The truth about 'Take A Bow'
The show is over, say goodbye.
There’s no doubt that the end of 1994 was as good a time as any for Madonna to slow things down. Just over a decade into her career, it felt like she had lived ten lifetimes and the public, front row witnesses, were exhausted. We had seen almost all of Madonna there was to be seen, and while toothpaste is pretty tricky to force back into the tube, there was nobody better placed to attempt the impossible than the biggest female solo artist in the world.
As 1994 came to a close for me, I was coming up to nineteen years old and had just left home, beginning my first year of university that September. I was having what’s officially known as ‘a good time’ for possibly the first time in my life. How freeing it was to have left my hometown behind and, with limited success I now realise, shaken off who I had been before. Now, I could be myself – or at least a version of it, I was still imprisoned by heterosexuality at this point – and was free of baggage. Nobody knew me. A reinvention, of sorts. And we all know someone else pretty good at turning a new page on themselves, don’t we?
Like me, Madonna was attempting something of a reboot and, similarly to mine, it wasn’t quite coming off as sincere. The preceding Erotica era and the SEX book had left Madonna battle-scarred and while her faithful fans stuck by her, the wider public had retreated in haste, performing the sign of the cross. It’s all well and good pushing buttons, but Madonna was now realising that depressed buttons eventually deactivate and click back to their original state. Notable exception being the most frightening button of all: the big, red, atomic death plunger. In this premature nuclear winter her career was suffering, Madonna attempted to cultivate shoots of green by playing it safer: ballads.
Closing off the Erotica era with the sublime ‘Rain’, following it with underwhelming soundtrack single ‘I’ll Remember’ – as an 18-year-old with no need for ballads, I’ll confess I was nervous where Madonna was about to go next. The very lowkey hip-hop leaning ‘Secret’ – a puzzling choice for lead single from Bedtime Stories, for me – allayed my fears a little, but releasing ‘Take A Bow’ as its follow-up seemed like Madonna’s most ‘please like me’ moment yet. I had the feeling she was running scared. My own personal tastes colour this view; although Madonna has some stellar ballads in her collection – ‘Live To Tell’, ‘Frozen’, ‘To Have Not To Hold’ – I’m allergic to some of her most popular slow-smoochers. ‘Crazy For You’ and ‘This Used to Be My Playground’, for example, leave me cold. So, at the time, ‘Take A Bow’ was a disappointment, and I largely ignored it. Hell, it wasn’t even the best ballad on the album, that honour falls to the delightfully miserable ‘Love Tried To Welcome Me’.
It was, however, a fitting closer to an album that was perhaps Madonna’s most mournful yet. It was as if Madonna was trying to show everyone she was human too, through the clear-eyed, calculated act of releasing a single with a big-name producer. Babyface does a sterling job of brightening up the song with sumptuous, and scene-stealing, backing vocals, but when listening to ‘Take A Bow’, I couldn’t help wonder whether it might’ve been better in Toni Braxton’s hands, two years earlier. The song itself is not a bad song, it was simply not the song I wanted from her at the time. It was, however the perfect song for one of my housemates, a young girl from Essex who borrowed my Bedtime Stories CD to record some of its tracks to add to what she called her ‘mega depression tape’ which she would listen to when enjoying a light wallow in misery – before shrugging it off and joining me in the student union. Ah, youth, where no problem lasts longer than five minutes, because that’s all the time you have to spare.
But now, thirty years later, I feel compelled to make amends for my youthful dismissal. I must put aside my prejudices against the tinkling electric piano – for me the scourge of balladry for far too long during the 80s and 90s – and appreciate the lush strings of the live orchestra, the honeyed, if melancholic, call-and-response of Madonna and Babyface’s vocals, and a regained vulnerability of Madonna herself, which was a sop to the puritans, yes, but intriguing nonetheless.
Naturally, our girl wasn’t ready to roll over and die just yet, and the lyrics certainly land a heftier punch than their saccharine backdrop. The target of Madonna’s acerbic takedown – someone who thinks they’re bigger than they actually are – could be any one of her numerous famous exes. It’s quite fun to imagine this is about Warren Beatty who, despite his deriding comments in Truth or Dare regarding Madonna’s inability to live off-camera, is no slouch when it comes to quickly identifying which lens is trained on him.
The cinematic video, too, is a triumph. A very early pitch at playing Evita, which would be hammered home even less subtly with a sequel video for ‘You’ll See’. (Superior to ‘Take A Bow’? Maybe!) Wisely eschewing the song’s stagey themes to shift action to the bullring, Madonna is in her element as the doomed, wronged lover of a coldhearted icon – perhaps an allusion to her own relationships where she has been the most famous half. While this is a reputation overhaul, it’s still a Madonna video, so among the haunted stares, glacial elegance, and high drama, there’s plenty of catholic imagery and, yes, Madonna does spend a decent amount of time in her underwear. Very much in her prime, at 36, the star looks beautiful in this video, and the 1930s-adjacent styling suits her much better here than it did in Shanghai Surprise.
Whatever I may think about ‘Take A Bow’, it had a job to do and, largely, it succeeded. In the US, it became Madonna’s most successful single to date, spending ages at the top of the Hot 100 and landing as her second biggest 90s seller after ‘Vogue’. Much like me, the British public were less convinced, and the track stalled at no.16, a disaster for her professionally. This is perhaps another reason I look on the song less kindly – as a self-confessed chart nerd, I was disappointed that ‘Take a Bow’ ended Madonna’s record-breaking run of Top 10 hits, which had begun with ‘Like A Virgin’ ten years earlier. There are signs Madonna herself wasn’t entirely comfortable with this sudden sweeping acceptance back into the fold of respectability. She followed ‘Take A Bow’ with the unrepentant ‘Human Nature’, complete with BDSM-flavoured video and profane lyrics.
We were only just entering the woods when it came to Madonna balladry – the mid 90s were tough for me personally as a result – but that’s for another time. While I may never fully embrace ‘Take A Bow’ to my heart, I doff my cap to it all the same. If only for the fact it ensured the closing lyrics ‘the show is over, say goodbye’ wouldn’t apply to their singer for quite some time. But the true reinvention, one that would breathe new life into both of us, was still a little while away.
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ONE-LINER
As I count down to the paperback release of my fourth novel LEADING MAN this April, every week until publication and beyond, I’m posting ONE line from the book here, snatched from every 25 pages or so, in the hope it will persuade at least one person to buy it. This week, on page 100:
He’d visited the gym at university only to get Tooty Frooties out of the vending machine.
LEADING MAN is funny and heartbreaking and I think it will surprise you how much you love it. Buy the hardback, or preorder the paperback. Preordering can make the hugest difference to how a book performs and my career, so please do so if you can. Or the Kindle is down to £2.99 now, so there’s always that. Thank you.
I was 17 and in love / lust when Crazy For You came out , which def helped me love it. I'm sorry you couldn't be there.
It must be a “youth thing”: I was never a fan of the ballads i.e. the slow ones back in the day. Now (as a person pushing 50) I think they’re lovely 😂