Is the point of topping the charts prestige or profit?
Madonna outsold Lionel Richie for the top spot on
Billboard’s album charts this week past. Only she didn’t.
By letting her album “MDNA” (a play on the medical acronym for the
club drug ecstasy) tag along with ticket sales to her live
concerts, the Material Girl created the illusion that she had the
bestselling album in America. But Richie’s “Tuskegee” actually
sold more copies.
Even the business of show business is largely a show. In more
primitive times, record companies would simply bribe disc jockeys.
Now they give away music to top the charts. One wonders if
the neo-payola is a symptom or cause of the recording industry’s
financial woes. Certainly two acts that peaked more than a
quarter-century ago vying for chart supremacy is both. What
performers hot in 1958 topped the charts in 1985?
The dodgy marketing gimmick might be best seen as a metaphor for
Madonna’s career. She has a talent for getting by without it. What
Singing in the Rain’s Cosmo says about Lina applies: “She
can’t act. She can’t sing. She can’t dance.” That’s not quite fair.
The former ballerina can move. Madonna, despite such challenges,
somehow manages to remain a pop-culture force (farce?) three
decades after we first met her.
She is a creation of the video-music era, when the beautiful
people rebelled against the talented people. The visual conquered
the aural. Madonna may have deluded her legions of fans into
believing her a vocal great. But she hasn’t fooled herself. Why,
other than a realization of the limits of her talents, would she
have lip-synched a “live” performance at this year’s Super
Bowl?
What she lacks in substance she makes up for in style. Anybody
strolling into a shopping mall circa 1985 witnessed her influence
in armies of adolescent girls in naked-navel mesh shirts with arms
bedizened in jelly-rubber bracelets and skirts strangely atop
capris. More perniciously, she eventually swayed not just what they
wore but what they did. Whenever her career seemed to be on life
support, Madonna could be counted on to release a sex book, make
out with Britney Spears, or adopt an African baby. In one video,
she sings alongside burning crosses, displays stigmata, and takes
one of the Church’s saints as a love interest.
Madonna is the businesswoman impersonating the artist. Her
brilliance comes from understanding that selling music isn’t about
making music. It’s about making publicity. So thoroughly have
marketing gurus captured the music industry that one of their
number scored hit after hit. Thus did a marketing genius get
confused for a musical genius.
Lionel Richie might be thought of as the anti-Madonna. He can
sing. But he has the charisma of Gerald Ford after a bad night’s
sleep. Despite scoring thirteen consecutive top-ten hits between
1981 and 1987, Richie appeared with the same $10 haircut and the
mustache that he had stolen from Dave Winfield. Alas, stylistic
reinvention wasn’t his strong suit. But the balladeer’s music
seamlessly transitioned from R&B to funk to calypso to
first-dance wedding numbers to, in his latest release, even
country. While Madonna played virgin, dominatrix, dance-club diva,
and other outlandish characters, Lionel Richie played, well, Lionel
Richie.
Roger Friedman, who broke the scandal at Forbes,
writes: “I do think that all the people involved in the Madonna
ticket-CD deal should apologize to Richie for denying him his
rightful place at number 1, starting with Billboard and SoundScan.”
That’s unlikely. But Richie at least has the satisfaction of
knowing that in week two “Tuskegee” moved more than double the
number of copies as “MDNA,” which experienced the greatest
second-week drop in chart history.
Friedman, who has been viciously attacked by Madonna zealots
online (gleefully?), wondered what went wrong as the MP3 of “MDNA”
plunged to $5 on Amazon. “The audience wasn’t interested in
vituperative songs with the ‘f’ word scattered through them
liberally,” he theorized. “Instead of dancing, Madonna was cursing.
And what does she have to curse about? She’s a gazillionaire.”
Foul-mouthed, filthy-rich fiftysomethings just don’t keep it
real. But that’s how Michiganders with aristocratic English accents
roll.
