This came out in 2003 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
The first thing you notice about the limited-edition boxed version of American Life is, of course, the cover pic of Madonna dolled up like a revolutionary — the love child of Che Guevara and Patty Hearst or whatever. The second thing you notice about the box is that it’s almost totally empty.
I’m not talking artistically. Not yet, anyway. I mean empty literally. Despite being as thick as three CDs, the American Life box doesn’t have much in it — a two-sided foldout poster, a sheet of Madonna postage stamps (huh?), and the disc itself, all jammed into the top quarter of the packaging. Underneath? Just the plastic tray and a big ole piece of styrofoam — a bunch of filler, in other words.
Now, we all know the Material Girl just loves her some symbolism. So an oversized box that’s topped up with useless, disposable junk but devoid of substance below the surface ought to be a metaphor for something. The hollowness of fame, maybe? The empty pursuit of materialism? The spiritual void at the heart of the American dream? Well, judging by what Madonna has to say on and about American Life, it could be all three.
“I got a lawyer and a manager / An agent and a chef / Three nannies, an assistant / And a driver and a jet,” she raps on the leadoff title track, ticking off her luxuries. “A trainer and a butler / And a bodyguard or five / A gardener and a stylist / Do you think I’m satisfied?” Remarkably (or not), the answer is no. “I’m just living out the American dream,” she says. “And I just realized that nothing is what it seems.”
Let’s just take a moment to let that statement sink in. Madonna — a woman who has spent the last two decades fostering, propagating, exploiting and profiting magnificently from the superficiality of pop culture — now wants to let us know it was all in error. “I’m so stupid,” she says a couple of tracks later. “I used to live in a tiny bubble / And I wanted to be like all the pretty people that were all around me / But now I know for sure that I was stupid / Stupider than stupid.”
Well, all right. Give her benefit of the doubt. People do grow and change. Even Madonna. After all, Ray of Light was kinda spiritual. Even Music was about bringing together “the bourgeoisie and the rebel.” And supposedly she pulled that anti-war video because she didn’t want to offend people, which is hardly typical for her. So maybe the first three tracks of American Life show she’s turned over a new leaf. Maybe she has some answers.
Then again, maybe not. “There are too many questions / There is not one solution,” she announces on the fourth cut Love Profusion, bursting your bubble almost instantly. “There is no resurrection / There is so much confusion.” The only thing that really amounts to a hill of beans in this crazy world? You guessed it — love. Oh, and dance music. So much for revolutionary. Disappointingly, the rest of American Life quickly devolves from self-examination into a fairly standard collection of dance-pop ditties cut from the same cloth as Music. Granted, that’s a pretty nice piece of fabric. And Mirwais Ahmadzaï is one helluva designer. Just like he did on Music, he stitches together these songs from groovy, low-impact beatboxes, strummy guitars, synthesizers that howl like sirens, buzz like zippers and blip-bloop like video games. Flashy yet tasteful, pieces like Nobody Knows Me, Nothing Fails, Intervention and X-Static Process are a fashionably pretty setting for Madonna’s processed vocals and declarations of love to hubby Guy and her children.
Still, American Life is an album that leaves you wanting more — and not in a good way. Since it sounds like a sequel to Music, it never surprises. And at just 49 minutes, it feels thin, all the more so because the sub-par Bond soundtrack cut Die Another Day takes up part of that time. Next to the intelligent lyrics of the first few tracks, the lightweight romance of the rest of the disc (“I know that love will change us forever / And I know that love will keep us together”) seems exceptionally bland. Then there’s the embarrassing Mother and Father, a dreary ode to her late mom (“Oh mother, why aren”t you here with me / No one else saw the things that you could see”). Taken as a whole, the disc isn’t the travesty some have made it out to be, but compared to what it could have been, it’s pretty average, lightweight fare.
Truth is, much as I hate to say it, maybe that big ole empty box stuffed with filler is symbolic of American Life after all. And now, I am talking artistically.
