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”

Darren Hayes’s brand-new album, Secret Codes & Battleships, was released worldwide three weeks ago. I purchased the special two-disc edition, which includes five extra tracks and live versions of two album tracks, “Talk Talk Talk” and “Black Out The Sun.” There are three things that crossed my mind when perusing the album booklet: the lack of punctuation in the tracks’ lyrics; a design preoccupied with bright colors, fantastic imagery, and geometric shapes; and a theme centered on the sea. There are also several photographs of Hayes on the beach, of which one shows him drawing a heart in the sand. The theme of the sea carries over to the first and last songs on the album, “Taken by the Sea” and “The Siren’s Call,” respectively. The album title is taken from a verse in the second track, “Don’t Give Up.”

The album’s overarching theme is the intensity of love and the complexity of relationships; the beauty and the sorrow of love and losing it; and the fragility of the lover whose heart falls in love, wades through the battlefield of love, and then faces life without it, scarred but still somehow hopeful. There are two things about the overall nature of the album that struck me: an absence of dance tracks about dancing and music (think “Spin”) and a completely experimental, artistic sound. There’s a reason why Hayes has waited four years to release this, his fourth solo album, and that’s because he wanted to give his audience a new sound, a different voice, and lyrics that are so spare and simple in their poetry that they strike a chord hidden so deep that I had all but forgotten was even there.

“Taken by the Sea” starts off the album with a musical and vocal passion that anchors the listener and plunges them into the depths of the album’s variations on the theme of love. Beginning with the sounds of a child’s mobile above their cradle to put them to sleep, it moves into a sound that foregrounds the redemptive power of love embodied by the sea. “Taken by the Sea” is about letting go without fear of not always being good or strong enough to handle life’s struggle, and hoping that in letting go there will be someone, that great love, who will be there to rescue you from drowning in that feeling of inadequacy or like you won’t survive your worst problems. For Hayes, he is the lone island surrounded by a vast sea that is the lover he desires to take away all of his unhappiness, sorrow, and fear:

Because I am an island
And you are the ocean
And all of my sadness taken by the sea

In this last verse, the song expresses the symbolism of water and the sea as the cleanser of all stains, all weakness. The song’s last verses “And I want so much to believe that I won’t disappear in the water / That I won’t always be swimming against the tide” show the singer’s most human side in yet expressing the nagging, insistent doubt and fear we all face in life though he has experienced the blindness of the face and embrace of love, the miracle of the hope he so desires. It seems so natural to human nature, even when visited by the angel of love, that when we look in the mirror we always fill it with doubt in ourselves, no matter who we have supporting us on the outside.

“Don’t Give Up” tells the story of a relationship on the rocks, and the singer wants to do whatever he can to save his relationship, telling his lover

And I want to run away from this
But I’d never leave a sinking ship . . .
Without you in it there’s no point to our story

And that, along with the most striking line in the song, “And Love surrenders to win the war,” is what the song is all about: Love is not about the self, but about the other person, and that person is the whole story; they are what make love’s heart beat. Love, in a word, is self-sacrifice, and to win the war, the singer knows he has to put himself second, which is how love that thinks with the heart rather than the mind surrenders, showing that his love is stronger than his ego by putting his lover’s needs and desires before his own. Love surrenders and shows itself triumphant by loving the other so much to let them go, if that is how it must be, although the singer clearly doesn’t want his lover to “ever let [him] go”.

“Nearly Love” finds the singer confessing that he doesn’t love his beloved as much as he used to, and no longer feels the intensity of the former passion he once felt for them. It’s a story of a love grown cold, and knowing this, the singer wants his lover to understand that this “nearly love” isn’t the love he used to feel, and now his “heart’s in a mess because [his] nearly love is not real / enough / to be the one”. He doesn’t want to hurt his lover, but his heart’s just not in this love the way it once was and has become “a lonesome ghost”. He may not want to end it, but he knows his lover isn’t the one, as they were in the past.

“Black Out the Sun,” my favorite track on the album, explores the despair left behind when a relationship ends, and how this ending has left the singer empty, without feeling:

There’s no joy there’s no meaning
Just this hollowed out feeling . . .
There’s a hole where my soul used to grow . . .

There’s an emptiness inside of me since you’ve been gone
All the world has lost its meaning all my colors run

The singer wants all the beautiful, life-giving aspects of Nature to be blacked out and shut off because he can’t bear to see these things in a world without his lover, because they express life and joy, which he no longer knows, “switch off the stars / and paint the sky black / love isn’t ever coming back . . . turn all the fruit into bitter wine / it was only sweet when you were mine”. This love was so strong, this relationship meant so much, and now loneliness fills the void where love once lived and the singer’s whole view of the world has been turned inside out. Here Hayes’s voice, just as with “Taken By the Sea,” takes you and fills you with the passion that he expresses with his relentlessly impressive vocal range.

“Talk Talk Talk,” the most danceable track on the album, finds the singer wanting to really have a heart-to-heart with his lover, in the hope that this will truly prevent their relationship from ending. But all he finds is his lover keeping silent while the unspoken words fight each other in his lover’s head. Hayes pierces the heart of the matter when he sings “Sometimes all the matters of the heart / Are the chaos and the cowardice that keep us apart”. When lovers don’t feel like they’re being treated right or being loved enough instead of expressing this, they shut down, causing a rift in the relationship, which is never good. What we keep to ourselves drives us away from the relationship we seem to cherish, and there comes a point when talking isn’t enough, but we should just be honest from the start and never let it get that far.

“Bloodstained Heart” is reminiscent of “Crash and Burn” (Affirmation 1999) but where that song was a call to be there for someone in friendship, this track is about being there, through thick and thin, for the one you love. For the singer, this love has “hit [him] like a subway train / and [he’ll] never be the same,” and the virtue of love comes through when he sings

Even when you fall apart
I’ll pick up your bloodstained heart
And darlin’ I’ll follow you down to the ground

For the singer, no matter what his lover is going through, he’ll be there for them, even when their heart is broken, when all the others have left their side, and all their dreams have died. The singer will be the beacon of hope in the darkness of his lover’s worst nights.

“God Walking into the Room” tells of the singer’s undying, unshakeable love for the lover he is no longer with. He prays that his “faith in love will survive” while all his friends tell him to find someone new, but they don’t understand how strong a power this lover is in his life, “they don’t understand the gravity I’ve fallen into”. This lover brings the singer all the love he needs, and when he kisses him and sees him “it’s like God walking into the room”. The song is a way for him to confess; he is so deeply struck by this lover, and so hurt by the loss of them that he is lighting candles and praying “for a love resurrection and all the things [they] lost in the fire”. The separation is felt so deeply that the song opens with the sparest of poetic beauty: You and I / We got splintered / Cut in two like earth and the sky” and ends with “the sky” being replaced by “the sea” and another prayer that his faith in love will bring his lover back to him.

“Hurt” presents a very different vantage point in which the singer is no good for the person who loves him and he very well knows it, and the song is about how he would hurt his lover if they “don’t put [him] back on the shelf” and find somebody, anybody, who would apparently be better. But for all the ease of confession to being a destructive type, it seems to vainly hide that the singer himself may have been hurt in the past and that this is who he has become because of his own experience with the pain and loss of love.

“Roses,” the saddest song on the album, asks what would you do if you knew the world was going to end tomorrow. The singer says he would confess to having regrets and only want to spend the last day with the person he still loves whom he left. It’s a song about death and the death of relationships that we stupidly, selfishly inflict and then regret (or at least should regret) because “You only get one life to make it right / You can’t smell the roses when you’re gone / So live every moment like it’s the last night on earth.” It’s a song about changing your life before you miss out on the chance to do so, making amends, keeping promises, and fulfilling dreams and desires, yours as well as others’.

“Stupid Mistake” is about exactly that—the singer claims he made a stupid mistake that caused him to lose everything, including vocation and his lover:

I made a stupid mistake and my world crashed down all around me
I made a stupid mistake and threw it all away . . .
I got lazy on the wrong side of love
Now I’m searching every face in the crowd for you

The question naturally becomes “what was this stupid mistake?” For the singer, the question is “how did he do this, how did he let this happen?” All he knows is that he is lost, and that he gave up everything he had, all the good, to start a war with his lover, but we don’t know what that war was about and why he doesn’t want to pray or want forgiveness for what he has done. The singer portrays himself as someone who no longer wants to try to figure things out and make things better, but yet he is wandering around wondering how he let this happen, searching for the one he lost though he claims right from the start “I don’t want love and I don’t want anybody else anybody else to either”. Since all the beauty of love has ended for him, he doesn’t want it at all anymore or for anyone else to have it either. “Stupid Mistake” may be cryptic in its way but it shows how we give up on love so easily because we can’t sacrifice our egos and we walk around lazy, lost, and blind to the fact that we, and often not our lover, are the culprits in letting love fail us and our relationships fall apart.

“Cruel Cruel World” seems a rewrite of sorts of “The Only One” (This Delicate Thing We’ve Made 2007) and has the singer singing that his lover is the only one who has stuck by him while everyone else has left him, and that his lover is “the only one who gets through” and that when he’s feeling cold and beaten in this cruel, cruel world, his lover is the only one he lets in, who understands him, and the only one he wants to “crawl back home to” when he feels all hope and kindness in the world is gone.

(Ulysses [Odysseus] and the Sirens by John William Waterhouse [1891] appears before the lyrics to “The Siren’s Call” in the album booklet of Secret Codes and Battleships)

“The Siren’s Call” is a haunting finish to the album. The title refers to the bird-women of Greco-Roman mythology whose song seduces sailors and causes them to be shipwrecked on their island where they prey upon them. Hayes’s song begins with the singer’s personalizing the experience of Odysseus who told his men to tie him to the mast of his ship while they stopped their ears with wax. And so Hayes sings:

Tie me up against the mast and shield the sunlight from my eyes
For I no longer can resist the haunting of her cries
They call me from the jagged rock
It was the sweetest melody
Like gold and honey dripping from the fingertips of God

Yet, despite this falling for the sultry song of the sirens, Hayes “can almost taste happiness   . . . / Above the siren’s call,” and that happiness is the hope of love. He claims that love “is not beautiful or pure / But it exists beyond the shore / It struggles to be heard above the screeching of her call” as demons clamor to drag him down and prevent him from coming home to the embrace of love. The song ends with the singer knowing love exists, and that if he wants it he must pursue it and not let the seductive sirens or the loud, restless demons of doubt and fear within stop him from finding that love he has glimpsed from afar.

With his new album Hayes has once again proven himself a man of passion and absolute honesty; he is a man of sensitivity and intense feeling that he puts into every word and every sound of his music. What makes Hayes and his music so unique is that his lyrics are just as real, just as human, as the voice that sings them, which makes you realize his music is about him letting his audience know that he feels or has felt just like they do when it comes to love and the fragile nature of relationships and the human heart and spirit. His passion permeates his music, his lyrics, and his trademark voice, and what stays with his listeners is this sincerity, and this alone is what makes Secrets Codes and Battleships a work of art and the man behind it a beautiful human being.

Buy Secret Codes & Battleships from Amazon.

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.