The Number Fortys: Madonna - "Lucky Star"

In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either). Also, if you want to read the Number in the title as meaning "more numb," I think that's totally understandable at this point.

My god. This was the song that broke Madonna, or more accurately, the video that broke Madonna. This song may be at #40 right now, but it's about to be her first Top 5 single. Her next 15 singles after this are also going to reach the Top 5. Seven of those are going to reach #1. Madonna is about to be one of the biggest stars of the decade, and one of the biggest (and best) singles artists in the history of recorded music.

Watching this video, it's impossible not to see why. The woman is a star. Had any singer--male, female, or otherwise--ever appeared this confident in front of a camera before?. When you watch this video you're watching a person being transformed into an icon. Girls all over America started dressing like Madonna after seeing this video. Hell, it makes me want to dress like Madonna.

The song itself is essentially a nursery rhyme. You get the feeling it only exists because the writer was excited about the double meaning of  "heavenly body" and couldn't wait to write a song around it. That songwriter, by the way, was Madonna. But hell, you can dance to it. You almost can't not dance to it. And the singing is incredible, especially the multi-tracked harmonies in the "You may be my lucky star, but I'm the luckiest by far." She got a lot of shit, especially early in her career, from people saying she couldn't sing. And yeah, she's no Aretha Franklin. But as an expression of one's personality? As a communicative device? As something that captures your attention and urgently conveys the existence of a person in the universe? From those perspectives, Madonna's one of the greatest singers who's ever lived.

She would get even better as the decade progressed, and the fact that this column will encounter most of these songs means there's no point in going into them here (though Into the Groove, despite dominating the radio, was never released as an actual physical single, and so never appeared on the Top 40 chart; Into the Groove is a straight 10). Like I said, as a song, Lucky Star isn't anything extraordinary. It's so overwhelmed by the context around it, the video and the creation of a star, that it's almost impossible to hear the song for what it is. But even that says something about Madonna's force of personality that she is able to dominate the song, and turn something flimsy into something iconic.

But all of that is hyper-analytical cultural criticism bullshit. I love Lucky Star. If I heard it on the radio, I would never, never, ever change the station. We forget sometimes that listening to music isn't only about evaluation & analysis & context & semiotics (thx internet). It's also about pleasure. And goddamn Lucky Star is a pleasure to listen to.

Score: 9/10

THE NUMBER ONE

Tina Turner was 45 years old when she had her first #1 hit. I'm not going to dive too deep into her personal history here, but let me assure you that she had been through hell. The cynicism in this song, the bitter truth at its heart, was something she understood very well. This is not a young person's song.


And how cool is it that a song like this could reach #1, a song about futility, fear, and the agony of being a person who can't help feeling love even when they know that it usually leads to misery and torture. I'm not going to quote statistics on domestic abuse, a rational-sounding neutral euphemism we use because the actual language of what happens in those situation--the cycles of violence that are re-enacted, perpetuated, and created whenever it happens--are too horrific to face with direct language. This is a song about many things, but to me it's a song about the next person who comes along after the abuse has stopped (or rape, or any kind of sexual trauma--the song is open enough to allow room for any survivor).

To me, the narrator in the song isn't saying that love is pointless, or worthless. It's saying that just because you love someone, or are attracted to them, doesn't mean you have to be with them. That love has nothing to do with it. And that narrator is absolutely right. What's Love Got To Do With It is one of the wisest, most moving songs to ever reach #1, and the fact that it did so makes me proud to be a human being coexisting on this planet with other human beings. Good job, everyone.

Score: 10/10.