The truth about 'Borderline'

Twee, saccharine, entry-level Madonna? Or pure origin-story brilliance? Let's see.

Something in his eyes is making such a fool of Madge.

The truth about everything* is different every week! This week, it’s the turn of THE MADONNA DIARIES, a series of personal essays about Madonna’s back catalogue.

My memories of Borderline’s initial release, in 1984, are vague, because it flopped, and when you’re an eight-year-old future gay with pop sensibilities, you are only interested in the HITS, darling.

That Borderline went belly up on first go isn’t entirely surprising. After the joyful dance sleaze of Lucky Star and Holiday, Madonna’s first two hits, Borderline seems twee, and saccharine – a song with puppy dog eyes and a begging bowl. A downbeat song about what we might now call an abusive relationship was not what illuminated dance floors were invented for. Madonna was yet to emerge as the future of pop music; she couldn’t afford, then, to release songs that didn’t immediately grab the public by the throat. So its original flight landed somewhat short of the runway, stiffing at no.56. Her last proper flop for quite a long while. But Borderline’s story wasn’t over. It would live again, in an era where Madonna could’ve released a version of When I’m Cleaning Windows using only armpit farts and a tambourine.

1985 was the properly manic Madonna year where she racked up eight Top 10 hits, the radio absolutely crawling with Madonna songs, the newspapers running out of column space to venerate, criticise, lampoon and dismiss her. Madonna in 1985 was a bonfire of contradictions, and the hunger for material from… yes, let’s say it, the Material Girl was insatiable. A rerelease of Holiday in the summer had done the business and improved upon the (overplayed imo) track’s original chart position, so you can imagine the boardroom of suits not exactly puzzling over what track to release once potential singles on the Like A Virgin album had dried up, which they had, at the end of 1985.

Madonna was only months away from returning with new material and a rather different look indeed, a transformation that would make her earlier incarnations seem dated and amateurish by comparison, leaning into the slick, ballsy sheen of the mid-eighties. This meant there was no time to lose if the scruffy upstart Borderline was to have its moment in the sun. In January 1986, Borderline rocketed up the chart and finally found the audience who’d ignored it a couple of years earlier, landing at no.2, as an awful lot of Madonna singles would, as it turned out.

Borderschlong, feels like I’m going to lose my dong. No, seriously, what’s going on?

At ten years old, I didn't know Borderline was a retread, but even then I knew something was off. Her look in the video – those bright green socks and orange stilettos, CHRIST – was a bargain basement version of the slightly more polished one that had cavorted on canals in Like A Virgin. She was also wearing a very horrible hat, something she wouldn’t do again for a long time. The song didn't sound that fresh, and her voice wasn’t quite matching up to the Madonna I heard on the radio. It would be a while year before I got my hands on my first Madonna album – True Blue – and I’d never been to a record shop so would never have seen a track listing for that was supposedly her ‘current’ album Like A Virgin, but I knew this song didn't belong, I just knew it. What an entirely useless superpower.

This pong of corruption and cynical capitalism stayed with me and may be the reason I’ve always found Borderline to be one of Madonna’s least engaging tracks. As much as I enjoyed watching her vandalise the creepy photographer’s apartment in the video (but that HAT, those SOCKS, help!!!), the song was a feeble dilution of the artist I felt she was meant to be. Madonna, giving in? Pushed to the limit? Being made a fool of? Casting aside her dreams for a controlling boyfriend? This was not the gondola-humping, Marilyn-nouveau I’d been promised.

Madonna really does look great drinking from a bottle, I’m sure we can all agree.

As fans go, I think I’m fairly normal, dully so almost, but nothing used to make my eyes shoot lasers like a deranged stan more than Borderline being so frequently cited as the Madonna song it was OK for non-Madonna fans to like. Always that sour disclaimer, ‘I don’t really like her stuff, but I do love Borderline’, the Dido CD of Madonna’s catalogue. To me, it was entry-level rubbish, for entitled straight couples, snogging to it behind a convenience store, tongues attacking each other slicked with cider and chips and lurid scarlet generic brand ketchup. Borderline, the soundtrack to a burger van sluicing out its grease traps. Borderline, the anthem of a group of ‘lads lads lads’ making up homophobic lyrics to it at a football match. Borderline, the song your second meanest school bully wants played at their funeral. Over the years, I became a hardened hater, disliking it so much that my original reason for not being keen on it had scattered into the clouds, seedlings of mistrust I could never gather again.

And yet.
I will admit.

My view on it has softened in the last few years. Stripping away my exaggerated snobbery and, perhaps, residual childhood embarrassment that I hadn’t automatically known it was an old song, I have learned to appreciate it. Maybe it’s a sign of getting old, of approaching with an eye of experience its sentimentality and that youthful yearning where everything seems catastrophic when, in reality, the character in the song probably found someone else fairly quickly. Borderline is a moment, the sh•t relationship most people manage in their teens – straight people especially, and certainly more back then – that is ultimately toxic and futile but feels like your greatest love. Borderline is the sound of someone with a taste for the dramatic mistaking jealousy for passion, and theatrics for love. It is the meaningless, adolescent fixation that stays with you for ever.

Willing to bet this look keeps Madonna awake at night even now.

The production is dated – and it felt it even back then, are there any other songs of that era that sound like Borderline? The chorus remains weak, hobbled by the clunky title word it feels forced to accommodate, but Borderline’s real power comes in its verses. They are, I now realise, sublime. Lyrically, melodically, they’re immediately involving from that very first line, a cracking opener that sets the tone for what’s to come and is all too painfully relatable for anyone who’s stared across a dance floor at a crush. ‘Something in the way you love me won’t let me be.’

The video, too, while problematic in the extreme, is better than anyone remembers it. Madonna’s story videos – think Papa Don’t Preach, Bad Girl – always come fully formed. The socks have very little screen-time, the hat she’s wearing under duress. As pilloried as she’d become for her acting skills later in her career, Madonna is believable here as a street kid given a golden opportunity to escape hanging around pool halls and street corners waiting for her hot but awful boyfriend to notice her. Also, she looks very beautiful. This may be the realest and most herself she’s ever looked in a video, understandable given when it was filmed, she likely still didn't have a penny and will have been living very modestly and still shopping at flea markets. The message of the video, that you must either sacrifice your love or your art for the other to succeed, may not play out quite as you’d hope here, but it would certainly set the tone for much of Madonna’s career.

Borderline, then, is perhaps the clearest, final glimpse of Madonna’s origin story. The version that arrived in New York with $35, ate out of dumpsters, lived in squats, worked dead-end jobs and partied with up-and-coming artists, punks, and future superstars – we may never know how much of it is true, and it doesn’t actually matter, but every word of it is written on this young Madonna’s face.

‘Just try to understand,’ she pleaded in the song. And now I do, I totally get it. Borderline has my heart.

Madonna proudly models her new hat, which is clearly cursed by a wronged Salem witch.

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