The truth about 'Express Yourself'

Don't go for second best, baby.

Doubtless there have been studies on DNA that account for why we are drawn to the things we love, how we develop a passion for one thing and a loathing for another. What was it about me that drew me, from around the age of twelve or thirteen, to appreciate basslines more, to become attracted to silky vocals over dance beats, planting my stereo right in front of my head as I lay down on the floor to complete whatever piffling homework had been set for me. I don’t know, I can’t explain it, but fortunately, Madonna was experiencing a similar awakening, returning to the dancefloors that had been her home early in her career. Early 1989. ‘Like A Prayer’ had shocked the world and gripped the Top 10 by the throat. As Madonna herself would say in an even more risqué song the following year: ‘So now what?’

‘What’ turned out to be ‘Express Yourself’, track 2 on the Like A Prayer album I owned but couldn’t play because my record player was broken. Originally an enjoyable, brassy, funky, vaguely disco kind of affair, ‘Express Yourself’ was more fun than the opening title track, and its message more relatable than ‘Like A Prayer’s (alleged) blowjob-related mysticism. But it was still a grownup approach, the instrumentation, the vocals, the lyrics – this was fun, but she meant business. Madonna was planting a flag in a dusty planet named Artistry. The whole album, really, was a statement, and a warning: I’m not f•cking around anymore, and I’m not waiting for you to catch up and take me seriously.

‘Express Yourself’ was a window into a world that would, it turned out, bear no relation to my own eventual relationships. Men buying long-stemmed roses, having satin sheets on your bed, fancy cars that went very fast. However, not going for second-best, and demanding an intellectual connection as well as a physical one, I certainly understood, and craved the same. For Madonna, perhaps it wasn’t just a message of empowerment but a casting off of her own youthful delusions. It’s worth remembering this song will have been written either during or shortly after Madonna’s marriage to Sean Penn had imploded. The pop icon wasn’t aiming only to inspire women to stand up for themselves, she was reminding herself not to settle for losers and clichés , not again. (She would forget this advice but that’s for another day.)

I was so young in 1989 – not only in terms of time spent alive on the planet, but in experiences. I was thirteen, but things didn’t happen to me, only around me. (I guess that’s luckier than most, in a way.) And yet, thanks in part to Madonna and avid viewing of soaps and dramas, I had remarkable insight into the world’s darker underbelly and knew far too much for my own good. But about myself, I knew nothing, who I was, or what I would become; I was a walking empty page, a first-draft sketch of a character with a ‘come back and give him some quirks’ annotation next to my name.

Madonna always managed to get seated at the worst table in Wagamama.

I felt like an alien when I was thirteen, that nobody spoke my language. My radio was tuned to a slightly different station, it appeared, my sense of humour slightly off, my references a little too clever, my voice a pinch too high. Dumbing down to fit in, locking away the parts of myself that made me an individual only made me miserable, like I was LARPing as an idiot. So I withdrew. I would’ve spent a lot of time in my bedroom, writing. Scripts that would never see the light of day, fake magazine articles, newspaper reports, stories and monologues. I didn't have a large group of friends, and the connections I had forged were flimsy and unsatisfying, but I had my imagination, and I disappeared into it. I watched life being lived to the fullest from my dark corner. I was not always unhappy; I had Madonna, and a volume dial.

Madonna fans know the story of Madge hearing the Shep Pettibone remix of ‘Express Yourself’ and liking it so much she made it the official release version, even dubbing over the video (which is why the segments showing a brass section playing don’t entirely work). They’ll also know that David Fincher directed the video and Madonna had to be persuaded to drink from the saucer of milk – way before wee Jonathan Bailey was pouring it all down his front in Fellow Travelers. This alliance between craftsmanship and thumping beats was the summit of perfection to my thirteen-year-old eye who taped the video off Top of the Pops and The Chart Show on our rented VCR. While the empowering lyrics had worked well with the KC & The Sunshine Band vibe of the original, when dropped over that early house beat they became exciting and aggressive, urgent and strong. Madonna’s message was no longer a plea for self-belief, but a towering edict, a wrecking ball to the prison walls inside my mind. The original, you could imagine at a party, a merry crowd dancing and singing along, arms aloft in time to the music, shouting out the ‘baby’ and ‘then you’ll know your love is reeeeeeeeal’. But the new souped-up version was something else entirely, it belonged to the clubs, to sweat dripping down bodies, to couples grinding close in the dark, or people alone on the dance floor, pumping their fist to the beat, lost in music. It was eyes across the bar, a half-smile, a beckoning over, a shared cigarette, no words spoken.

I didn't realise it at the time, had no idea it even existed, but ‘Express Yourself’ was the first song played in the virtual gay club in my head and I haven’t stopped dancing since.

‘Cameron, did you take the bins out?’

So we should talk about the video. Madonna and David Fincher were a thing romantically for a while, and it shows here, in the first of four videos he directed for her. The camera doesn’t just love her, she devours it. Every shot is so intimate, as if we are reading their horny texts (faxes in those days?) to each other. Madonna, blonder than blond, looking more like herself than she might ever look again. Brows, lips, the jawline, the eyes burning right into you – that the final frame features them is no coincidence, Fincher knew what he was doing.

This is the Madonna of almost everyone’s imagination, the run-up to Blond Ambition and world domination. Her curly blond bob – likely only in situ because she was filming Dick Tracy at the time – inferior, frizzier variations of which ended up on the bonce of every girl at my school for years after. Madonna slinking about in that bias-cut chartreuse dress, the original unmarried cat lady, gazing out over her empire with the kind of detached contempt that was the epitome of eighties sexiness. Later, on all fours crawling toward the infamous saucer of milk. Not forgetting her deranged turn as the tyrannical billionaire, gyrating and grabbing her crotch and surveying us all through her monocle. The obligatory hot model of the day as love interest – this time, Cameron Alborzian, now a yoga teacher and still incredibly kind to the eye – and the endless references to artists she, or Fincher, admired. The whole thing, as was often trotted out at the time, is inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and Madonna couldn’t resist the odd nod to one of her fave artists Tamara de Lempicka, even recreating poses of figures from some of the Polish painter’s most famous artworks.

‘That’s it, Mittens, you’re coming off the IAMS lamb and red pepper. Your breath honks.’

Madonna’s iconography runs through this song as quartz might streak a pebble. The hair (most importantly), the empowerment, the first steps toward nudity – which ‘Vogue’ and ‘Justify My Love’ would run with in 1990 – the exploration of fantasy, be it sexual or aspirational. There was a sense of Madonna being absolutely in control, The Boss; you could imagine her going over the storyboard with a magnifying glass, measuring every bead of sweat on her minions’ brows, timing to the second that satin sheet being whipped away from her naked body. To a thirteen-year-old outsider in Yorkshire, there was nothing more fascinating, inspiring, or exciting than watching Madonna get the world up against the wall and empty its pockets.

‘Express Yourself’ was, for a time, the most expensive video ever made, an accolade which seemed to mean a lot to critics and punters alike – ah the eighties and the nineties, where what you spent was more important than what you said. Luckily, Madonna was saying plenty. In fact, this freedom of expression in the video would come back to haunt her 18 months later when ‘Justify My Love’ was released, and caused a scandal, ending up banned by MTV. Madonna appeared on US current affairs show Nightline to defend herself, and the presenter used the fact that Madonna spent some of the ‘Express Yourself’ video in chains as evidence she was a) a pervert and b) more submissive than she claimed. Madonna didn't miss a beat as she impatiently explained, as if the presenter was an idiot, that she put herself in chains – nobody told her to do it, it was her idea – and the character in the video is chained to her own desires. She rounded off this ethics lesson with a clear, persuasive, emphatic ‘I’m in charge, OK?’

And it was OK. More than OK. Songs in the vein of ‘Express Yourself’ by other artists have cluttered the charts in the following decades, but they’ve seldom matched its impact. Stands to reason: why go for second best, baby?

Watch Madonna perform ‘Express Yourself’ on the MTV Awards or opening the Blond Ambition Tour. This is what the word ‘iconic’ actually means!

Would love to hear your own memories of this banger. Comment! Talk to me!