I have a love and hate relationship with Madonna, she can be bold and daring, but it’s often self-serving and she never forgets she is a businesswoman before being an artist. When I read she had just covered Elliott Smith’s ‘Between the Bars’ on Tuesday night as part of the premiere of her secretprojectrevolution short film in New York, I was again split between love and hate. ‘How dare she!’ I read on some comments…. ‘This is achingly beautiful’ say other comments, and I am right in the middle.
On one hand, she is Madonna, and this is a very big deal for Elliott’s music to be covered by such a prominent artist, on the other hand, she is Madonna and her aura is so big that Elliott’s disappears in the process. There were even some people who believe(d) it is/was an original song of hers! Come on people!
Madonna is a big star, and by interpreting the song she makes it hers in a way that very few other artists can, and ends up killing the song’s multi-facet and multi-level dimensions. This was always the case about Elliott’s lyrics, ‘Between the Bars’ was much more than a song about alcoholism or addiction,… was it a metaphor for relationships? If you listen carefully, the lyrics run around your head in circles and can make you drunk, between the bars,… drinking bars,… jail bars,… musical bars,… in any case the metaphoric and poetic lyrics always suffer from a literal explanation. There is always much more than what you first get with Elliott Smith’s lyrics, and any attempt at explaining anything about the song falls flat compared to the song’s every direction potentials. When Madonna sings it for a project, which centers on the artist being thrown in jail for perceived obscenity (according to Billboard magazine), she definitively orientates the meaning.
Her performance is a bit strange, dragged on stage by some sexy prison guards (everything is always a bit about rough sex with Madonna), she kneels down and sings the song in a very emotional way,… and her voice isn’t that bad after all. However, either she struggles with the lyrics at the 2:13 mark or it is some peculiar effect she wanted to give? She also brought her son Rocco, who is dancing in the hood at the end.
One last thing, when Elliott was nominated for an Academy Award for ‘Between the Bars’ in 1997, Madonna was the announcer for the category. You could tell she was hoping for a miracle, when she announced the winner (Céline Dion) as she exclaimed with an ironic laugh, ‘Ha! What a shocker!’ Elliott didn’t want to go to the ceremony, that he described later as surreal. The organizers used the Richard Marx tactic and he finally decided to go, but he obviously didn’t want another person, and especially Marx, to play his song. So we are left wondering what he would have thought about Madonna’s interpretation.