I hate to say this, but Madonna’s 2003 album American Life pretty much ended her commercial success here in America. Madonna has a large, loyal fan base, so she continues to sell out arenas and her albums usually debut at number one. However, when it comes to top 40 singles that are always on the radio, that era here in the United States ended when American Life was released. So why did this album sink while arguably being her best album to date?

American Life is a very personal concept album about happiness and the facade of fame. Produced by Mirwais Ahmadzaï, the album is a mixture of electronic music with acoustic instruments. The genre is actually classified as folktronica.

In most countries, American Life was released on April 21st, 2003. We Americans had to wait one extra day to get our hands on this album. The album had four singles, the title track American Life, Hollywood, Nothing Fails, and Love Perfusion.

The album debuted at number one in almost every part of the world, but that does not mean the album was a success. Like I said before, Madonna’s fan base is large enough and loyal enough to make pretty much any album of hers go to number one. The single American Life was only able to peak at number 37 on the Billboard Hot 100 list. The second single, Hollywood, did not chart at all. This was the first single of hers that failed to chart since 1983. Sadly, the following two singles also did not chart.

So, what the hell happened?

Before I can even talk about the actual album, I need to discuss the controversy surrounding this album because, in my opinion, this is where Madonna really dropped the ball. 

If you’re not familiar with the American Life album and you watch the official music video for the American Life single, you might be a little…confused.

Okay, so Madonna dressed in military gear with images of flags behind her doesn’t actually make any sense. The reason for this is this video is a very fast last-minute re-edit.

While Madonna was gearing up to release this album, there was talk about America invading Iraq. This topic was very polarizing and extremely controversial. Madonna decided to use this album to express her opinions about this topic. The original video is a blunt anti-war message set against the backdrop of a fashion show.

By the time the video was ready to be released, we were no longer talking about going to war…we were at war. Shortly before the video was supposed to be released, Madonna decided to pull the video. 

On April 1st, 2003, Madonna released a statement saying, “I have decided not to release my new video. It was filmed before the war started and I do not believe it is appropriate to air it at this time. Due to the volatile state of the world and out of sensitivity and respect to the armed forces, who I support and pray for, I do not want to risk offending anyone who might misinterpret the meaning of this video.”

Many people believe Madonna’s pulling of the video was actually a knee-jerk reaction to what happened to the country group The Chicks (then named The Dixie Chicks) a few weeks prior. On March 10th, 2003 while performing a concert in London, The Chicks band member Natalie Maines told the audience that she is ashamed to be from the same state as George W. Bush. Within days of that statement, their music was blacklisted from radio stations, they lost sponsorships, their number one song at the time dropped to number 43, and they received death threats. The term did not really exist at the time, but The Chicks were canceled.

To get a true idea of what the backlash looked like, here is a trailer for Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, a documentary highlighting the aftermath:

Madonna has spent her career pushing buttons and creating controversy, so when she pulled this video last minute (and so soon after The Chicks fiasco), many people saw this as Madonna being weak or scared. The narrative quickly became that Madonna was a floundering, aging pop star, trying to hold onto what was left of her career.

Take a look at this segment from the O’Reilly Factor where Bill O’Reilly and Rolling Stone Associate Editor Kirk Miller are having this very discussion:

In a 2003 dateline interview with Matt Lauer, Madonna herself talked about why she pulled the video and also responded to the accusations that The Chicks had something to do with her decision:

Personally, I think what happened to The Chicks had a lot to do with her decision. What I find frustrating though, is the backlash Madonna got, and to this day, continues to get for making this choice. At the time this was ammo for people to say that Madonna was fearful and trying to hold on to relevance by playing it safe. When this topic comes up today, I often hear discourse about how Madonna simply chickened out. This really frustrates me because we saw what The Chicks went through. It’s one thing to get chastised by pearl clutchers for releasing a book of sexually explicit images; it’s another thing to go on TV to defend your sexually provocative music video that MTV banned. The Chicks, however, found themselves in a situation where people actually wanted to see them dead. I don’t agree with ridiculing someone for trying to avoid that experience. Plus keep in mind, by the time American Life came out Madonna had a family with two very young kids. She had her children’s safety to think about.

That being said, I think incorporating an anti-war statement into this album was a very bad move. American Life is a concept album about Madonna’s personal growth and discovery. The song American Life is about how she has achieved what people consider to be “the dream”, but she has realized that that is not what makes someone feel fulfilled. Although I appreciate the statement Madonna wanted to make about war, this album and this song have absolutely nothing to do with war.

I get the feeling this album was pretty much done when talks about war arose. Madonna probably got this urgent need to “say something”. So she gave her very personal album a last-minute anti-war makeover.

To make matters worse, not only did the message of the video not make sense with the song, but after the hasty re-edit, the video just didn’t make sense at all. This was a mess, to say the least.

Controversy aside, the sound of this album is unlike any other Madonna album. It is not a very “commercial” album. This album lacks definitive bops. There is no Vogue, there is no Music, there is no Ray of Light. Arguably the two most “commercial” or “radio-friendly” songs off the album are Hollywood and Love Profusion. However, when listening to them, you’ll still hear that they’re not the most commercial-friendly songs.

Die Another Day, the Bond theme she made the year prior, was added to this album. I feel this was added to make the album more commercial.

And if the controversy and lack of commercial appeal weren’t enough to sink this album, when listening to the song American Life, you might have noticed that there was one other teensy weensy element that hurt this album’s appeal. In the title track…the first single…Madonna raps.

Click below to hear the infamous rap:

So…okay…first and foremost, this is not the first time a Madonna song had a rap in it. This isn’t even the first time Madonna herself rapped in a song. One of her biggest hits of all time, Vogue, has a rap in it.

Click below to listen to the rap in Vogue:

However, the rap in Vogue is a fun bop about classic Hollywood icons. The rap in American Life is an angry rant about how privileged she is.

Also, unlike Vogue, where the rap sort of just happened, for some reason, the rap in American Life was marketed. Take a look at this clip where Madonna is teaching the interviewer how to rap. I love Madonna, but this clip makes me cringe every time:

Imagine Madonna doing something like that when the song Vogue came out.

And there is always this exchange with Carson Daily:

Personally, I don’t hate the rap, but I do feel that highlighting the rap wasn’t doing herself any favors. When I hear this rap, I interpret it as her being cheeky. Keep in mind at the time this song came out, raps about wealth and status were extremely common. Since the song is about Madonna discovering that wealth and status do not equal happiness, I view this rap as taking the piss out of that musical trend.

There is technically a second rap in this album. In the track Mother and Father, a very personal song about her coping with the death of her mother, this happens:

In my opinion, when someone is emotionally remembering trauma, the thoughts often come in very fast and very slow almost like angry, vengeful waves. And that’s what I feel when I hear this part of the song, racing thoughts mixed with jaw-locking anger.

As the Bill O’Reilly clip showed, the discussion of this album not doing well was wrapped up in the discussion of her relevance and age. A very scathing New York Times article that came out right after American Life was released said, “Music promoters say that marketing Madonna to teenagers and young adults is difficult because most people in those age groups do not like to listen to the same music their parents do. Madonna, 44, is the same age or older than the parents of the target demographic of most record companies, they say. Her fan base is now made up mostly of people older than 25 and gay listeners, though she has retained a large international following.”

In the same dateline interview where Madonna addressed The Chicks accusation, she also addressed this article:

Truthfully, when this album failed to maintain relevance, it does seem like she got scared. Almost immediately after the American Life single underperformed, Madonna dyed her hair from brown back to her traditional blonde look. She then did a gap commercial with Missy Elliott. Madonna followed that with a live performance with Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Missy Elliott (all three were dominating the music industry at the time). And finally, Madonna finished 2003 by recording a duet with Britney Spears.

Even if you’re a fan. I mean, how can you not like Me Against the Music? And that MTV performance, iconic! However, it’s hard to deny that Madonna was probably trying to maintain relevance and the public was not kind.

Here are three sketches from the American Life era. The first is a supercut of jokes about Madonna’s age from an SNL sketch. The other two videos are sketches from MadTV:

I personally find this disgusting. Just two years prior, Madonna was riding a high with her Music album and her Drowned World Tour. Then she has one album that the general public does not respond to and suddenly she is viewed as a desperate old has-been. How did the public’s image of her change so fast? Well, if you’re asking my opinion, it’s good ol’ fashioned ageism. I feel once Madonna turned 40, she was on some sort of unspoken probation where she was not allowed any missteps. American Life had several missteps and it cost her dearly.

Instead of going on tour to promote American Life, The following year Madonna went on a greatest hits tour (with some American Life tracks sprinkled in). If you’re familiar with how Madonna viewed her back catalog at this time, it would be hard to argue that the 2004 Re-Invention Tour was not a direct response to the disappointment of American Life.

In 2001, after not touring for almost a decade, Madonna went on her Drowned World Tour where the set list had only two songs recorded before 1994.

While promoting American Life at a Tower Records in 2003, a fan asked her to sing one of her 80’s hits. This is how it went:

And during another promotion for American Life, an audience member asked her this:

Cut to about a year later and she’s getting ready to go on a greatest hits tour.

Honestly, Madonna’s disdain for the idea of a greatest hits tour is probably why the 2004 Re-Invention tour isn’t better remembered. I mean, it was a critical and commercial success at the time, but it’s rarely mentioned when talking about Madonna’s tours. It sounds like it should be iconic, the greatest artist of all time singing all of her hits. I mean she performed Vogue, Material Girl, Express Yourself, Papa Don’t Preach, and so on. But I get the feeling that Madonna really didn’t want to sing these songs and an audience can pick up on that.

Here is Madonna performing Express Yourself on the Re-Invention Tour. Watch for yourself. Is it just me, or does seem like there isn’t much enthusiasm coming from her while performing this hit?

So with all that’s been said and done, why is American Life in my opinion Madonna’s best album to date?

First of all, this is arguably Madonna’s boldest album that took many risks. Madonna has made a career out of starting trends, not following them. Madonna is known for finding music that is not conventionally popular. Her talent and influence then bring it into the zeitgeist. However, Madonna might have bitten off more than she could chew by trying to introduce mainstream audiences to folktronica, but I admire the ambition.

A song like Easy Ride is a perfect example of how unique this American Life is. Its combination of orchestral violins, acoustic guitar, and electronic music is fantastic and moves me every time I hear it.

Even if listeners of the time didn’t find this music palatable, the album is filled with amazing tracks.

American Life is also Madonna at her most mature and reflective. 

A song like X-static Process shows that Madonna can tackle religions without being aggressive or confrontational.

I also find the dichotomy between the message of American Life and how she responded to her career suffering after the album’s lackluster reception. American Life is basically saying fame is not important, but as soon as her fame struggled due to this album, she made desperate measures to keep herself relevant. Starting around the Ray of Light era, Madonna has been fairly honest about her addiction to fame. And this shows that she is still a work in progress. It really humanizes her. Check out this clip from a 2004 interview where she talks about this very struggle:

In the same interview, Madonna reflects on the controversy surrounding her decision to pull the American Life video one year after the fact:

After all was said and done, American Life could have ended Madonna’s career, but in part due to the success of the greatest hits tour, her career was able to recover. Her follow-up album, Confessions on a Dancefloor, was a monster success in almost every part of the world and the connected tour broke records. Unfortunately here in the United States, it wasn’t as popular. Most people here in the states are aware of the song Hung Up, but Confessions got very little radio play and was basically relegated to VH-1.

As bold and unique as the American Life album is, I think this album took way too many risks that didn’t pay off for Madonna. Since this album, Madonna really hasn’t been this raw and open in her music and until 2019’s Madame X, her albums have pretty much been conventional. That doesn’t mean they’re bad, it just means they’re conventional.

In more recent years, the American Life album has gone through a critical reevaluation and I think people are starting to finally see this album for the masterpiece that it is. If this is an album you have not listened to, I highly recommend it. American Life is Madonna at her absolute best.

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

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