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Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Welcome to Switch On Pop, I am producer, Rhianna Cruz. I'm songwriter, Charlie Harding. And welcome back to our listening to Madonna series where we take a crash course in Madonna studies or as I like to call it, Madonnaology.
Today I want to jump right in and play you some of Madonna's first single, Everybody. I'm pretty sure that the instrumental was the demo track of my Casio learner keyboard when I was a kid. That has some cheese balls to the sizes. Oh yeah, super cheese ball.
You know, if you listen to it, right, it might not sound like anything special. It might not sound like anything other than a great pop song. But I'm here to tell you that in the scope of pop music, everybody actually carries a lot of cultural weight. Hey, what?
Hear me out. Hear me out. We got to look further than the funky synthesizers and the Casio keyboard samples and into the song's legacy, which is a part of Madonna's whole legacy that we're taking a look at on listening to Madonna through her Holy Trinity. Remind me Holy Trinity three elements of Madonna.
They are. Well, last episode we talked about the way she explores gender in her music and next episode we're going to tackle her spirituality. But this week, we're going to look at Madonna's music as a cultural melting pot. And that brings us back to everybody.
Explain yourself. So I'm here to get really big brain on you. Okay. Okay.
Even though Madonna is a white woman from the Midwest, her discography has been influenced by countless different cultures over her 40 year career. She developed her sound in black and brown dance spaces in New York City and frequently pays homage to the people she encountered while traveling the world, reflecting and sometimes appropriating the cultures that surrounded her. But through this process, I believe Madonna created space in the mainstream for artists from these cultures to follow in her footsteps. And I know it might sound a bit out of pocket, but I do believe that Madonna opened the flood gates for many of the sounds that we've seen on the Billboard Hot 100 over the last decade.
What does this have to do with everybody, which I think sounds like a demo track on my Casio keyboard? I'm clearly missing something. Well, everybody actually has a deep connection to Latin music and culture. It is no secret that Madonna loves Latinos and Latin culture.
Latin culture has been cited as perhaps the most influential and revisited ethnic style in Madonna's work. And you're saying we're hearing it in everybody? Yeah. An important piece of the puzzle here, okay, is who Madonna was around in the early stages of her career while she was working on everybody.
And ultimately, renowned Puerto Rican producer Jelly Bean Benitez. First of all, great nickname. Second of all, I think I'm giving off major gringo vibes who knows nothing about these Latin music because it's the era I was born in and it's a major blank space in my musical knowledge. So help fill that in for me.
Yeah, so Jelly Bean is major. I'm Puerto Rican. I'm from New Jersey. My dad was a Latin DJ in the 80s and 90s.
So this is a name that I've heard around all the time. And Jelly Bean is famous for being one of the leading dance remixers of the 80s. And also, one of the first big producers in the genre of Latin freestyle. A subgenre of dance music big in the 80s and 90s among Latinos, especially in the New York area at this time.
Here's one of his productions, the song Dancing on the Fire by Latin Dia. Okay, cool. I think of the synthesizers that are what we're deceiving me. They give off this very strong 1980 sound that feels connected to New Wave, that feels connected to Dance Music of the Era.
They aren't giving obvious Latin percussion, but there's all kinds of Latin rhythms and syncopations that are buried in these synth sounds. And now I'm realizing it's even reminding me of huge early Latin hits by my sound machine that use similar kind of synthesizers, but merging them with Latin rhythms. It's been a half been sat. Wow.
It's also really cheesy, like Dr. Kideer, the beat. Dr. Beat, Miami sound machine from 1984.
It's super cheesy, but really fun. I feel like I've taken this from the New York Metro era down to Miami. Let's go back to Latin freestyle as happening. As soon as we're across the coast, but let's go back to New York.
Yeah. So we're in the early 80s. Madonna's gallivanting around New York making her debut record. She ended up not liking the way production was going.
So she went to the club and asked the DJ Jelly Bean to help her. And eventually the two of them started dating and he produced her song Holiday. And Jelly Bean ended up remixing Madonna's whole debut record and his fingerprints are all over that album as the King of New York's Latin dance scene. So on a song like Everybody, we can hear some of the same sonic qualifiers of Latin freestyle kind of watered down for general gringo consumption.
So what are those Latin freestyle characteristics? Let's see if we can identify them on Everybody. I'd say I'm hearing very percussive, slap bass, syncopated, high synthesizers. I'm hearing a drum groove that is not for the floor dance music, but rather sort of bounces around the bar.
Yeah. And all of that is true because freestyle actually emerged as a way for people to dance to something fully synthesized after disco had run its course. You know, disco, we have the large orchestras, we have the full band. This is post disco music.
And it's a genre that works well alongside electro music, which took up the early half of the 1980s. So let's look at a freestyle song from the same year as Madonna's debut record 1983. Shannon's Let the Music Play. Oh my gosh, it's so Madonna adjacent.
It is, right? You know, we even have the same kind of squelchy, high synthesizer that is on everybody. This is in the baseline, but that's the size sound for real. Yeah.
And you mentioned a lecture as well. This is so reminiscent of Planet Rock sort of like the foundational electro recording from the early 80s. Absolutely. We're getting these syncopated drum machines all layering on top of each other.
It's all synthetic. We have layers upon layers of synthesizers. The production is kind of all over the place in a way where you're hearing all of these different rhythms from every single layer. So pulling from electro, the Latin freestyle sound, is very DIY.
It's not the big disco orchestras. It's these sort of affordable synthesizer sounds layered on top of each other and clearly geared towards the dance floor. Exactly. Both Let the Music Play and everybody have lyrics that are focused on music and dancing and the DJ.
You know, most freestyle music is like this, but it's simple stuff that communicates well in the club. Whoa, whoa, whoa, sorry to fast forward, but I'm realizing that this is like foundational to Madonna because go all the way to the year 2000 and she puts out an album called Music. Like she's constantly celebrating music, making music about music so that people can celebrate and music is very inception. There's this through line of celebrating music in her lyrics.
We get it later on, on a dance floor and so on. I had known that she was a child of New York clubs and growing up dancing. I didn't know the musical Latin influence from the very beginning. Yeah.
The key thing about everybody though is that it is kind of sanded down. It makes Latin freestyle music accessible to a wider audience. And it's a sound that's true and authentic to Madonna who is hearing these sounds around her in the clubs. But throughout her music career, we hear Madonna navigating how much to directly cite versus adopt and innovate on the global sounds and cultures that influence her.
Whether she stole these sounds or simply platforms is up to the listener. There's even a joke from comedian John Leguizamo who in one of his specials said to rapturous applause that Madonna stole Latin freestyle. But Madonna loved Hispanic culture. She said that when she lived in New York for so many years, she was constantly listening to salsa and meringue.
That stuff was constantly blaring out of everybody's radio on the street. To her, it was her sound and community. So flash forward to the late 80s, Madonna makes three songs with writer and producer Patrick Leonard. One of these songs is the number one hit, Laius la Bonita.
Oh my gosh. Rihanna, I had always misunderstood this song. I just thought it to be even more appropriate than maybe it is. It's kind of just read to me as like an electro pop, but it has these Latin horns and Latin style guitar.
And I was just like, I did not know that the underlying production was also drawing from Latin freestyle as she's like, has not been a part of my music education. Yeah, Madonna really was a lot to Latin freestyle and the sounds that started her career. And you know, she's got kind of delusional with it. Like she said once that she's Spanish in another life.
Oh gosh. I don't really know how much I agree with that as something that is Latino. But Madonna wrote Laius la Bonita about the quote, beauty and mystery of Latin American people. Okay.
So it is totally a little bit. But I will say that Laius la Bonita foreshadows the way that Latin music becomes dominant in the pop music landscape. So let's look at Laius la Bonita's Latin influences starting from the top. Bongo's, congas.
We have that same sort of slap bass synthesized sound that we heard from the Latin freestyle. Gomopo Gese, C'est la bak. Hushed whispered vocals. And then in the background there is a driving Latin style acoustic guitar.
Right. We have these castanets. We have these bongos. We have this bass line that's kind of functioning in this trisio rhythm.
Right. Gomopo Gese, C'est la bak. The most vocals I'm not so sure about. But it's not as asking in Spanish at the beginning of the song.
How could it be true? And I don't really think that extends to Latin music as it does the themes of the song because the song is about this dreamlike island that she came to in her sleep. This is becoming personal to me now. The thing is I grew up in New England, where's he going with us?
And it's really cold in the winter. And there's this whole thing where people love to go down to the Caribbean on their winter holiday to escape the cold. And then they have to come home bringing back their imagined idea of what Caribbean culture is with them. And they have gray, the holy wardrobe.
Right. I love my favorite music and completely ignoring that sort of complicated colonial history of most Caribbean nations. And I'm catching some of those vibes from this song. It's like, I want a vacation once and now I have an exemplified dream of the Silebouta.
Totally. And I hear you. But here's my tea. I love this song.
I find it very campy. It's one of my favorite Madonna songs. And I think it's over the top in Sileis in a way that feels like a genuine and authentic expression of love for this community, you know. And it's like something that I know myself and a lot of like queer Latin people gravitate you know, because it's like unabashed love for this community, albeit in like a kind of clumsy way.
I totally accept that. And I feel like I'm somewhat applying 2020's idea of culture and identity back to the 1980s. And Madonna seems quite genuine in her vocal delivery on this song. Yeah, when you listen to Madonna tell the story of the song, you know, it's a little random where she's like to get the correct translations for the lyrics.
Like I talked over the phone with an Hispanic housekeeper and it's like, it's giving I spoke to my taxi driver one time and it changed my life kind of lives. Literally, but this is funny because the lyrics are like not really Spanish at all. You know, there's lines like this. She's singing in the Trixio rhythm right there following the bass.
She's starting to embody that Latin lifestyle. Right. While she's singing things like, it's time for Siesta. Oh, gosh.
It's just funny. You know, the song references Latin Island. There's hints of Spanish guitar in the interludes. But here's the one personal gripe I have with Lice Le Bonita.
The lyrics mention samba, which is a Brazilian genre too far south in Latin America to be relevant to the island that she's talking about. I'm now desperately Googling islands off the coast of Brazil. Apparently, the song drove up tourism in Belize, where there is an island called San Pedro, which I find quite funny because it's like this song about this fake place influencing real life tourism and actual plays in Latin America. So Lice Le Bonita is like this pastiche of Latin sounds and culture.
But the song is produced kind of so beautifully that the kitcheness feels quite gorgeous. Two other songs were released around this time in the same vein from Madonna. That also referenced Spanish culture to varying degrees of success. We have the homage to Mariachi culture, Spanish eyes.
It's a slow burn. I like it. I think it's really good. She has another number one around this time that also references Latin culture, I think to less success.
And that is the Spanglish, who's that girl? What's your problem? I think it's fun. I mean, it is fun.
But the thing you have to remember is Madonna is a white woman from Michigan. And to hear her talk about herself and be like, who's that girl? And be like, Saniarita, Masvina, like it's like, OK, talking about herself here. Oh, nevermind.
Oh, gosh. No, exactly. She's talking about herself. It's the tie and single from her movie, who's that girl?
And she stars in the song hit number one, but a lot of critics. And I personally think this as well. The song is just a retread of everything she really does. And why is La Bonita more successfully?
Oh, yeah. I mean, it's got the same kind of base groove, same instrumentation. I truly was hearing it as her singing to her friend. No, I want to stop Latino.
Oh, God. No, she's singing about herself. OK, OK. People really love these songs.
You know, and at this point in time, you know, a mainstream pop artist had not paid tribute to these sounds in this capacity. You know, these songs are put out at the back half of the 80s when it's on and it's already massive, huge pop star. And I would go to say that their success and legacy predates the whole Latin pop boom of the 90s by a whole decade. She constantly references Latin music and culture before we had the spanglish of a song like Ricky Martin's Ligamalita logo.
We had the clumsy spanglish chorus of who's that girl? You totally right. The Latin Pop wave had not yet crested in the 1980s. There's only one song that has more than 51% Spanish lyrics, which is La Bomba done by Los Lobos, a cover of the Richie Valensong to go along with a biopic that came out.
And that song did go to number one in 1987. It was a smash in the 50s, smash in the 80s. It's still fantastic today. Yeah, it's telling that there's only one song that's predominantly in Spanish on the Hot 100 at this time.
And even though Laiz La Bonita, you know, I'm going to say like a good 90% of the lyrics are in English. It still showed the American public the potential in this new sound. We could still hear Laiz La Bonita in some of the most iconic music of the past 15 years. Take Lady Gaga's Alejandro, for example.
Another Italian American doing Latin music. More like a ton, but I hear you. I'm not here to start beef. You know, Lady Gaga and Madonna have had a long standing back and forth of like, she's copying me.
I didn't copy her and they've settled it. So I don't want to dredge anything up here. Sure you don't. But you put Alejandro next to Laiz La Bonita.
It's pretty obvious where the inspiration is coming from. You could almost hear Lady Gaga saying Alejandro over those lyrics. No, exactly. I like was listening to this song the other night trying to synthesize the connection.
And I was literally playing Laiz La Bonita singing over it. Alejandro because it fits so well. So Madonna at this point is lovingly paying tribute to the Latin community with open arms. The same people that started her career and helped her become a star.
She also did that on arguably her most impactful song of all time, which we will get to after the break. You can watch or listen, sit back and relax and get ready to net worth and chill. Rachel Cohen had decided that volunteering her time wasn't really worth her time. I'm 32 years old.
And I'd say really since I was in late high school junior or senior year, I started to see volunteering as kind of pointless. It wasn't going to make a big difference on the things I cared about. It wasn't going to move the needle. So I just stopped doing it.
But then she changed her mind. And then that changed her life. Hi, it's Rachel with We Are Family. I have a grocery and produce.
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Small ball can be some airs every Friday on YouTube and wherever you get your podcast. So Charlie, if you had to take a guess as to what Madonna's most impactful song is, what would you say? Ooh, a Vogue. Ding, ding, ding, right on the money.
You know, obviously one of the most important dance track of the 90s Madonna borrowing from the ballroom culture showing the whole world how to vote. Right. And I think the connections start with the genre that Vogue is, you know, it's a house song and house as a genre emerged from the LGBTQ black and brown communities of the underground dance scene, you know, house referring to a warehouse, right? And if you'll recall Madonna owes her fame to these communities.
So what better song to communicate her allegiance to those people than an ode to the dancing within this house ballroom culture? Okay. I just have to point out that Madonna was not the first to appropriate this sound from ballroom culture that actually there's a connection back to the sex pistols. What?
No. So Martin McLaren was a fashion designer and music manager from London, who at one point was the manager of the sex pistols. And when sort of whole punk thing is drying up, goes to New York City and makes a song with ballroom stars, including Willie Ninja from the House of Ninja, they make deep in Vogue released in 1989 before Madonna's Vogue. Wow, Charlie, I am gagged by this.
I've never heard this before. This is awesome. Yeah. And was known for taking some cultures and kind of turning them into a bumper sticker version of that culture.
And so he had an important role in taking the queer, black and brown culture of ballroom and making one of those first dance hits to go beyond that community. And you know what's funny when I started playing it, right? This violin synth at the beginning. This has got to be a special truth to the house is off.
It sounds exactly like a song off of Madonna's erotica deeper and deeper. Yeah, I'll go back to the 1987 Early House track, Strings of Life by Derek May, that establishes that string sound that then everyone incorporates as part of house. Wow. So Vogue is incorporating all these different sounds, these different inspirations, paying tribute to these communities.
It's also in the lyrics, a song designed to transcend culture and color lines itself. Now we should be honest here, there have been tomes worth of ink spilled on, whether or not this song is appreciation or appropriation based off of who was and was not included in the making of it, who got credit, who received financial and cultural capital off of it. But she's stating her intention. And I kind of feel like in some ways, Pultra has come around to this song.
This is not an advantage song despite having been a topic of hot debate. Yeah, I agree. I think cultures come around. You know, when Vogue became the number one hit of the summer of 1990, it was played in clubs across the globe from London to New York to Bali.
And I don't need to sit here and tell you how important Vogue is to pop music. Like it's credited with mainstreaming house music, it brought back disco music. If I were to pull specific examples since 1990, like we'd be here all day. You know, we could do like a 10 part series on the importance of Vogue.
But Vogue is also a full circle moment, considering freestyle, which we talked about in the beginning with everybody was born out of a post disco moment. And now we have Vogue bringing back disco and bringing back these sounds like Madonna has been here long enough at this point to revive genres that she helped put to bed. And even today, looking to the charts, Vogue is everywhere. At the top of last episode, we played a little bit of Ariana Grande's Yes and in relation to Vogue.
And in addition to Ariana Grande, you know, Beyonce put out Renaissance, this Ode to House music and Culture. And one of the remixes of her song, Break My Soul, is The Queen's Remix, which references Vogue and Madonna directly. And Beyonce doesn't just sample Vogue. She also interbleeds the famous bridge in which Madonna lists movie stars of a prior generation.
Beyonce updates it and makes it a black anthem, mentioning famous black musicians, including her sister. When I get super famous, I'm going to drop my brother's name in a song that I make as well. But I promise you, it's not going to be a cover of Vogue. I can't pull that off.
I would love to hear it though, personally. Where do we go next? So in Madonna's sonic cultural melting pot, we have both the black and brown communities of New York. Now we got to go abroad.
This is good because it just got cold in New York. I got to go on my island vacation somewhere. Where are we going? So we're going to go all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to Portugal, where Madonna continues to gain inspiration from the communities she's surrounded by on the album, Madame X, and specifically the track, Faz, Costoso.
Again, a little out of touch here. I know like Fato music from Portugal, but you got to film me in. Yeah. So this is her song with Brazilian superstar Anita.
And the album, The Strack, is from Madame X, came out in 2019 and was inspired by Madonna's time living as an ex-pat in Lisbon, Portugal. When she was there, she was immersed in the local music and culture. She became very involved in the local underground music scene and wanted to make an album that paid tribute to this time in her life. Now, Faz, Costoso is actually a cover of Portuguese artist, Blyo's song of the same name, which was popular when Madonna was living in Portugal.
Love the push of the drums. This is so fun. It's really dope. I love this song.
I think it makes sense that Madonna brings in Anita on her cover. Makes it a bit more of a global track, working with Brazilian artists in Portuguese. Anita is basically the Madonna of Brazil. People love her.
She's already a global icon in the country and is credited much like Madonna with mainstreaming this Brazilian sound to Latin markets. So looking at Faz, Costoso, we have a funk song, which is new to Madonna. You know, she's done Latin sounds before, but this is an entirely new rhythm here. You know, we know the regga ton beat as it's like boom, boom, boom, chrissy rhythm, but the funk beat is differently syncopated, you know, instead of that boom, chr it's like a boom, boom, chr, chr, you know, it's like it's so different.
This is not like George Clinton funk. This is a different thing. No, I should have said that earlier. Funk in Brazil is this rhythm.
It's a cultural music, totally different than parliament funk. That like George Clinton funk that we got going on in America. And it's the sound of this Madonna track and it's a big part of Anita's sound. Yeah, Anita actually has a whole album that you put out this year called funk generation, which is her pushing this funk sound out to her millions of fans.
Yeah, that's funk rave by Anita. Oh my gosh, it is a funk rave because it has both that funk rhythm and then it adds a sort of four to the floor dance beat it too. Cool. Yeah, it's really dope.
Going back to Faz, Costoso, it's interesting because the song that that Madonna is covering is entirely in Portuguese, but Madonna's version with Anita is half in Portuguese and half in English. A decision that I assume is made in part because Madonna is not Portuguese and is not fluent in Portuguese and maybe doesn't have a Portuguese housekeeper and figure out the translations, but I assume it's also to bridge Portuguese culture with an English speaking audience as she's known to have done in the past. Rana, I'm going to make a correction here. I'm assuming Madonna did have a housekeeper when she was living in Lisbon, likely Portuguese, which by the way, Portuguese housekeeper is an essential part of the plot line of the film, love actually.
And I don't know if that is involved here in Madonna song or what, but I just important clarification. I mean, the song came out 16 years after love actually. So maybe there's some connections that Madonna's making in her head as she's living in Portugal around this time. It's like a conspiratorial.
But it's all of, you know, I can tell Madonna really loves this culture through the communal nature of this album. And on this song in particular, there's this bridge part that isn't in Blai's original version that turns Faz, Costoso into this big communal party. So what you're saying is that she's trying to right the wrong of misusing samba in her earlier reference by making a cover of a Portuguese song with a Brazilian artist using Brazilian funk sounds and incorporating elements of samba via like carnival sounds. Exactly.
I mean, she does this all over this album. There's the song Batuka, which features the Batuka deres orchestra and all women group from Cape Verde that play drums on the track. The Brazilian people also love Madonna. Madonna closed out her celebration retrospective tour earlier this year with a show in Rio.
The show was free and she brought 1.6 million fans to that show to see her. Wait, what? How? Where?
There's a big big? It was on the Copa Cabana Beach. She'd get anybody on that beach. The show was massive and Madonna clearly loves this culture.
Faz was released in 2019, but flash forward five years. And what do we hear rising up on the charts in America? Bailafunk and that same Bailafunk beat. That is last year's Bongos from Meghan the Stallion and Cardi B.
Yeah. I love that song because it's essentially a Brazilian Bailafunk song. Yeah, it's super fun. And I have to say that when I heard Modemax when it came out, I was like, this is going nowhere.
I don't know what Madonna's doing partially because I'm somewhat suspect of the like, I'm an out of touch celebrity. Am I only way of making something relevant is going to another global culture and incorporating that sound? Right. But also just like I was suspect that like this was going to be the next sound and yet you're showing me that this Bailafunk sound that she started to bring into her music is rising up around the world.
It is. You know, I've been saying for a group that Bailafunk is the next sound that's coming up. You know, how we had like the Latin boom, the other regga ton boom, I think Bailafunk like will be next. And I think we've got to look to Anita to push that forward.
And we're giving Madonna some credit for being early to it. Exactly. Just like she was with Vogue, just like she was on top of Latin freestyle. Exactly.
So Madonna always consistently ahead of the curve and going back to the idea that we started with up for music being a cultural melting pot. Madonna reflects the world around her and we talked in the gender episode about her pushing the borderline when it comes to gender expectations. Here we can extend that same metaphor to blending literal border lines between cultures and countries and communities, all becoming one giant globalist sonic painting of Madonna and her music. I like what you did there.
What other borders are you going to cross next episode? Well, next episode Madonna is going to cross the borders of the material realm and go into the metaphysical realm when she embraces spirituality. Switch on Pop is produced by Reina Cruz, edited by Art Chon, engineering by Brandon McFarland, those creations by Art Scali, remember the Fox Media podcast, now we're going to production the vulture, which is part of New York magazine. You can subscribe at my mag.com slash pod.
Find us on social media at Switch on Pop and tell us where you are hearing global inspiration in Madonna's music. Cause there's a lot there we didn't even touch on today. For real. We'll be back again on Friday with a final episode in our listening Madonna series.
Until then, thank you for listening.