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Madonna

At sixty, Madonna is about to go on tour once again. This news brings to mind some lines from Madonna's all-time best lyricist, Oscar winner Stephen Sondheim:

Yesterday it seemed the world was about to end, didn't it?
Looked as though it wouldn't last out the year...
Yesterday, disaster waited around the bend.
Well, my friend:
Spring is here.

The source of humor here is that our speakers are gangsters. They're out to rape and rob and pillage. So the celebratory song--the song we might assign to a cheery, do-gooding Shirley Temple--is really a song about doing destructive things.


Bye-bye, blues; so long, adversity!
Happiness, hello!
Keep the status quo
Permanently so!

"Dick Tracy" is set in the past, and so Sondheim seems to be writing in his Cole Porter voice. There's something old-timey in the choice of words. The diction feels less "current" than--say--Mary's diction in "Merrily We Roll Along." (The idea of anthropomorphizing "happiness" and "adversity": This makes me think of Audra McDonald, directly addressing some flowers in "Hurry, It's Lovely Up Here." "RSVP, peonies!" "Hey, buds below: Up is where to grow!")


Let the fun resume.
No more doom and gloom.
No more bust, just boom!
Back in business...and overnight...
In demand! Well, all right!
Business is just dynamite!
Let the good times roll!

Sondheim says lyrics should be different from poetry; you should fly right along with the words. You shouldn't feel the need to linger and scratch your head, as you would with a great poem. You can sense Sondheim's delight in his choice of words. He is taking various cliches and putting them together in a fresh way. "No more bust, just boom!" (Again, I'm reminded of various old-timey Audra McDonald covers, with the same sense of literary playfulness. "Life is short, short, brother, ain't it de truth?" "Lose that long face! Go 'long and get that long face lost!")


There's a show-don't-tell quality: Exuberance is built right into "Well, all right!" The colloquial words and the short exclamation tell us all we need to know about the speaker's mood. (And the word "dynamite" is of course a kind of joke: These gangsters are working, literally, with dynamite.)

It's lovely to have Madonna back on the scene, even if I expect she won't be singing Sondheim during her tour. But who knows? A boy can dream...

P.S. Form matches content in Sondheim. "Bye bye, blues! So long, adversity!" Exclamation, then addressee. Then we set our sights on the future: "Happiness, hello!" Addressee, then exclamation. A reversal. A change in formula. Signifying a shift in content. Don't try to tell me this wasn't planned.
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