I know I may appear quite curmudgeonly about Pop, that Pop music thread for instance, amidst the rhetorical panning i was genuinely asking what case could be made for Pop. The truth is 9 times out of 10, okay 99 nine times out of a hundred, it doesn't do it for me. Even when I was kiddywink, ducking off school at the college sanitorium, listening to a constant stream of Radio One in the early eighties, it was Blondie's "Heart of Glass" and Peter Gabriel's "Games Without Frontiers" and The Specials "Ghost Town" that would haunt me with their off-kilter vibrations, emanate internal logics foreign to the school and home, suggest the purple modes of secret societies. You might say those tunes are all Pop, yeah and I say maybe they became Pop but they weren't conceived as Pop and we'd fucking argue all day.
Madonna's "Beautiful Stranger" is, as far as i'm concerned, the absolute best of what Pop has to offer. What an improbable success! Old Madge with her stretchmarks, in (is it?) a movie tie-in. That must put it way down the rank of what qualifies as someone's idea of a perfect pop record. It's not a glistening oiled girl-band with mirco-schaffel track or Ricky Martin. Its some fading star, ok she's amazingly lithe, but we're entering into the appreciation of the older woman with this one. Madonna hadn't done a catchy tune for ages, well at least not one I liked ('Ray of Light' 'Music' all that stuff just makes me flash on aerobics classes)
What makes it the very definition of Pop is how totally it's orphaned from these subterranean rhizomes the connection to which DEFINE the Rockist. She hasn't written the track herself, Madonna buys tunes from songwriters, unlike the things just previous to it she hadn't strapped herself to the underground with people like Mirwais and William Orbit (didn't she try Liam Howlett, Goldie AND The Aphex Twin, all of whom told her to walk). She's just gone 'Dash it all!' I suppose using Mike Myers in the video, was, like using Ali G in 'Music' an anglophile gesture, but its one loaded with irony, cos of course Austin Powers is a send-up.
That the track is inseparable from the video is another reason its a quinessential piece of Pop. Here's a handy rule of thumb: any piece of rock music (in the sense of Rock-ist) which has a video made for it is always a crap piece of music, almost without exception, perhaps 'Windowlicker' but certainly none of the other Aphex Twin tracks. Here's another rule of thumb: if the video is a good as the song whatever the track's background in the murk of cult, it's Pop. Obvious really.
I just adore the tune on this one. Cut off from the body of the rest of Madge's trendy records, as well as isolated from the underground, its also incredibly anachronistic. A pastiche of a kind of Lovin' Spoonful, Mama's and Papa's and The Archies day-glo, flower-sucking, penny-farthing-sporting harmonically over-abundant 3-minute wonder, instead of sounding like a modern version of those sort of tunes it sounds like the sort of track that would emerge form LA's 1980s Psychedelic Pop underground. It sounds like The Bangles or Dream Syndicate or summat. The way its built on, and flows between, what feels like a succession of choruses (ie 100% Sugar, sugar) is excessively dreamy. I've worked the song into a video I've just completed, something Sky have commissioned and everyone in the quite militant office where I've been freelancing is whistling it. It's not catchy, it's not addictive, it's practically the Ebola virus.
And the video. Well it's sidesplitting isn't it? It also has this kind of wonderful gravitas. That grown people like Madonna and Myers can send themselves up, and just about everything about who they are, where they live, what they do, like this, well it isn't just funny it's touchingly heroic. The way Madonna rubs her arse in Myers head, it's just nuts. The way he makes a mobile phone with his hand and mouthes 'call me' as she gyrates, seemingly isolated and ignorant on stage; just perfection. OK I hear you say, here we go, taking Madonna seriously (I should do more of this!) well no actually, this isn't really about Madonna. That's the thrust of my argument, it's not about anyone. It's about meat and hair and teeth. OK something portentous and self-conscious like 'Papa don't Preach' is wide-open to "serious interpretation" but this is just a piece of Pop flotsam. It looks like it was filmed in about half an hour for goodness sakes!
To summarise (!) what allows 'Beautiful Stranger' it to be a perfect Pop record is that it's orphaned. Not only does this allow it to stand on fall on it's own merits (THAT'S the argument for Pop) it also means that any alchemy it accrues it has done so in a purely accidental manner. And if you ask me, answering my own question, that quality of the accidental is the quintessence of why Pop might (even if only occasionally ) be valuable.
Download the video here
Original Thread Here
