Cut the Crap

Because she’s as narcissistic as she is fascinated by the power of photography, Madonna has used her album covers for an extraordinary series of portraits that chronicle her self-imagined evolution: the clubland bride reclining on satin pillows from Like a Virgin (provocative); the faceless, unsnapped-jeans waist-land from Like a Prayer (lean, serious); the cowgirl makeover from Music (garish).

Now, on the cover of her new album, American Life, the gaucho is reborn as a guerrilla, with her familiar face scrambled and topped with a beret so she resembles Che Guevara, the ’60s Marxist warrior. How many young fans will wonder why she’s ripping off Rage Against the Machine’s logo?

Many of Madonna’s albums have been extraordinary, too, but they’re not nearly so unpredictable — our most ambitious pop star is also one of our least ambitious singers. Since her first single, in 1982, she has found collaborators who can hook deceptively simple songs to tricky dance tracks — and lately, abandoning her New York club roots, she has cast a curatorial eye on not-quite-mainstream European electronica producers.

In 1998, she teamed with William Orbit for Ray of Light, a lush fantasy of spiritual fulfillment. Then she turned to Mirwais, the radical French tinkerer, who cherishes anxiety the way Orbit cherishes bliss. Together, they made Music, a fitful, fidgety album that celebrates incoherence. A disco cowgirl sings a techno song about how “music makes the bourgeoisie and the rebel … ” She never finished the thought, which suggests she hadn’t bought that beret yet.

Mirwais is back for American Life, which is just as disjointed as Music and much more severe. Many of the songs start with a wisp of electric guitar and then a violent stutter or hiccup as the beat comes in, cutting Madonna’s voice to ribbons. On “Nobody Knows Me,” she delivers a series of rhyming complaints (“I’m not that kind of guy/Sometimes I feel shy”; “It’s no good/When you’re misunderstood”) and these empty phrases make sense — not because they tell us anything about Madonna, but because the bass line is as acerbic, and the beat as petulant, as the album’s sulky title.

That’s both the best and the worst thing about this album: The music is much more eloquent than the lyrics. In “Die Another Day,” the title theme from the latest James Bond movie, she whispers, “Sigmund Freud, analyze this,” and it’s hard not to think of Billy Crystal and Robert De Niro. But then there’s the gospel choir in “Nothing Fails”: It’s a “Like a Prayer” rip-off, but the result is glorious, the same as the first time she did it. Mirwais himself adds delicate backing vocals to “Love Profusion,” delivering the most memorable line: “Aaaaah.”

For a long time, it was impossible to hear Madonna without thinking about her life. Each new interview or video encouraged listeners to scrutinize her albums for clues. She was unsolvable: a human acrostic. These days, though, her life seems less puzzling than ever. It’s hard to be curious about her marriage to director Guy Ritchie, her time in England, her forty-fourth birthday, her dedication to her two children or her love of yoga (or is it Pilates?). Without a compelling back story, her songs seem diminished.

Madonna confronts this problem in the title track, which is the first single. “I live the American dream,” she sings, inviting listeners to speculate about her new life in England. But even she seems bored by the topic. She may never live down the ridiculous rap section that begins, “I’m drinking a soy latte/I get a double shot-tay.” And it’s depressing to hear a brilliant media manipulator declare, “I’ve just realized that nothing is what it seems,” especially since she used that line in a magazine interview last year.

If this is a holding pattern, it’s a seductive one. Though it’s harder to love Madonna, it’s easy to admire her achievements: Her albums are no longer guaranteed blockbusters (and her movies are still guaranteed bombs), but she has disproved skeptics who said her music was secondary to her media tricks.

The album ends with “Easy Ride,” a gorgeous ode to banality. As the string section swells, Madonna keeps repeating a chorus that’s somewhere between a playground chant and a Zen koan: “I go round and round just like a circle.” She sings it as if that’s something to be proud of, and who knows? Maybe it is.