Madonna – What it Feels Like for a Girl (2001)
Some years ago I was having a thoughtful conversation with a colleague. The topic was being female in a (then- and mostly-still-) male-dominated tech-forward business. Sorry ’bout all the hyphens.
She could, she told me, handle men and their well-worn jockstrapism quite ably [ed. doncha dare call it ‘ladyballs’; it’s just garden-variety self-awareness, and testicle-owners don’t hold sole title to those]. But what she said next broke my heart.
“I just don’t feel like I can be myself. I have to constantly role-play, and that’s really tiring. Just doing my job is tiring enough.”
Gut punch. It became crystal clear to me that however “far we’ve come”, it seems we haven’t moved a centimetre. Not one.
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As a musician, I’ve never been a Madonna champion. She’s not, IMHO, much of a singer, instrumentalist, songwriter or creative driver much less musical thought leader. Marketing and Product Delivery? Peerless. Entertainment? Ninja. Company spokesperson? I suppose, in a John Lydon kind of way. But we’re here to talk music, and that’s where we’ll litigate her exercises.
I’ll start here: even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day.
Madonna penned the lyrics for What it Feels Like For a Girl for her forthcoming album Music, and collaborated with two producers, Guy Sigsworth and David Torn (brother of late actor-comedian Rip), to complete the songwriting byline. It’s not clear how the musical composition broke down between the three royalty collectors, but no matter: the lyrics were brilliant work, certainly the hero of the song, and tower over a weak musical accompaniment, both melodically and harmonically.
And by throwing shade at the musical component, I don’t mean to sell the text short here. It’s every last bit of truthful, moving and mistakeless. The evocative imagery of tight jeans, patches of skin and jutting hips ‘repenting’ are set afire with sarcastic, rhetorical shots “When you open up your mouth to speak / Could you be a little weak?“. It’s a betrayal of general, almost porn-level exploitation writ large. One gets furious just listening to it, which, as it goes, is the whole point.
Forget the voiceover in the intro (Charlotte Gainsbourg‘s scripted words from the jaw-dropping 1992 film Cement Garden), a silly and artless Scooby-Doo moment that no thoughtful listener needed. I won’t quote it here. The gut punch comes in the rhythmic accompaniment.
Really, the line containing title is the song’s grand eclat. It’s not a question, it’s a statement. It’s an imperative, a challenge to spend at least a moment reflecting on what it might be if you lived another reality, one that imprisoned you in an apparatus of expectations, scripts and roles, none of them of your making or consent. Clearly it’s aimed at cisgender males, but you can adjust the sights anywhere you want where structural injustice squats.
The drumbeat – the cold, synthetic, electropop rhythm – stops cold on the word ‘know‘, then restarts on the word ‘girl‘. Musically, the fabricated rhythm is the only point of interest in this easily-composed song. And it seizes as mechanically as it had played. The only music worth a damn in this song is screaming two messages: first, listen to the words “what it feels like“, and; second, purpose and confidence are interrupted, even estopped, by a context beyond her levers. The singer’s voice is the ‘girl’; the drum machine is her purpose, her energy. The rhythmic pause is deafening and achieves both attention and affect.
I haven’t found any primary-source references to this passage in interviews, articles or other chronicles of the writing and recording of this song. I’d be curious to know whose idea it was to stop the drum machine and what they intended. But that’s music, isn’t it? Who meant what and whatever we hear or choose to hear may be altogether uncoupled. And what of it?
It doesn’t make me find that moment any less heartbreaking.
