Say Your Lines, But Do You Feel Them?

Madonna “Take A Bow”

Madonna has been a pop star for four decades and at every point in her history it has been common for people to casually dismiss her vocals on the basis that she does not possess a powerful big belter voice rooted in either rock power balladry or R&B/gospel music. It’s always a very smug take and comes from people who are too self-satisfied to consider for a moment that it’s like saying that Whitney Houston sucks because she couldn’t do a good John Lydon sneer or that Dolly Parton is a weak vocalist because she can’t rap as well as anyone in the Wu-Tang Clan. Madonna’s music may frequently draw upon disco and R&B influences but she never presented herself as a run-happy diva. Her comfort zone has always been an intriguing middle ground between spunky new wave rock and musical theater, two very different styles that nevertheless share an emphasis on melody, clarity, and attitude.

And when I say “musical theater,” for the most part I mean the kind that come from Hollywood, not Broadway. Madonna is a cinephile to her core and her love of the movies has guided her music as well as her visual presentation, most often in her taste for wistful melodramatic balladry well suited to the big screen. “Take A Bow” is her greatest song in this mode, and so innately theatrical in its swelling strings and grand yearning that Madonna went and made the lyrics about a failed love affair between two actors.

Co-written with Babyface at his mid-90s pinnacle, “Take A Bow” may be the most elegantly composed track in the entire Madonna discography. The song highlights two of Babyface’s greatest skills as a songwriter – he’s great at making his harmonic sophistication seem totally natural and unfussy, and in writing songs that burn with intense passion but maintain a cool composure. When Babyface worked with R&B singers like Boyz II Men or Toni Braxton that usually worked as a contrast with their big hot voices, but with Madonna it only emphasizes the cinematic quality of the song in the sense that screen actors are meant to perform with small gestures intended for the camera, whereas a stage actor has to err on the side of bigger, bolder decisions that play to a live audience. Madonna inhabits “Take A Bow” like a screen actor; she hits her marks for the melodramatic peak of the bridge but the most devastating moments are in the quieter, more nuances lines.

“Take A Bow” is a song that absolutely luxuriates in sadness, and invites you to join it as though it’s some kind of elaborate gala of loneliness and misery. But of course it is! This is a song sung from the perspective of an actor, and a song that’s essentially a tribute to the grandiose melancholy of classic Hollywood. Madonna lifts her central metaphor from Shakespeare (“all the world’s a stage”) but playing roles and living out a performance in this context is more tragic than pithy. She’s singing as someone who felt something earnest and true – “I’ve always been in love with you…” – and is finding out it’s always just been playing out a script, stock roles in a clichéd plot. Above all else, she’s disappointed to find out that she hasn’t been living out the movie she had in mind.

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