thinking of The Beautiful South or Crowded House when they commissioned this compilation; another potential triumph for perennial pop underdogs who'd been hanging around for some time before breaking through, and don’t they all sound familiar and good when you put all of their moderate hits (and one major one) together? This isn’t really a Best Of since with one dangling exception it is solely devoted to the band’s Fontana work; four songs from each of their albums that you might have heard of, three from their then most recent and commercially underperforming album, two obligatory new songs – and one uncomfortable closing blast from a far-off past which throws everything else on the record into perspective.

 

My feeling is that, with all the fat trimmed off, this 69-minute album – like most number one albums of the period, it’s far too long, probably with an eye to the imminent future of people listening to individual songs rather than the thing as a whole – would work as a cracking 46-minute greatest hits package. The AllMusic review complains about the songs not having been sequenced in chronological order, but even bearing in mind that compilations are generally designed as entertainment rather than a university lecture presentation, it’s pretty clear that if strict chronology had been observed, this album would have been top-heavy – a great first half followed by a fairly dreary second one.

 

Instead, The Best Of darts about all over the place like a moderately excited pinball and shamelessly frontloads the really big, or biggish, numbers. I’m rather fond of the Gold Mother material myself. Indeed, when I listened to “Come Home (Flood Mix)” I quite unexpectedly found myself contradicting what I said at the beginning of this piece, with thoughts about the lurid pastel-coloured music that defined 1990, when the world was happy and life still seemed possible. The genius of the House piano fill which refuses to change despite the song’s overlying chord sequences – see also the two-note guitar riff that David Byrne added to the entirety of the Fun Boy Three’s “Our Lips Are Sealed” – is, well, genius. “Perfume” by the Paris Angels – either mix will do. The Weatherall/Jesse Jackson mix of Primal Scream’s “Come Together.” Even Candy Flip and Flowered Up. The optimism of the times struck me at an age – twenty-six – when, historically, Bad Things always Happen to Music. 808 State. E-Zee Posse. The Inspirals. The Shamen. The Mondays. My Jealous God! I didn’t have time for Joy Division or the Smiths – neither, at the time, did New Order or Johnny Marr – and felt it was enough that they’d been avenged, that closure on Closer had been achieved.

 

Probably because it hasn’t been ruinously overexposed on heritage theme park radio, this music still remains fresh to me, and Tim Booth sounds utterly at home in this setting and generally angry and “passionate” in “Come Home” (what an enormous scream he unleashes on his "makes me wanna SCREEEEAM" - his is the best growl in British pop since Eden Kane) and the twirly kaleidoscope of “How Was It For You.” Meanwhile, in “Lose Control,” the singer manages an elegant melancholy (“Where is the love that everyone is talking of?”) which sat and sits very well next to Billie Ray Martin and Electribe 101. This is someone who can sing and act (and it was little surprise that, during the band's six-year sabbatical in the 2000s, Booth trained and mainly worked as an actor).

 

The one of course that heritage theme park radio routinely pounces upon is “Sit Down.” The original version was eight rambling minutes long and quietly powerful. But to get it onto daytime radio and into the charts – which it certainly did; only nineteen other singles in 1991 outsold it in Britain – I guess they had to realise that the only way of doing so was to, well, sound like everybody else.

 

The modish production of the remake/edit instantly flattens the song. It thuds in the dull middleground and neither punches nor embraces. And yet it is a song, written in 1988 when Booth was suffering from depression, which has touched and continues to touch so many. They say that, when the song was sung live (much more powerfully), audience members would turn to and hug one another. To me it all sounds as transitory and bogus as the fake ecstasy described in “Sorted For E’s And Wizz.” In telling people that, really, they’re not alone in feeling weird, ostracised and/or displaced - or just "different" - it did fulfil a primary function – and fellow Mancunian duo Olive’s 1997 number one “You’re Not Alone” could stand as a fairly deliberate sequel.

 

From personal experience, however, my feeling was that “Those who find themselves ridiculous” etc. was generally consumed with eagerness by yuppies who didn’t have to be mad to work where they worked but it helped, whose idea of going crazy was a weekend camping trip. The final, crashing, echoed “DOWN” seems to be an acknowledgement that this utopia can’t last for more than a few radiant seconds.

 

The primary benefit of mixing up James’ chronology is that you get plenty of smashing pop songs, almost one after another here. For instance, “She’s A Star” is the best fake-Suede song I know of (and a lot better than most of the fourth Suede album, but that’s for another time). “Say Something” and “Laid” are concise and funny. “Sometimes,” complete with Eno’s Oblique Strategies Male Voice Choir, is propulsive and genuinely rousing, and paves a direct path to bands who would follow in their path, like Elbow and Coldplay. “Born Of Frustration” is basically a reheating of “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” complete with Jim Kerr impressions, but Booth’s sheer determination, and Andy Diagram’s important trumpet, help transcend any stadium dreams; towards its end the song sounds as though about to buckle and collapse into freeform cacophony, becomes intentionally fuzzy.

 

Nonetheless, I fear that Fontana glimpsed their own U2, and steered the band accordingly, Eno productions included. The abbreviated “Sound” almost outdoes its closet, again by means of Booth’s implacably adamant force (his polite howls resonate like a Home Counties Howlin’ Wolf, or so he would wish, though are nicely subverted by Diagram's wobbly but deadpan trumpet fanfares and what sound like random verbal barks from a megaphone, like a passing by-election campaign car). But the middle of The Best Of becomes bogged down in conciliatory dullness. The that way the Smiths/this way Mumford And Sons romp of “Waltzing Along” is entertaining enough, and "Say Something" is New Order in most ways (especially Glennie's bass hook). New track "Destiny Calling" is absolutely spot-on and utterly hilarious trolling of Oasis - James know their fellow Manchester bands - complete with a pretty vicious lyric, over-sauced guitar overdubs and sputtering-down ending. However, “Tomorrow,” “Out To Get You” and “Runaground” are all flatulent, feasibly dull Joshua Tree clone wannabes. “Seven” or “Ring The Bells" are oddly unspectacular, and to me sound like prototypes for stage development - these are all songs designed to be roared out by a crowd.

 

Watching the videos that accompany some of these songs, I am also not wholly convinced by Tim Booth. He always seems up and ready for things, unquenchably and earnestly enthusiastic, but a lot of the time he simply tries too hard, so he comes over as less of a Morrissey with a degree, and more of a slightly more self-aware Colin Hunt, or Robin Williams performing a routine on nineties Manchester indie singers. There is something of a sanctimonious, thou-shalt-not aura of pseudo-purity to many of his words, which usually fit the musical picture but are otherwise generally incomprehensible (and nobody listens to the words in pop music anyway – otherwise the new reality proposed in “Sit Down,” which in itself is really a very old remedy, would have come to pass), even though many of these songs, when you can make out what Booth is going on about, are just the other side of being too strange to become stadium "anthems." Uplifting singalong "Laid" is about someone losing his partner and going psychologically mad, hallucinations included. "Born In Frustration" is about having all these plans in your head but being thoroughly unable to realise any of them.

 

In other words, James are sufficiently fun to warrant forty-five minutes of your time but you wouldn’t necessarily want to go on a fortnight’s holiday with them. It's not so much the case that they weren't cut out for stadium rock, but more the case that stadium rock isn't cut out for them. In a lot of ways, Tim Booth's absolute refusal to edit his expression is admirable - this is, when it all comes down to something, art-rock; it's there and that's what it is.

 

All, however, is thrown into quite stark relief by The Best Of’s closing song, extracted from their second E.P., recorded for Factory Records in 1985 and which I, and possibly only I, bought at the time. I’m not saying that “Hymn From A Village” absolutely excretes over everything else here but there is a dynamism, a force and a real fury here which the band subsequently seemed to abandon. Gavin Whelan’s drums are dizzily active (although his replacement drummer David Baynton-Power is certainly no slouch, as "Come Home," "Sometimes" etc. demonstrate) and Tim Booth sounds like he’s actually got something to say that he’s had bottled up for a quarter of a century. “You can hear the question, can you feel the reply?” he yodels and screeches. “OH GO AND READ A BOOK, IT’S SO MUCH MORE WORTHWHILE!” which are wise words to this day and I might just take him up on that when I’ve finished writing this. It was just under three minutes of scorching economy and it was perhaps James’ real moment. And I can still listen to and enjoy it because it is so fundamentally and furiously happy – and happiness is what I need to hear in whatever lifespan remains due to me.

MADONNA: Ray Of Light

 

(#583: 14 March 1998, 2 weeks)

 

Track listing: Drowned World-Substitute For Love/Swim/Ray Of Light/Candy Perfume Girl/Skin/Nothing Really Matters/Sky Fits Heaven/Shanti-Ashtangi/Frozen/The Power Of Good-Bye/To Have And Not To Hold/Little Star/Mer Girl

 

(Author's Note: This piece was written by Lena and edited and formatted by me - M.C.)

 

"For the first time you [lift your heart to God with stirrings of love], you will find only a darkness, and as it were a cloud of unknowing [...] Whatever you do, this darkness and the cloud are between you and your God, and hold you back from seeing him clearly by the light of understanding in your reason and from experiencing him in the sweetness of love in your feelings. [...] And so prepare to remain in this darkness as long as you can, always begging for him you love; for if you are ever to feel or see him...it must always be in this cloud and this darkness."

(The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter Three)

 

 

There are few times that I can look at with a real sense of easy/unease than the first half of 1998.  It is as if it was a very, very long story coming to an end, all loose ends being tied up, questions answered…but still, still, there was something lurking in the background, unknowable, hinting at a future to come which was going to be profoundly different. 1998, in other words, was the last real ‘normal’ year of the century, before the 1999 panic over the end of the century. The cloud of unknowing was where everyone was, whether they liked it or not.

 

When I listened to Ray of Light I was strongly reminded of two things, things which are no longer around. One is the Omega Centre Bookstore in Toronto, the other the Body Shop fragrance Oceanus.  If you were me you would go to the Omega to experience a waft of incense, some New Age burbly music and head straight for whatever was of interest. And they had nearly everything you might want to help you get away from ‘male white corporate oppression’ (thank you Kim Gordon) could want. Tarot cards, books on numerology and astrology, books on how to channel and meditate, wicca, etc. I think they sold crystal balls as well, crystals themselves of course. And those most fashionable of things, books on yoga, Hinduism, Buddhism and (though I did not look for them) the Kabbalah. 

 

I mention all these as Madonna has clearly been, at this time, into these last three quite heavily and it is as if this album was to be listened to while also reading some ancient instructions or scripture. Something leading to wisdom, something leading to understanding. It is a ‘wellness’ album in many ways, but not as restful or calming as that implies.

Oceanus was my perfume at the time, going well color-wise with my chunky bright blue sweater. It was unisex; it was like being by the sea, again like standing next to a rather lily-smelling infinity, with the salt tang in the air as well.  It urged you to go out and do things, to explore. It was not particularly ‘sensual’ let alone sexual, but it could take you, if you let it, OUT of yourself….implying the endlessness of the ocean itself, of a certain borderless world, that pacific state of pure joy.

Madonna looks out with some impatience from the cover, as if to say, here is the blue turquoise of the water and the inevitable sandy beach, these timeless things, and me. I think she looks a bit wary too, the photos of her inside looking happy are kind of forced, the ones where she is blocking the gaze of the camera with her hand, realer somehow. And then the music starts, quietly….

 

…I am going to be *cough* polite here and not talk about Madonna’s early 90s period*. It was, as the term these days seems to be, “wild” and perhaps this was intentional. "Drowned World/Substitute For Love" has Madonna rejecting her past, almost as if (though she never uses the term) she has been born again. It is that burbly New Age music again, eventually growing into a beat but somehow (and the whole album is like this) kind of muffled, as if there is a wall of…water?....between you and her. And considering she and William Orbit produced Ray of Light, she must have wanted it to sound all a bit subdued. It is like the solemnity of a ritual; not everything here is going to make sense, but it feels right for this moment and the logic of album is inexorable. 

 

I am not sure who the "Substitute for Love" person is (her newborn daughter? The Higher Wisdom? The Big Guy/Gal Upstairs?) but clearly, she has swapped a lot of her life – fancy things, having ‘fun’, flings that don’t mean anything – because this new thing eclipses them all. Who needs love when you have yoga, Buddhism and the Kabbalah? But she ends the song by singing, "This is my religion." Madonna is building her own faith on these things, but the Catholicism she grew up with is always there, too.

 

So then, that's her mission statement:  I am done with my past, this is who I am now, upon these rocks and mantras** and patterns I build my faith. "Swim" makes the sloughing off of sins, bad habits and the current chaos into a groovy throwing away of clothes while on the roof of a hotel.  I am SO DONE that I am going to purify myself in the ocean, She sighs at the end as the music swims calmly by like fish, as if this is all very easy or very tiring or both. Well Madonna doesn't want - I read about this in a biography of her - me to dwell too much on the roots of these songs, so I won't; but I will say that it is much easier to say you are casting off your old self than to do it....

 

And she is working with William Orbit because yes, ladies and gentlemen, she wants to be new, MODERN, cool and so on. She wants to rave, and so refashions a song from 1971 by folk duo Curtiss Maldoon called “Sepheryn” which is folky and kind of spacey. Madonna and Orbit sped it up quite a bit and made it into a rave, a fun time to be had by all. I have no idea what "Ray of Light" is about besides feeling…at one with the universe? She even yelps and screams at the end, and now that she has a trained voice and knows how to sing, she can really yelp and sustain her voice to keep up with the frenetic beat. The closest thing I heard to this at the time was the CBC radio Stereolab concert from '99 and Laetitia Sadier was whooping and yelling at the end of a song, and it sounded to me as if...a baby was being born. And Madonna (this is key to the album) is a new mom herself. All kinds of things are being (re)born now....

 

And now to the funky mystery slink of "Candy Perfume Girl" which is sensuous and of course I would like a song with perfume in the title! Hypnotic, sinister - alluring is the word used so much in perfume advertising, and things get kind of confusing and big and more and more disorienting as the song goes on....magic poison...hmmm....the way she sings "delicious fires" as if this is what she wants too, if only she could find it....

 

"Skin" is a real breakthrough of sorts - not just her admitting that she has said 'stupid things' before but a real sense of her being....overwhelmed?...by this Other. The music speeds by smoothly, like what 'the future' is supposed to sound like. It is an internal monologue, a song of pauses and magnifications and sensations. Here she is wanting to be kissed and touched, the music racing along with her insistent "Kiss me I'm dying...dying and 'I'm not like this all the time!'. This ache and longing continue later....

 

"Nothing Really Matters" is her once again saying she is now a different person because 'love is all we need' and um it shuffles along. "Something is ending and something begins" is fairly obvious a statement, but this is an album which...puts this idea to a test. This is the most 'normal' 'disco' 'traditional' Madonna song here, practically begging for a remix or two (Madonna picked William Orbit because she liked his remixes of her songs).

 

Again, I am not sure about "Sky Fits Heaven" completely BUT it is upbeat, optimistic and again practically sounds so 1998 it's got a date stamp on it. This is very much, to reiterate, an album made and released in a specific time, when electronica and drum ‘n ’bass (this song seems like a mash-up of both) that is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Madonna is just part of this big flow of time, following her heart, mindful that this won’t last forever. And then it squeaks and squelches to an end, the signs along the road which whoosh by, leading to...

 

Okay, so the yoga song is here. It seems almost pointless to really say much other than her pronunciation was not that good at first and she had to go to the BBC World Service to learn how to sing the lyrics correctly. This truly is peak Omega Centre 'I just got into yoga and I am very serious about it, I have a designer mat and everything'. I have no doubt Madonna is sincere, and I know some people out there appreciated "Shanti/Ashtangi" but I also know it upset people that she would be a cultural appropriator for profit. To which I guess she would say, IT'S ART, DARLINGS, and go into her next pose....

 

 

Here beginneth the WHY DO I LOVE IMPOSSIBLE MEN section:

 

“For He can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you must step above it stoutly but deftly, with a devout and delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you; and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens."

(The Cloud of Unknowing, ibid.)

 

 

“Frozen” is a legend, a told-many-times story, Madonna has been on this for so long – “Open Your Heart” is the ancestor.  Does she know what love is? Of course she does. Is it possible for her to run and run and catch up with this Other, however? She sings it hoping, longing, sad, plaintive...across what seems like desert, sand, nothingness....it was inspired by The English Patient*** and has that musical sense of being both western and eastern, though not in a way that say, oh, Jeff Buckley was trying to merge the two in his own music.

 

Again, she insists on there being a key to the Other’s heart, and oh yeah I have to dip into my own esoteric knowledge and mention that the symbol of the key in astrology is for the minor planet Chiron, known as the wounded healer, a centaur who has to give up his immortality in order to be healed, and was put in the stars as the constellation Centaurus by his half-brother Zeus. So, Madonna going on about the key is about her wanting to heal someone (Chiron was a great healer himself) and the Other not willing to break down and make that sacrifice.

 

The Cloud of Unknowing doesn’t want her to give up, but she does…This little symphony continues with her singing 'Your heart is not open' and thus she goes, singing offhandedly "I wanna go higher." I yearn to say goodbye? There's no greater power OH HEY NOW WAIT A MINUTE… this rather swish break-up song is almost a joke in the context of what is to come.  No greater power than the power of goodbye?  WHAT with the what now? All this sadness and letting go of things, but can you really let go of things and say odd things like “Creation comes when you learn to say no”? What if saying no, rejecting things and running away…don’t work?

 

Concluding this section is the endless back-and-forth of "To Have and Not To Hold" which is what happens when you are attracted to someone who is emotionally unavailable, devastatingly attractive and just not there for you, now or ever. She should know better, she does know better but it's useless. All these songs point to her situation - a lonely and isolated one, which is perhaps why she needs all the wisdom she can get from rituals, yoga, etc (She chants part of the Invocation to Patanjali here, Abahu purusakaram which means “From the hand up to the head he has the shape of a human” which I guess she put in because it scans but also he seems too good to be true?). Age can bring that wisdom, but also a vulnerability that someone like Madonna may be uncomfortable with....Madonna is, in the context of The Cloud of Unknowing, an active, not a contemplative. She is not, cannot settle for life outside the world, hidden away. How could she when she has a baby?

 

Here endeth the WHY DO I LOVE IMPOSSIBLE MEN section.

 

What is it like to be a mother? What is it like to give birth? “Little Star” is a fairy-queen blessing of a song, far away from the world of “Show Me” by the Pretenders, where the daughter is a creature from outer space, a sign from the heavens, now living in the cold, hard world on Earth. But here the daughter is a special thing, and the music is...dare I say it a bit generic? William Orbit skitters around in the background, but the mood is far more "Lovin' You" by Minnie Riperton. The broken heart is still there, despite the baby's ability to breathe new life into it; Madonna calmly sings this lullaby as if her baby is the only good, pure thing in the world.  

And then the other morning it hit me: 

Suddenly I am rocked back, back to my own birth year. Laura Nyro - still a teenager - sings "And when I DIE...And when I'm dead, dead and GONE...there'll be one child born and a world to carry on." 

And I remember my mom saying this was her song, and that I was the one child born....and of course hearing it makes me cry.

I didn't know my mom was that ill; she never told me how ill she was.  

The same went for Madonna, much much younger than me when her mom waved to her, then disappeared.

"Mer Girl" is girl of the ocean, the sea; but heard aloud, it could be the Girl Mother, Mother-in-the-Girl.  

I am the mother of the girl and I miss my mother.

She runs, she races in this dream sequence of a song - a recitation of the run away from home, from everything familiar. We are back to where we unwittingly began, she told us from the start but we were distracted by everything else - the romantic plights, the renunciations, the raves. But this is the Drowned World, the Titanic disaster aftermath. The desperate wanting to go away, the fear that if you go away, you won't be able to come back.

She runs and runs, thinking about her mother's death, and is metaphorically swallowed and then lifted out of the earth itself. "And I smelt her burning flesh/Her rotting bones/Her decay/I ran and I ran/I'm still running today."

"I was looking for me."

This whole album has just been radically upended. Nothing can stop this endless running away - from her house, her man, her baby even - it is as if Ray of Light is a huge prologue leading to the actual, real story underneath everything which is this empty howling relentless grief, a terrible wound at a young age, one she cannot simply say 'goodbye' to as if it were to a heartless beau.

The sort of grief where becoming a contemplative after a while would make good sense. To find yourself (it sounds so simple) and to realize after so many nightmares and crying jags and hopeless pursuings of unavailable men that maybe there's a...pattern here? Or as they would say kindly at the Omega Centre, how can you embrace your wounds as sources of wisdom and growth?

And here we suddenly stop, and in a way Madonna stops here too. Not that we do not come back to her, but soaked to the skin, with matted hair and grieving and running, she has reached the edge of what, in a way, she can do. She will be quite different when we get back to her.

Because this is that - dare I call it this? - rare, liminal time. The moment where everything can, for a moment, be just like when you finally reach the ocean, you breathe deep and relax. Even if you feel grief or are going through it, you need to pause in that unknowing and feel something much bigger than yourself happen. That rich blue green sea appears to me, comes into my life not as an ocean, but as an object, as the watery late '90s continue. Madonna in the meantime has to grasp back and hold on to whatever she has - a ray of light, perhaps?

Next time:  the strongest voices from Manchester.

 

*This is just to say also, Camille Paglia doesn’t mention it but Vanilla Ice was not, could not have been the sexiest man in Miami c. 1992. "But Madonna's confrontational strategy (through its very success) had become stale by the time of her ill-conceived 1992 book, "Sex," which may have sold well but was an artistic disaster, banal in design and juvenile in detail. Gimmicky, sadomasochistic scenarios were old hat and, in any case, hardly expressed the health or vitality of the sex impulse — Madonna's ultimate point. After the protracted censorship battle over Robert Mapplethorpe, who had genuinely inhabited the S&M underworld, Madonna's images seemed shallow, superficial, and unerotic."

 **Madonna wanted to call the album Mantra, but realized that maybe this wasn’t the best idea.

***I don’t know if this song is sung from the point of view of Katherine Clifton or Almasy or is simply inspired by looking at Ralph Fiennes and just sighing a lot. It’s okay, Madonna; everyone had a crush on him at the time.