The most shocking thing about Madonna and Sam Smith’s much-trailed collaborative single may be that it apparently took seven people to write – among them Smith and Madonna, a chunk of the team behind Smith’s 2022 chart-topper Unholy, and blue-chip songwriter-for-hire Ryan Tedder. There’s almost nothing to its two and a half minutes: a Bollywood-ish string motif, a two-note melody and a beat that, when it really kicks in, recalls the kind of hard-edged house music that proliferated in 90s New York gay clubs. Ironically, the atmosphere it conjures isn’t a million miles removed from that of Junior Vasquez’s 1996 single If Madonna Calls, the self-styled “bitch track” that led to a breakdown in relations between the Sound Factory’s resident DJ and the singer.
“Vulgar will make you dance, don’t need a chorus,” sing Smith and Madonna in unison, a line that’s hard not to respond to with a shrugging, “Well, if you say so, but one might have helped.”
Indeed, there’s something shrug-inducing about the whole enterprise. You suspect there is a yawning chasm between how shocking and subversive Vulgar’s authors think it is and how shocking and subversive it actually is. We’re two decades on from the curious moment in chart history when a song called Fuck You was deposed from the No 1 spot by an answer record called Fuck You Right Back, so it takes more than a few “Go fuck yourselves” and “Say our fucking names” to set anyone other than the stuffiest listener on their ear.
The YouTube video may bombard the viewer with a pink strobe effect and flash the lyrics up in stark take-it-or-leave-it black and white, the Auto-Tune may be deployed to turn Smith and Madonna’s voices into a wilfully grating noise, the sense that everyone involved is nearly herniating themselves in an attempt to be confrontational may hang heavy (Marilyn Manson now going door-to-door trying to shock people, as the old Onion headline put it) – but if anything, there’s something quite sweet about it. “If you fuck with Sam tonight, you’re fucking with me,” offers Madonna at one point, striking a rather protective and maternal note, like the mum lurking narrow-eyed at the school gate, waiting to get the bully by the scruff of their neck.
In fairness, the Daily Mail, Piers Morgan et al will doubtless dutifully respond to Vulgar in the way Smith and Madonna hope. But those are people who make their livings by professing to be horrified, and whether giving them something new to be horrified about is an achievement or just a kind of reciprocal, cyclical arrangement is a moot point. It’s performative outrageousness provoking performative outrage.
