Madonna is known to run the gamut in the type of songs she produces and performs. Some of her most psychologically honest and personal work began to appear with Like A Prayer and continued for about a decade through Ray of Light. I do not mean to say that before or after this period she did not release songs that were not expressive of her personal self, but that it was during this time that she began to reveal herself most honestly in her music. Bedtime Stories, is, in my opinion, her most personally probing album. Naturally, the R&B-inflected sounds of the album drive it throughout, until the last three songs—“Sanctuary,” “Bedtime Story,” and “Take A Bow,” whose melodies and harmonies depart from the upbeat sound of the rest of the album. “Bedtime Story,” in particular, is strikingly abstract, both lyrically and musically.

“Bedtime Story” reads as a pessimistic song with a grave lack of trust in words and language, a great irony in that it needs those very same words to convey its meaning. The lyrics can also be viewed as arguing for the transcendental benefits of drug use, with its desire to move beyond logic and reason to a plane of consciousness where one can relax and avoid the mundane reality of everyday existence. Yet, the song makes it clear that even on another plane of existence communicating one’s experience still needs words because there is no better means of expressing ideas and emotions than through language. Essentially, words, though arbitrary, go beyond symbolizing our ideas and our emotions and ultimately become them. We are the language we read, write, and speak. No matter the plane on which we find ourselves, we have no choice but to think and feel, and we have no better means of self-expression than through the double-edged sword of language, “And inside we’re all still wet / Longing and yearning / How can I explain how I feel?” That latter question is fundamental to the journey of this song, for if we give up language, how can we then best express ourselves?

Since the human condition is to think and to feel, we endeavor to find valid ways of expressing our thoughts and emotions. Language, although it seems to be our best option, nevertheless fails us, as do all our forms of art, inadequately defining our identities for others as well as the messages behind our thoughts and feelings. If language, drug use, art, even religion, do not completely liberate us from the prison-house of our own minds and bodies, then the only means that remain are sex and death. This is the undercurrent of “Bedtime Story”: the desire for sex which leads to its momentary glimpse into the void of unconsciousness/death as the only means of releasing the pressure of self-consciousness runs throughout the narrative of the lyrics and the dream of the video.

Basic Freudian psychology teaches us that all human beings have a deep unconscious desire for death, for a return to the womb, to the period before which we become burdened by human nature and consciousness. The narrative structure of the “Bedtime Story” video codes this desire in Madonna’s dream state. Our desire for death, for a state of nonhuman experience, is so engrained within us that it develops and vents itself in a variety of forms: art, religion, sex, and dreaming, to name a few. It is Madonna’s genius that incorporates all of these in a four-and-a-half-minute video. Taking what appears to be a medically induced dream state as her point of departure, she delves into the human psyche and shows us a fantastic dream vision in which we experience an allegorical narrative that unravels, begging us to decipher its hieroglyphics.

In ancient Greek myth, Sleep and Death are identified as twin brothers. One of the most profoundly symbolic moments of “Bedtime Story” is the image of Madonna lying asleep in the arms of Death, a skeleton. Not only does this image emphasize the heavily entwined relationship of sleep and death, but it also constructs a perverse, almost demonic, revision of the Christian Pietà, in which Death seems to mourn the loss of the mother goddess as the source of all life, which she ironically takes away in the act of giving birth, thereby casting her face in the mold of Death.

Interspersed throughout the dream sequence is a group of male figures, wearing golden suit jackets and long, flowing purple robes, who imitate the mystic dance of the whirling dervishes of Middle Eastern culture. This mystic dance is one of the spiritual methods of reaching unity, oneness, with the Divine center and radiant framework (the Light) of all Creation. This is a meditative dance where one abandons one’s desires (symbols of one’s self or ego) in a concerted effort to find fullness and union in God. This dance takes us a step further to understanding where the lyrics of the song seek to take us in the representative figures and actions of the dream we see enacted.

Why is today the last day that Madonna sings she is using words? She has decided to go beyond the mere form and convention of language, because it has lost its meaning and its function. She has realized that words cannot express her most piercing thoughts or deepest desires: Words are pure artifice; they live and remain on the surface of things, barely scratching the meaning of our perceptions, actions, and emotions. This is a failure, a loss, and a lack that cannot be abided. So, in a move toward finding another path through which to express herself more perfectly, she has gone to dreaming (a language without words but rife with signs, and in Freudian terms, a form of wish-fulfillment) yet her dream is riddled with the marks and symbols of death, our greatest fear and our deepest desire. Again, Death seems the only permanent answer to conquering the burden of consciousness and our flawed tools of self-expression. But in between language and death lies sex.

The sexual act is an expression of anything from lust and mindless, bestial urges to intimacy and desire to the fulfillment of love. When lovers engage in sex the ultimate goal is pleasure and a fluid experience of desire for the beloved, and in the midst of that love and pleasure is the orgasm allowing our sexual urges to flood so that they can ebb. In French, le petite mort, or “the little death,” is synonymous with the sexual orgasm. In Elizabethan parlance “to die” meant to have an orgasm. When one climaxes during sex, the mind briefly loses consciousness and recourse to logic or reason, and so when Madonna sings, “let’s get unconscious honey,” she is really saying let’s have sex. For to engage in sex leads to a numbing or temporary suspension of the mind’s mental processes and its conscious awareness of what lies beyond the pale of the physical, sexual self and its desires. The sexual act and its accompanying orgasm are the only ways for a human being to (momentarily) escape the burden of the self, short of death, outside of the creative process or the mystical methods of religious experience, as described above in the spirited dance of the whirling dervishes. Furthermore, the orgasm is the closest experience humans have to encountering the vale of death, to facing the void in which the conscious self (which makes us limited and human) is silenced and the soul is left naked in the profound darkness created by the incandescent light of God.

So when Madonna sings, “Traveling, leaving logic and reason / Traveling, to the arms of unconsciousness” she is singing about her desire to travel mentally (through sex) to the plane on which no sense of self can be felt, because this is the point of orgasm—to alleviate the burden of the conscious human ego and bring it back into the oneness of the universe and the Divine. The orgasm, in short, is the definition of the Nietzschean “Dionysian” moment wherein the self is shattered at the moment of climax to return the individuated self/ego to the natural “Apollonian” order of the cosmos.

In ancient Greek, the term psyche translates as “the soul.” Some Native American belief systems hold that when sleepers dream, the soul becomes disjointed from the body, thus able to transcend the material world and, for a time, reintegrate with the spiritual ground of the cosmos. As the video comes to its conclusion, Madonna is seen being hurtled toward waking consciousness through a background of stars and black matter, being forced back into reality. So, the image resonates on multiple levels: as a return to the consciousness of everyday reality; as the soul/psyche being forced back into the body from its time liberated from the flesh during dreaming, united with the Spirit that underlies the world; and, lastly, as the soul having glimpsed the void (death) in the fleeting moment of orgasm and being rushed back into the burden of consciousness that the torrent of a sexual climax ultimately yields. This can also be seen when Madonna begins waking in the arms of Death, reversing the Apollonian order in a startled “drowning” or submersion into Dionysian individualized consciousness. Whenever we struggle to be free of the natural order of death, we express our fear of it, and thus reaffirm our individual identities as conscious beings, and unconsciously continue to seek death when we engage in the natural act of sex, which constantly forces us to come face to face with death, albeit only for a moment.

In “Bedtime Story” Madonna explores the failure of language to illuminate our true selves, questioning how we can best express our thoughts and feelings, realizing that we cannot find any successful means, and so the quest continues in a desire to rid oneself of the Atlas-style weight of self-consciousness. She tells us this can be accomplished through sex and the orgasm that beckons us to look in the mirror at death (God is in the dark void left by our annihilation of consciousness experienced in the orgasm), and she depicts this in a dream vision as the haunting lyrics and images of the video penetrate and permeate our minds in a multimillion-dollar work of art.

Madonna’s exhibitionist qualities are not just for show; they point to a fundamental but all too readily forgotten truth ever-present in the real world—that of the individual constantly performing and wearing a mask in public, even in private. Madonna has proven to be quite human but also no fool; her need to perform in a theatrical manner is just as deeply rooted, psychologically speaking, as is every human being’s. This fact and how she plays a multiplicity of parts in her numerous videos and her many concert tours have been to her advantage. I say this because at any given moment we all want to be someone somewhere else, and Madonna’s videos and her theatrically imbued concerts attest to this and to the deeper truth seemingly masked by the relentless wardrobe change, both literally and metaphorically speaking. This truth is that the person being conveyed is only a façade, a temporary reality, ultimately a self that crumbles and disappears as it is being performed. Thus, the terrifying yet liberating reality-check that there is no self; there is no stable, permanent self or identity that can be demonstrated with any consistency. The value in this is that we both can be and truly are anyone we want to be at any time and in any place. Madonna’s greatness lies in her taking this notion and turning it into a brilliant artistic and moneymaking scheme for nearly three decades. Madonna has taken the Eastern philosophical doctrine of no self (Buddhism), or the illusion of a self (Hinduism), and created countless identities, countless theatrical, artistic performances out of this truth of a fluid “self” constantly under stress to perform and give new life to music as something more than just mere singing on a stage to be watched and admired.

In the video for “Material Girl,” Madonna plays an actress in a knock-off of Marilyn Monroe’s performance of “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The theme of Madonna’s video is that her performance as a woman who enjoys the wealth and gifts of handsome men who want her on their arm for eye candy is just that—a performance. Madonna’s character, her true “self,” prefers the simple, more natural things a man can give her to convey his romantic feelings, as depicted by Keith Carradine’s character when he gives her flowers and takes her for a ride in a brown pickup truck at the video’s end. Here, Madonna literalizes the whole notion of performance by playing an actress whose career objective is to put on and take off a self that is different from one’s own.

In “Open Your Heart,” another video dominated by the concept of performing, this time for voyeurs in booths at a peep show, Madonna dons a close-cropped black wig, which she removes at the beginning of her routine to reveal the same style hair, but platinum blond. Plainly, the wig emphasizes her part as a provocative dancer in contrast to the natural, playful young woman the viewer sees engaging with the teenage boy outside who longs for a glimpse of her mildly erotic performance inside.

In “Like A Prayer,” Madonna returns to the role of actress in a drama (which we do not know as such until the end of the video) wherein the racism that consumes America is brought to the foreground and the hope of uniting blacks and whites as one humanity is expressed in Madonna’s character’s testimony as to the black prisoner’s innocence.

In “Vogue,” the first two stanzas Madonna sings emphasize a person’s desire for true freedom of the self, to get away from the humdrum of our mundane lives and to be someone else:

Look around everywhere you turn is heartache
It’s everywhere that you go (look around)
You try everything you can to escape
The pain of life that you know (life that you know)
When all else fails and you long to be
Something better than you are today
I know a place where you can get away
It’s called a dance floor, and here’s what it’s for, so . . .

Madonna’s answer to this need is to go out onto the dance floor, where the music and the moves it inspires will enable you to use your imagination and provide you with the inspiration to truly be someone else, not just a dancer, but someone who can feel free from the burden of the “self” in the movements of the dance. The point of the song and its video is that of becoming a star, a celebrity, in your own right, in your own world and imagination, whether it’s on the dance floor of a nightclub or in the privacy of your own room. It’s about taking off the self that you live with every day and putting on another self that will allow you to feel less restrained and contained by the world.

“Justify My Love” and “Erotica” move us directly into the realm of gender, sex, and sexuality, exploiting and confronting each of these and their subtle differences in videos that were too hot to handle for MTV and the public in the early nineties. Sex is the expressive act of desire and attraction between people, while gender and sexuality are played out in the public and private spheres, as they are social constructs that Madonna has toyed with since early in her career. The gender lines of masculinity and femininity are blurred in the black-and-white video for “Justify My Love,” where Madonna switches from intimate moments with a man and then a woman who is almost boyish in her appearance. “Erotica” features Madonna in the role of the dominatrix Dita, donning a black mask and brandishing a whip, among other sexual unmentionables. With this video that could only be shown after midnight on MTV and the album of the same name, Madonna openly expressed the natural desires and fantasies of human nature, exploding the confines of modernity’s repressed sexuality. Madonna brashly exposed a sexual self that modern society and culture is always at pains to hide and suppress. Both of these songs show modern culture that a human being is more than just a public face; there is a multiplicity of selves in the human psyche, the most powerful of which is the sexual.¹

In her next incarnation, Madonna returned to the theme of acting in the lyrics of the power ballad “Take A Bow.” The title itself hints at a dramatic actor’s final curtain call at the end of a rousing performance on the stage. Though the video focuses on the bullfighter Emilio Muñoz, the theme is the same—the young woman desires the love of a man whose career is more important to him than love. The song begins:

Take a bow, the night is over
This masquerade is getting older,
Lights are low, the curtains down
There’s no one here
Say your lines but do you feel them
Do you mean what you say when there’s no one around

…and its last stanza² begins, “All the world is a stage / and everyone has their part . . .” The song is about the nature of acting and the self, the fact that all human beings are always acting and wearing masks, on stage and off. Thus, there is no one true self because we are all actors in the drama of our lives, and in the instance of the song, not even love can redeem the actor who is more caught up in the artificial world of performing for the fleeting cheers and applause of the crowds.

In “Bedtime Story,” Madonna invites the viewers to explore the terrain of the unconscious in the dream state of an induced sleep. She depicts a narrative of the inner, dreaming self that is only experienced in a sleeping state, where repressed ideas and anxieties coalesce and come to the fore in symbols and metaphors whose meaning modern psychology attempts to determine and clarify. It is a fascinating video and song in which “Word are useless, especially sentences / They don’t stand for anything / How could they explain how I feel.” This is the most terrifying of questions, because with no stable self or identity, words become meaningless, and how can they express how one feels, when how one thinks and feels is as fluid and malleable as water and silver and words are not concrete.

A final intriguing expression of the question of the self appears in the video and lyrics for “Die Another Day,” in which Madonna does battle with her doppelgänger. In the video a white-suited Madonna fences with her black-suited double and fights her to the death—literally, in which she shoots an arrow into her double’s chest. It is an aggressively acted video in which she sings:

I’m gonna break the cycle
I’m gonna shake up the system
I’m gonna destroy my ego
I’m gonna close my body now

Here she expresses her desire to stop the functioning of the body and a direct desire to annihilate the self, which can only be done by breaking the cycle, an allusion, for those versed in Eastern philosophy, to the cycle of samsara in Buddhism in which we are all bound to the wheel of human existence until we reach enlightenment. The only way to transcend is through an annihilation of the ego/self (in Hindu or Buddhist terms), which is the revelation that the self is an illusion; something nonexistent that clouds us from experiencing our true spiritual nature.

From this cursory review of her music video catalogue, one can see Madonna’s artistry goes beyond mere performance and even theatricality, for that matter. Madonna’s songs and videos call into question the very concept and meaning of the self and its plasticity in the face of modern culture’s mass production of the “lasting image” and the iconic “self” behind that image. Madonna’s lyrics and videos engage her audience as to the nature of the actor, and the notion of a private versus a public self. Madonna’s music moves its listeners out of themselves and into a place where the human bondage of the self to the everyday is broken, and the spirit is set free. In the end, Madonna’s music and videos are offered as creations to be engaged in and explored as something more than frivolous acts of escapism.

¹ In 1993′s Girlie Show, Madonna’s stage version of “Justify My Love” overtly juxtaposed the song’s lyrics and sounds with the confining costumes she and her troupe wore—suits and dresses in the style of the film classic My Fair Lady, the screen adaptation of G. B. Shaw’s late nineteenth-century drama, Pygmalion. The play explores the Victorian theme of raising the unrefined into the cultured, assuring acceptance in polite society. The Victorian period was notorious for its sexual repression and its aggressive belief in public morality and manners.

² These verses paraphrase the first two lines of the famous “Seven ages of man” speech by Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (Act II, Sc. vii), which begin, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

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Lesbian Music Movement Nation (LMMN) and RainbowNoise Entertainment have joined forces to establish a showcase of talent within the lesbian community. The Sounds of Pride Tour provides a nationwide platform for artist to promote their music in multiple cities. By packaging several musical genres and artists together for one purpose, the Sounds of Pride Tour will enable lesbian artists to invest in themselves by maximizing their national exposure. The tour features Rainbow Noise, Smokin Aces, Young Kaii, DJ Jai Syncere, and more.

Tour Dates

• July 2, 2011 Randolph County Club 4pm Randolph, MA
• July 3, 2011 The Ottobar  @ 9pm Baltimore,MD
• July  4, 2011 Phaze 1 @ 9pm Stone Mountain,GA
• July  5, 2011 11/12 Lounge Orlando,FL

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