In the December 1994 issue of Details magazine, Madonna was interviewed about her sixth album, Bedtime Stories. In it she mentions an author she had been reading at the time, Jeanette Winterson, quoting a line from her novel Written on the Body, but she mistakenly states that it is from Winterson’s earlier novel, The Passion. Madonna uses the quote, “This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?” to describe the sentiment behind the song “Inside of Me” about her mother, who had died when she was five, pointing to the effect of this loss on her. After reading this quote I began to read everything Winterson has written and she has been my favorite living author ever since.

A handful of Madonna’s songs from the early 1990s contain allusions to or direct quotes of verses from different poets and authors, suggesting her lyrics aren’t mere fluff and that she wants her work to be viewed in the light of these meaningful, classic texts. This is first evident on the B-side to the “Justify My Love” single of 1990, “The Beast Within.” In 1993’s Girlie Show the male dancers from her troupe, in army fatigues, perform a choreographed spectacle filled with anguish and passion, desire and a longing for intimacy, plagued by shame. It was also performed on her Reinvention Tour (2004) and appears on the live album recording from that show, I’m Going To Tell You A Secret. In this six-minute song Madonna recites varied sections from the book of Revelation; these verses include 1:3, 7; 2:1–4, 9–10; 13:1–10; 21:1–8; and 22:10–13.

Naturally, the text is apocalyptic, and the title of the song hints at the subtext of the verses Madonna has purposely chosen—“the beast within” humankind is a violent, sexual animal; the two are almost always entwined, and as the flipside to “Justify” the song only serves to reinforce Madonna’s interest in the relation between sex, repressed desire, and violence, and what happens when one’s sexual desires are not acted on in the best way possible. (Does anyone hear echoes of “Express Yourself” and “Human Nature” here?) “And I saw a beast rising out of the sea . . .” can be read as the untamed violent, sexual animal hidden deep inside each of us which is often set free when we surrender to our sexual urges, urges that religion either tries to utilize for deeper pleasure and self-control (a common Eastern trait, think Kama Sutra and Tantric sex) or to entirely deny and repress as a sin and a great evil engineered by Satan to keep us from our heavenly paradise. This beast is “worshiped” by those who believe the purpose of all life begins and ends with humanity itself, and that we are free to live and do as we please, giving in to all of our sexual and violent desires at the expense of others. Those people who are witness to this beast ask, “Who is like the beast and who can fight against the beast?” prompting the belief that we are all like the beast because at our core lies the beast of our inhumanity toward others, not just our “base” sexual instinct. And we are the only ones who can fight against the beast within. This beast must be fought through a belief in humans as greater than the instinctual, sexual, and violent animals they are at their core, and through a belief in God and the salvation brought by love in sexual intimacy and desire without it leading to excess wherein we are nothing but animals fucking for the sake of temporarily quelling our recurring natural sexual urges. The verses that end the song dwell on the idea of God returning to the world to save from death all those who have lived by the law and by love, to be with “He who conquers” the beast within, but that those who do not believe, those who go and live in excess—“murderers, fornicators, idolaters”—will suffer and “their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone.” Giving in to our urges is not a sin, is not evil, if we channel them in the act of love, and if we use our minds and our hearts to love one another and God, which is the right path, the middle path, which all religion preaches as the way to redemption. This will save us from the excess that leads us to the emptiness we feel when we detach sex from love.

In 1992, Madonna released Erotica, which includes a cover of the Peggy Lee classic “Fever.” Here the lyrics speak of Shakespeare’s “star-crossed lovers” Romeo and Juliet (she also mentions them in “Cherish”), in which she sings:

Romeo loved Juliet
Juliet, she felt the same,
When he put his arms around her
He said, “Julie baby, you’re my flame”
He gave her fever

Simple enough, the song is about sexual attraction; the chemical ground which produces desire within the mind, heart, and soul for another human being that burns so deeply and feels so good that it becomes an irreversible turn-on, and the flames of this desire can only be extinguished, albeit momentarily, by acting on that desire. Desire can’t always be contained or controlled, and “Fever” celebrates this with a hip, sexy beat.

In 1994, Madonna released Bedtime Stories, her one album with a number of literary influences. Aside from “Inside of Me,” discussed in the introduction, the other songs on this album which have literary influences are “Love Tried To Welcome Me,” “Sanctuary,” and “Take A Bow.” In “Love Tried To Welcome Me,” Madonna invokes two possible sources for the lyrics “And I must confess, instead of spring, it’s always winter / And my heart has always been a lonely hunter.” The first could be Carson McCullers’s American literary classic written when she was only twenty-three, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. This novel, written in the Southern Gothic tradition, is the story of teenager Mick Kelly, the deaf-mute John Singer, and other outcasts isolated by the Southern society in which they live. It is a novel that highlights the nature of adolescence with its awkward, frustrated hopes, dreams, and ambition, unrequited love, spiritual isolation, and the failure of humans to engage in meaningful communication. The other source, from which McCullers took the title, at the suggestion of her editor, is Fiona MacLeod’s poem “The Lonely Hunter,” from the verse “But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.”

The other literary influence present in the song is found in the two slightly modified versions of the chorus: “Love tried to welcome me / But my soul drew back / Guilty of lust and sin,” and “Love tried to welcome me / But my soul drew back / I was covered with dust and sin.” These lines slightly rephrase the first verses of the English Metaphysical poet George Herbert’s poem “Love (III),” which are as follows: “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin.” The song is about being beckoned by Love into a world of intimacy and fulfillment, where desire can blossom into the liberation of love and respect for oneself and the beloved, but the singer cannot be broken, because she is covered with the weight and guilt, the dust, of lust and sin, and so her heart and soul retreat, afraid to let go of her sordid past behavior, her heart is unable to set itself free to truly love and be loved, where sex is incorporated into desire, the foundation of love and intimacy.

In “Sanctuary,” one of Madonna’s darkest songs, her spoken-word lyrics are taken from Walt Whitman’s poem “Vocalism” as well as from the book of Genesis. This is a powerful song that expresses the idea that the sublime and the beautiful are found not just in the sun, but also in the rain, not just the light, but also the darkness, and not just a smile, but also someone’s tears, for in all these things life, and its mystery, are represented. It is also a song that asserts the singer’s desire to find peace and rest in the heart, soul, and arms of the beloved, where it seems the beloved has an almost hypnotic power over the singer, captivating her with his very being and his voice, which accounts for how the song is performed.

The spoken-word lyrics that begin “Sanctuary” and are added on to when repeated come directly from Whitman’s “Vocalism,” a poem whose theme concerns the power of the human voice to entrance its listeners with an eloquence, a beauty, and an enlightened knowledge that belongs to those who lead the masses of humanity forward through times of tribulation and joy, which makes the poet himself tremble because it is so wholly human with a fullness of experience, as well as divine. Madonna quotes the first verses of Whitman’s second stanza:

Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice,
him or her I shall follow,
As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps,
[anywhere] around the globe.

Madonna also quotes from the second verse of Genesis’s Creation story in her spoken-word lyrics when she says, “And the earth was void and empty / And darkness was upon the face of the earth.” As any Madonna fan very well knows, religion has been a pivotal influence on her thinking, lyrics, and music since early in her career, from “Like A Prayer” through “Shanti/Ashtangi” to “Isaac.” Here it seems to reinforce the idea that the earth in its unformed nature, swallowed by darkness, is itself a beautiful mystery.

Lastly, in “Take A Bow,” the powerhouse ballad that ends the album, Madonna, co-writing with Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, quotes Shakespeare’s As You Like It. As pointed out in my previous article,[1] Madonna quotes (with a slight change) the first two lines of the famous “Seven ages of man” speech by Jaques in Act II, Scene vii, which begins, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Her lyrics are: “All the world is a stage / And everyone has their part.” These verses are appropriate because the song is structured around the theme of theatrics, acting, and performing, from its title to its final verses, and the gap between being an actor on stage performing a part and functioning without a mask in the real world and in one’s relationships.

Much can be said, both positive and negative, about Madonna as a singer-songwriter, actress, and theatrical performer, but what can be said with certainty is that during the early 1990s, her lyrics showed a more personal, human side, and the songs on Bedtime Stories in particular, in response to the adverse public reaction to Erotica, depict a softer, more honest Madonna. Anyone can argue that she ripped off the poets and authors she quotes from in these songs, but poets and authors have been silently (and not so silently) lifting ideas, phrases, and verses from others since writing literature could be taken up as a career. What can be said without question however is that Madonna shows the value of literature and reading by appropriating lines and verses from certain texts for Bedtime Stories because they fit the theme of her songs. In doing this, she depicts literature, reading, and writing as powerful, understated modes of redemption, because it is in literature that one can find the true vision and experience of the self, both good and bad, dissolving our isolation by showing us we are not alone in the pleasures and sorrows, comedies and tragedies, of the human condition.

[1] “Who’s That Girl? Madonna and the Philosophy of the Self”

When Madonna released Confessions on a Dance Floor in late 2005, there was a track on it entitled “Forbidden Love.” Eleven years earlier, in late 1994, she released Bedtime Stories, which also included a track called “Forbidden Love.” The earlier “Forbidden Love” speaks to me more deeply because Bedtime Stories was released at a time when I was experiencing forbidden love and was rejected for my desire. It is almost a dozen years later and the song still speaks to me, evoking memories of when I was seventeen and first listened to it. The latter “Forbidden Love” is a different type of song, and it is what I call “the two faces” of Madonna’s “Forbidden Love” songs that is the subject of this article.

“Forbidden Love” (from Bedtime Stories) is a first-person narrative exploring the internal experience of desire, rejection, and the eroticism beneath them in the human mind. The singer knows “it’s not right / To have [her lover’s] arms around [her]” but still she can’t help how she feels, singing, “I want, to feel what it’s like / Take all of you inside of me.” This verse literalizes the experience of desire, the oral nature of desire that is equated with an intense hunger, which must be satiated at any cost even though the object of desire may be taboo or forbidden. In this view, a typical Freudian one, the singer’s desire is so great, indicating a lack, for that is what all want reveals, seeking fulfillment of its own selfish needs without thinking of the other’s needs; to take another inside of you is to only temporarily stem the flood of desire, which after a short period, will return to its heightened fever pitch. Desire keeps us fettered to the wheel of human bondage.

This version of “Forbidden Love” is extremely and overtly sexually and stimulated by physical or sexual attraction. It crosses the line between love and lust; essentially, the song is about sexual desire and its gratification, but this desire is caused by the physical beauty of the other and the chemical reaction to that beauty and the shared physical, sexual experiences that occur between the singer and her sexualized lover: “In your eyes / Forbidden Love / In your smile / Forbidden Love / In your kiss / Forbidden Love.” And, what makes this desire all the more fierce is that it is forbidden, it is being denied and the listener never knows exactly why. Yet what the listener does know is that the singer is so eroticized by the fact that this love is off-limits, clearly indicated by the whispered phrase “Rejection, is the greatest aphrodisiac” and the verses “If I only had one wish, / Love would always feel like this.” This perception of rejection is a key to the song: to be rejected by a lover is only going to stoke the fire and create an even stronger, forceful attraction toward that lover that can almost make the situation dangerous if the rejected lover doesn’t let go.

In the second stanza, the singer gives us a hint as to why this love is forbidden, and that she is being rejected because she knows her lover is no good for her, and will only mistreat her:

I know, that you’re no good for me
That’s why I feel I must confess
What’s wrong, is why it feels so right
I want to feel your sweet caress

But yet even this, the idea of being hurt by her lover, is not enough to make her ignore this attraction, this desire; for her, the fact that this is forbidden love and that it is perceived as wrong and bad for her, is why it feels so right, so good to her, and she still wants to feel her lover’s touch.

But yet there is a lingering question, compelled by the verses “If I had one dream, / This would be more than it seems.” Is the singer’s “forbidden love” really forbidden or is all of this just a fantasy? Has a relationship between her and her “lover” really ever existed, or is the relationship very real, but the “forbidden” nature of it a fiction, a ruse to inspire the torrent and passion of sexual desire and intimacy? Naturally, all of this reverts back to the subject of desire and the element of fantasy as a player in the human mind dictating one’s perception and real experiences of the true nature of love and desire.

Confessions’ version of “Forbidden Love” is quite a different story. It really is about falling in love with someone that we aren’t meant to be with; it’s the story of two people crossing paths and falling for each other when it wasn’t their destiny, “Forbidden love, are we supposed to be together?” It’s “forbidden love” because, as will be shown below, there are external forces that want to prevent these two lovers from being one, not just personal skepticism. It is about the intimacy of desire leading to love, not to sexual lust that recurs and burns the mind and the flesh. This “forbidden love” is right because it brings two lovers together, making “hearts that intertwine”, and whatever physical intimacy attends this only serves to show how natural, beautiful, and romantic the love that exists between this boy and this girl is: “they lived in a different kind of world.”

This version of “Forbidden Love” speaks of the love between these two people as fated, a destiny meant to be, and only momentarily questioned, because as the singer makes us understand, her lover’s appearance, touch, and words have assured her that this is their destiny:

Just one kiss on my lips
Was all it took to seal the future
Just one look from your eyes
Was like a certain kind of torture . . .
Just one touch from your hand
Was all it took to make me falter . . .

Just one smile on your face
Was all it took to change my fortune
Just one word from your mouth
Was all I needed to be certain

The singer’s words seem to say that she believed her life was moving along one path until her lover came along and kissed her, causing her future to turn in a different direction, and that his smile changed her fortune. Many of us believe that it is fated when we meet a certain someone whom we fall passionately, deeply in love with, because it looks, feels, and tastes so right. And for all the questioning the singer may be doing about the certainty of this love, her lover’s words reassure her that it is meant to be. Ultimately, the singer is questioning fate and the validity of believing in such a concept. But love itself seals her lips with its beauty and its “different kind of world” in which we view the world and all things in it differently because we have fallen mysteriously, unmistakably in love. But what marks the love in this song as forbidden? It seems that the love here is “forbidden” because it seems too good to be true, and the singer wants to forbid herself from believing in it and the power it has shown in changing her life and her future.

On her Confessions tour Madonna performed that album’s “Forbidden Love.” On each side of the stage a set of shirtless young men stand together; one has the Jewish Star of David on his chest while the other’s chest bares the crescent of Islam. They are doing a choreographed dance with their hands and arms intertwining and releasing while Madonna sings in the center, who later joins them in this routine before the performance ends. A large cross hangs behind her from where she descends to the stage, and so one readily reads a religiously inspired context for the performance of the song.

Here, this version of “Forbidden Love” sends the message that religious creeds, political persuasion, sexual and racial prejudice, and the violence that often accompanies the ignorance and exclusionary tactics of these agendas, have no power over love and desire. Love knows no color, no belief system, no agenda but its own, and that is to break the ego of its self-centeredness and show it the beauty of sacrificing the self’s own needs and wants for those of another greater than oneself. True love conquers all, defying all boundaries that anyone puts in its place; in the eyes of love no embrace, no kiss, no touch, no expression of desire is forbidden or taboo because love is blind to the differences in others which humans see with the clouds and dust of ignorance and hatred in their eyes and their minds. It is ironic that the cliché “Love is blind” has lasted so long, when truth be told, Love is the only thing in the world that truly sees.

Madonna’s two versions of “Forbidden Love” are unique in their musical and lyrical differences but quite astonishing in their similarities. They both question how we perceive the meaning and power of love, and how they affect our relationships with others by examining the human psyche’s interpretation of the reality before our eyes. Each song presents us with how love transforms our beliefs, causing us to question the nature of what it means when something is “forbidden” to us, who made it so, why, and what happens when we fight against these prohibitions and taboos whether compelled by love to break these restrictions or not.

“Forbidden Love” from Bedtime Stories

I distinctly remember discovering my homosexuality in the summer of 1989, shortly after I had turned 12. Concomitantly, I discovered Madonna’s music, and the first song to pique my interest was her latest single, “Express Yourself.” Queer that I am, it immediately spoke to me, and remains my personal favorite, as well as the video, primarily because of its outspoken nature in regard to human identity, including the role love and desire plays between men and women, hetero- and homosexual alike.

Every time I hear “Express Yourself” it brings an instant smile to my face, particularly the rip at the beginning of the video edit and the hook of the first, spoken, lyrics:

Come on girls,
Do you believe in love?
’Cause I got something to say about it
And it goes something like this . . .

The song is fundamentally important to me on many levels, least of which is because I automatically equate it with my burgeoning homosexuality at the time, and more important, because it forces me to recognize that I am a human being with dignity, deserving of respect, socially, sexually, and romantically. It is on these levels that “Express Yourself” functions as not only a feminist anthem as originally portrayed in its lyrics and video, but also as an anthem for the homosexual male and all human beings. When Madonna was interviewed concerning the video at the time, she said, “The ultimate thing behind the song is that if you don’t express yourself, if you don’t say what you want, then you’re not going to get it. And, in effect, you are chained down by your inability to say what you feel or go after what you want.” This is true not just in terms of your career, but also in respect to your romantic and sexual relationships.

We must learn to live by the words “Don’t go for second best,” the mantra of “Express Yourself.” To do this defines a human being as someone who believes that their individual needs and desires are paramount—this does not necessarily point to selfishness but to self-confidence and positive self-interest. Putting ourselves first prevents us from being used or abused in our relationships—if we do not command respect it is because we have no self-respect, thus we allow anyone to step all over us and take what they want from us without recompense. And that is no way to live. This is the general idea behind the song. “Express Yourself” is a song about self-empowerment; it is a song that says we don’t need others if those others are going to drag us down and take our dignity, our humanity, away from us through their lies, games, and indifference. If someone we love or desire is not interested in us or is not ready to join us on the path toward a fulfilling relationship, then we must gather our inner strength and go forward because as Madonna sings,

You deserve the best in life
So if the time isn’t right then move on
Second best is never enough
You’ll do much better baby on your own

This last verse epitomizes Madonna’s absolute point: Human beings seem to believe that they cannot survive without a romantic partner or someone by their side in a relationship. The weight of this fear and the ignorance as to the indomitable strength of the human spirit in the face of life’s struggles essentially belies the failure of people who believe their lives depend on the love of another; in other words, that the love of another automatically completes them.

Madonna teaches us to stand on our own, to understand and love ourselves by taking back our dignity and self-respect when our relationships do not grant us the love, respect, and freedom of identity we deserve as is our natural right. As the lyrics of the song reveal, material things, the money that behind those things, and acts of seduction are superfluous and ultimately meaningless if our relationship isn’t grounded in honesty, respect, and compassion, where each mate provides the other with the mental and emotional comfort and stability which is so often required in a relationship, and whose strength then extends outward to the other spheres of our lives.

No matter which way you cut them, relationships are about power and what makes them beautiful is their power dynamics. But when the power of one partner outweighs that of the other, then there is an imbalance that must be rectified, and if it cannot, the partner who finds themselves unfulfilled and put in a submissive position must walk away, showing the other they will not accept being used or abused and turned into a forgotten, silenced partner in the relationship. It may hurt to leave the relationship but your self-respect and self-confidence is what matters most in this instance, and you shouldn’t think you have to stay in an abusive, unloving relationship where you are unsatisfied and unhappy. Sooner or later your partner may very well see the error of their ways, and

When you’re gone he might regret it
Think about the love he once had
Try to carry on, but he just won’t get it
He’ll be back on his knees

But when your partner comes back and apologizes, you both must understand that “What you need is a big strong hand / To lift you to your higher ground,” and make you feel like “a queen on a throne,” like the one person who is more important than anyone or anything else in the world. What you don’t need is a lover who is going to throw you down, cast you beneath them, forcing you to answer to their every desire and pleasure without reciprocating in response to your own. A man or woman who puts you down and tries to enslave you is weak because they fear the fluid nature of the power dynamics that exists in any true, honest, and loving relationship because the possibility that their love and desire will be so strong that it will cause them to lose control and be viewed as “weak” overwhelms them, and, as is part of our psychological makeup as human beings, we fear being weak or seen this way because we don’t want to be used or abused; it is a mark of our struggle toward constant self-preservation. And so the delicate nature of the human psyche extends to the conflicts and communion between two individuals in a sexual and romantic relationship.

Madonna’s power lies in creating music that everyone can relate to. Madonna’s songs convey the strength and power of the human self when we don’t allow ourselves to be taken for granted or taken advantage of. When we learn to respect ourselves then that respect will earn and receive the respect of others, from acquaintances and friends to family and lovers. The lyrics of “Express Yourself” and Madonna’s performance in the video define and depict a strong, assertive woman whom we should imitate if we want our needs and desires to be met in both our careers and our relationships.

According to Peter Griffin on Fox’s Family Guy, “1985 gave us the gayest music video of all time.” He’s talking about, of course, David Bowie & Mick Jagger’s Dancing in the Street. We don’t disagree.

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