The truth about 'Vogue'
A semi-deep dive into one of Madonna's most iconic chart-toppers.
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.
I couldn’t let Pride Month go by without an edition of Madonna Diaries – and while it may not be her campest song, or even her gayest, it’s certainly her proudest. Not without its controversies, this stylised siphoning of the ballroom scene is, nevertheless, a guaranteed floorfiller and truly inspiring. Strike a pose.
Imagine living a life where ‘Vogue’ doesn’t exist. I know. But for me, this was a reality. Fourteen and a quarter long, Vogueless years. Everything changed when I bought the 21 March 1990 edition of Smash Hits. Not only did it breathlessly inform me of a new single and album, but it gave me the new track's lyrics or, as I called them then, because I was fourteen, its ‘songwords’.
It seems quaint and frankly weird now, doesn’t it? Relying on a magazine for hints about a favourite artist’s upcoming single. PR teams having to wait for the campaign to trickle out to punters. How far behind the curve was I? No idea, and back then it didn't seem to matter, but somebody was out there listening to it on my behalf. I only found out years later that the lyrics in Smash Hits were not official ones, but hurriedly transcribed by Smash Hits staff, which explains some of the mistakes in the 'Vogue' songwords here – mistakes I repeated for YEARS when singing along.
The 'Vogue' news was toward the front of the magazine and I still remember being very excited to see the photo of Madonna pouting, with long blond hair cascading – well, hanging – from her face, in pristine, high-glam makeup. Reading that 'Vogue' was “a slow House type thing” was baffling but also thrilling. My musical tastes had begun veering more toward dance music by that time – I must confess I found some of the Like A Prayer album an overserious, plodding bore at that age – so to hear that Madonna would be setting up camp on the dance floor felt like everything was aligning. (Obviously she’d rip away that false sense of security by releasing an album of big band pastiches, and rounded off the year with a single that was five minutes of sex noises, but I loved them all the same, and for the moment at least I was in the dark about that development.)
Charged as I was with excitement and anticipation, nothing could’ve prepared me for hearing 'Vogue' for the first time. This was much more than a “slow House type thing”; it was a manifesto for hedonism. I had little control over the kitchen radio at home, and no money to buy singles at this point, so my chances to catch 'Vogue' were scarce – the Sunday chart rundown, and Thursday’s Top of the Pops – and I devoured these opportunities. Fingertips hovering over the PAUSE button and eyes constantly checking that REC & PLAY were both pressed down, I’d record 'Vogue' every week in the hope that just once Bruno Brookes might shut tf up so I might obtain the very rare (and not used on the video) single version intro in full. (I did, once, and was elated.) The video may have been a black and white masterpiece (more on that later) but to say 'Vogue' was, for me, a blast of colour in a very dull world would be no exaggeration. I didn't really know what vogueing was – although I did trail to the big library in Bradford to try to find out more – but I did know 'Vogue' preached escapism and glamour and I was sorely in need of it. I don’t know if you were around in 1990, but it was basically the long eighties. Helmet-haired Thatcher clinging on, with the Poll Tax riots imminent. Terrible fashion and wet-look hairdon’ts still lingering, nothing to watch on TV but EastEnders and Howards Way. I’d started my upper school the previous September and, reader, I hated it. Now one of around 1,000 pupils, it was slightly easier for me to disappear, melt into the crowd, so I tried to stay as small and inconspicuous as I could with… varied success. Life wasn’t dark, but it was cloudy enough.
But it didn’t matter, because I had 'Vogue'. Like most songs that are actually trying to sell you some dance moves, 'Vogue'’s lyrics are fairly basic – it makes ‘Monster Mash’ read like Tolstoy – but its intentions are so positive and message so uplifting you can forgive it. Whether she knew it or not ( I suspect she did, for what it’s worth) Madonna seemed to be speaking to queer people directly when she claimed ‘I know a place where you can get away’. When she told me, dancing in the confines of my bedroom, grey carpet underfoot, eighties red and black striped wallpaper all around me, ‘You’re a superstar, yes, that’s what you are’, I believed her, I really did. I was nobody, a short, skinny, freckly sack of unformed character traits and sassy remarks with no audience, but I turned the music up, and it took me away. From the very first ‘Woo’ of the single edit to that last thundering echo of the title, I was somewhere else, I was free.
In the long eighties, imagination struggled to catch up with technology, and your pleasures were subject to whichever moral panic the media was frothing over at the time. Plus ça change. Thanks to Madonna wearing a lacy top that showed her boobs for the entire first verse, it was almost impossible to see the full video for 'Vogue' on TV, broadcasters usually starting instead at the second verse, where Madonna is dressed more demurely – until she isn’t. 'Vogue' is strong enough to stand up without the David Fincher-directed video but together they are a tour de force. I remember watching in awe as Madonna’s dancers – including the supremely talented José Gutierez and Luis Camacho from the House of Xtravaganza, who were also on choreography duties – performed lightning-fast but outwardly effortless moves, as if the music was pulsing from inside them. Madonna herself never looked more glamorous and assured – truly in her prime and at her peak, the power radiating. Whatever was happening behind the scenes, everyone in that video looked like part of a troupe you’d want to run away from home to join. Where life was a non-stop reenactment of the pinnacle of the Golden Age, where men and women were equals, where boys could dance with boys, where everything dripped with sophistication and your veins ran with liquid platinum. It was a fantasy, yes, a world away from where I was, certainly, but I didn't feel remotely like an outsider.
Madonna is magnetic throughout – her best moment almost impossible to pick. Might it be her dance-off with Oliver, famously the only straight guy among her dancers, or perhaps her perfect eyebrows as she raps? Either way, somehow the star is overshadowed by her dancers, vogueing at warp speed, at the height of their beauty and innocence. They would go on to become very famous after going on tour with Madonna and featuring in her Truth or Dare movie – a few later going on to sue her for, in part, not handling their expression of sexuality sensitively – but in this moment, the future is a cloud of mist far on the horizon. Once the song has crescendoed and the giant feathers have obscured our cast for ever, we finally breathe out, feeling a little lost. Can that fabulous five minutes be over already?
It wouldn’t be right to talk about 'Vogue' in 2023 without mentioning the ongoing discussion around the long overdue acknowledgment by the mainstream of vogueing’s ballroom scene origins. Madonna never claimed to invent vogueing; the story goes she came across José and Luis in a club (or, alternatively, met them at a ball in Harlem) and was immediately transfixed. What she did do, however, was downplay its origins and tie it more to Hollywood glamour than the scene it came from, which rightly attracted rancour. If we were being generous, we could say she’d been hugely inspired but wanted to put her own spin on it – and she did employ José and Luis – but it would’ve been a nice touch to include references to the culture and its key figures. Malcolm McLaren managed to do just that the year before with his track 'Deep in Vogue’, which namechecked leading lights of the ball scene and must’ve been a huge influence on the Madonna track too, predating her release by almost a year. (Beyoncé would go some way to right this wrong in 2022 in a mashup with 'Vogue' and her single ‘Break My Soul’.) In Madonna’s defence, this brash, vampiric approach to less mainstream cultures wasn’t unusual for the time. Paul Simon, for instance, was selling millions of records by nipping over to South Africa and South America and incorporating their music into his own. But that’s not to excuse the lack of sensitivity. Indeed, Madonna was still doing it as recently as her last album Madame X, with fado music, albeit more respectfully and affording more visibility to creators. The documentary Paris is Burning – released toward the end of 1990 – would further reinforce the true origins of vogueing*, and music artists would continue their plundering; the ball scene would have to wait decades for its true mainstream moment, with the TV series Pose.
*edit: According to commenter Margaret (see comments below), Madonna pushed for Paris is Burning to get a distributor, and I also discovered that she went to the LA premiere in 1991, so maybe her respect for ballroom culture is underestimated.
Some urgent questions before I close:
How many Barbie dolls died to make that very flammable looking hairpiece Madonna wears when she’s singing over the mirrored coffee table or whatever it is?
Who’s locked Donna and Niki in a dark cupboard for their close-ups? Like, they have no props whatsoever?
When the Smash Hits staff were transcribing the rap from ‘Vogue’ – who did they think Caplan was? (It was supposed to be Katherine, obv.)
Who do the hands that vogue around Madonna’s face in her closeup belong to?
Is the video set… in a lighthouse? Second verse, Madonna looks like she’s at the top of one with the criss-cross windows behind her, and there’s a seaview behind José while he poses on the chair
Is it a coincidence that Slam – whose face gets the most closeups of any dancer – looks rather like Tony Ward, who Madonna would be dating by the end of the year?
Have you ever seen the outtakes? Madonna is a perfectionist. Watch out for her grimacing at the end of the takes she knows she’s fluffed.
While the journey to bring 'Vogue' to us was a complicated one – and we haven’t even had time to talk about how it was meant to be merely a B-side!!! – it’s one of Madonna’s finest hours and, as a result, one of ours. While she may have been rather understating the complexities of vogueing with her assertion that “there’s nothing to it”, at least 'Vogue' gave us the confidence to try.
Madonna, José, Luis – icons all.
For what it's worth, Madonna pushed to get Paris is Burning a distributor.
Love this, Justin, takes me right back to where--if I didn't look too closely in a mirror--I believed I could achieve glamour myself and move like Mads if I practised hard enough. And the 'play-rec' button anxiety was real, along with getting everyone to shut the f*ck up on a Sunday when I was recording my faves from the radio. Now, whenever I hear a blast from the past which I'd taped in those heady days, I still automatically know what 'comes' next, whether it was a DJ making a dumb remark and cutting off a perfectly good end, or the next track... funny how these recordings stick in the mind.