Alright! With the final dribble of last minute voters, we capped out at
144 participants for this silly little cute winter time killing rate that now has to be a massive event because so many of you took part. Thank you so much. Are we ready to kick things off? Although maybe I shouldn't say "kick" because...
My bottom hurts just thinking about it.
SCORE: 5.101
HIGHEST SCORE: 9 x 3 (
@torontodj @Pop Life @V3RYP05H)
LOWEST SCORE: 1 x 2 (
@happiestgirl @Jonathan27)
MY SCORE: 5/10
If I had actually been on the ball over the festive period, I could have started this write up pretty much the moment the rate started and most likely saved myself a lot of time, but as it was, I ended up pissing away a lot of my time on… drinking, sitting, eating, barely functioning, and not listening to I’m Breathless, so here we are!
Let’s be honest, this is a foregone conclusion. Frequently
willfully forgotten from the Madonna canon from a lot of people, this was always going to be our first elimination. A beloved popstar deciding to make jazz/lounge music… in the name of an acting role? What kind of cocktail mixed purely to kill queers with a sip? Gagger was taking notes from the jump! I’m Breathless was largely a concept album of music made for or just inspired by Madonna’s role as Breathless Mahoney in 1990’s Dick Tracy, which was directed by and starred her then-beau Warren Beatty, who was the tit dick. That’s titular Richard, in biz speak. In it, Madonna plays a coquettish lounge singer who seems to be caught in some kind of... prohibition era skirmish between men in wide brimmed hats gooning at each other. What? You think I watched this? There's a limit to how much research I'll do, girls!
The calendar for this time in Madonna’s career is, pardon the timely pun, bananas. The 80s had been a run the likes of which had never really been
seen in pop for a woman; she had jumped from hit to hit to hit, gaining more and more momentum with every passing release. It kind of felt like everything was hitting an apex just in time for things to take a change. It shouldn’t be a surprise knowing everything we know now; Madonna is a perpetual motion machine. She never stops, she gets bored, she switches things up, she is always
going. So after the first three albums had acted as a steadily escalating smash hit gauntlet, pivoting into something more intense and introspective with Like A Prayer at least made sense. It also led onto one of the best pop tours of all time.
…so what the fuck is an acting role in a movie adaptation of some corny comic strip got to do with the victory lap of one of the finest runs of hits pop has ever seen? Was my question when I actually started to wonder about why this album even exists in the first place.
My first thought: I get it. We’ve seen it happen so much in subsequent years. No matter how incredible a popstar is, eventually they must get a little bit sick of
being an incredible popstar and want to try their hand at something else. That's just life. You get bored of routine, no matter how extraordinary. When you have total, unchallenged dominion in one sphere, you’re going to start looking outside that sphere either out of boredom, or for any potential opportunity to spread said dominion even further. I think Madonna’s motivations were all of the above, along with a few others. Acting had been a double-edged sword for her throughout the 80s with some roles being received well, and some… not so. You also had the really intriguing dynamic of maybe wanting to impress a partner who was alarmingly unmoved by her status as the Queen of Pop. So not only was there fascination with an unconquered medium, there was something to prove, and our girl
loves to fight when her back is against the wall.
(If there’s one pattern that held for decades in terms of the men Madonna was with, it was that she always seemed to end up with men largely unimpressed with what she did, but that’s maybe a conversation for another time.)
I was surprised to find out that Madonna begged Beatty for the role, largely because I can’t imagine her being subservient in any kind of way and also because… I’m not sure what she thought the role would bring her. But then, when she had been on top of the music industry for so long, perhaps the idea of making a lateral, low-pressure move that also allowed her to flex creatively was alluring. Me doing this rate teas. Although I will say that from the clips I’ve seen (like I said, I value my mental health and I'm not watching this) I’m not sure I get the appeal. But maybe watching a movie in 2024 that was made in 1989 based on comic book strips from the 1930s (Jesus not the source material being nearly
a century old at this point!) is a largely fruitless task. However, if you’re into Madonna making Drag Race-esque innuendo to a man dressed like The Mask (1994), maybe the film is for you.
Anyway, onto the album. Stephen Sonheim, musical extraordinaire, uber-fag, and whose middled-aged self could low-key
come up and fuck me in the ass sometime, also penned several songs for the album. Apparently, he was initially a bit sceptical of Madonna’s hiring as part of the film… but when Miss Thing realised he might get a hit record out of it, he was quickly convinced. Madonna initially struggled with the transition into the singing style the songs required from her here, to which I say: it was 1989 and her voice would continue to be
shot for the next two fucking years as she trotted around the world yelling at stadiums full of people. What do you want from her? Hilarious tidbit from recording the album and filming the movie being that she started
smoking to make her voice even
more hoarse! I’m Literally Breathless! Sure sis, that’s why we all started smoking: to stay in character. Anyway, despite Sondheim apparently being brought on to oversee the record, his credits only remain on “Sooner Or Later”, “More”, and “What Can You Lose”. He also appears to written a version of “Back In Business” which shares nothing more than a name with Madonna’s version. The more you know.
I think the album is an easy slam dunk for her worst, at least on knee-jerk response, but I think the reality is at least
slightly more opaque. The album is not only a departure from the bulletproof pop she had made her name on for the last decade, it’s also really,
really stylised to the point where even if you like this style of music, some of the creative choices made with it aren’t going to wash. Like, who is listening to “Cry Baby” and enjoying it? Ever? “I’m Going Bananas” just
feels like it’s offensive even though it’s maybe hard to pinpoint why, and the way that “More” just seems to spiral into total unlistenable hell is something to be marvelled at. It’s wild that she made this music with Patrick Leonard in large, who really proved that he had the range when you consider his work from True Blue to this point and even beyond.
Still, I think at the very least there are salvageable parts, or at the very least interesting, and like I just said, it’s all largely impeccably produced even if it isn’t to your taste. The big band sweeping soundscape, yes. That opening one-two punch of “He’s A Man” and the simmering “Sooner Or Later” are glorious at setting the scene regardless of what comes after, and there’s even something a little charming about how opulent “Hanky Panky” is produced, and Madonna’s twist on “Back In Business” is a legitimately great pop song. The way that chorus just explodes from those whispery verses is a kick and a half.
There is, of course, “Vogue”, a single so singular and huge that it sits not orphaned, but entirely
emancipated from its parent album as one of the finest, biggest pop singles of all time… but this is an album rate, and you’ve all read me rhapsodise about “Vogue” over and over and over, so let’s leave the particular tale this time. Hilarious that it was the album's lead single when it didn't appear in the movie and seems largely removed thematically outside of both being vaguely... glamourous, I guess?
Outside of getting a suite to itself during the Blond Ambition Tour and mercifully providing a bathroom break for everyone involved, I think the album is largely survived by the 1991 Oscars, which saw “Sooner Or Later” bag a trophy for Best Original Song. That night, Madonna - sensing an iconic moment - turned up with Michael Jackson on her arm, wearing a particularly
stunning Bob Mackie dress, $20M worth of fiercedragjewels.com, and performed the track. It’s
fantastic; there are nerves at play obviously (Madonna has frequently cited how nervous she gets for any performance on live television) but she masters them and just utterly goes for it. The moment she starts to move around the stage, you can tell she has things dialled in. Frustratingly (and for what would be the first of two times in her career), the song is a solo Sondheim pen effort so she didn’t get an Oscar, but still. She got The Moment, and that’s good enough. For fun, I went back to see what I said of this performance when eliminating the song in 2020, and I stand by pretty much all of this.
