2010s Musical Retrospective: Dolly and Madonna

Madonna and Dolly Parton: the two defining women for me (musically) over the past decade. These may seem unusual figured for a musical retrospective over the past decade as both artists are seemingly thought of as being important for their legacy and back catalogue rather than for their current releases. Parton in particular actively encourages nostalgia for her old material and her reputation as a legacy artist. However Dolly Parton is not just a legacy artist and has made a whole career out of not being reduced to just one thing. Further, both Madonna and Parton have been rather prolific over the past decade with albums, tours and other commercial ventures demonstrating that no matter how nostalgic Parton gets about her “Tennessee Mountain Home” or how much sexist ageism is directed at Madonna, neither are retiring any time soon or content to retread the same paths again. This post will focus on how listening to their albums released this decade has shaped my journey and the evolution of my music taste.  

The decade’s early years were taken up by my love of Madonna, and I remember how Lady Gaga supposedly copying Madonna on “Born This Way” seemed like a big deal. There was something about these two women and their LGBT+ fan bases that provided some of the affirmation and acceptance that I needed at that time. More than that, Lady Gaga and Madonna’s music is pop with a purpose. Their music aims to engage with social issues, involve listeners in their dynamic storytelling and to invite their fans into a hyper reality around their persona. Of course being too involved or blinkered by fandom is never good; however listening to Madonna gave me the confidence as I was trying to figure out my place in the world, (something I am still figuring out, but at least now I am at ease in my own skin). 

Having discovered both Madonna and Dolly Parton at quite advanced stages in their careers, I had and continue to have with Parton a lot of albums to discover. This meant until this decade, I had missed the experience of an album release day. In my second year of university in 2012 Madonna released MDNA and I dragged my boyfriend at the time with me to buy it from the shop. Although not my favourite album of hers, I still fondly remember those unusually hot March days in 2012 listening to that album and being part of Madonna fandom on release day for the first time. 2012 was a good year for my inner Madonna fan, but 2015 would be the pinnacle. Madonna’s next album Rebel Heart in my opinion could hold its own amongst her legacy.

 Rebel Heart is an eclectic album and in many ways is a smorgasbord of Madonna’s whole career: irreverent yet thoughtful engagements with religious iconography (‘Holy Water; “Devil Pray”); empowering dance-pop (“Living for Love”); bringing underground dance into the mainstream (“Body Shop; Illuminati”); and rare glimpses of Madonna performing vulnerability (“Joan of Arc; HeartBreak City”).   Rebel Heart also features an even rarer glimpse of Madonna being nostalgic in the deluxe version that features “Veni Vidi Vici” where Madonna namedrops a number of her biggest hits including “Borderline;” “Like a Virgin,” “Like a Prayer,” “Music” and “Ray of Light.” This nostalgia is also a key theme of the album’s title track. 

‘Rebel Heart’ is a pop anthem with an acoustic almost country-folk pastiche sound. Madonna sings of her life story with a strict father, standing out from the crowd, and continually striving in spite of adversity. The song sounds more nostalgic than its lyrics would suggest. Madonna sings ‘never look back it’s a waste of time’ and yet the mood is more reflective and one of looking back and so both impulses remain in the song and this tension makes the song such a compelling listen. For me in 2015 I was about to move to a new city, to Brighton to study a Masters called Sexual Dissidence and I was prepared to take more risks than I had before. Despite studying an English Literature course, by the end of my Masters’ I had written three essays on popular music (including one on Madonna) and the city of Brighton held so much potential for me to explore. I ended a nearly six-year relationship, and through listening to Madonna and her willingness to ‘shed’ the past and fearlessly embrace what lies ahead without a plan, I was prepared to take this chance on Brighton. 

Of course real life is rarely quite as good or exciting as a Madonna (or Dolly Parton) song. Brighton couldn’t live up to my expectations and deliver for me, and in all honesty was never going to. I had built such an idea in my head of Brighton as this ultimate destination to be gay and find fulfilment. I also allowed myself to get burnt out in campaigning and activism that I internalised a lot of the outrage that many movements use to drive forward momentum to the point that it affected my relationships. My behaviour became at times obnoxious and argumentative, I neglected the importance of building friendships and, and I ultimately isolated myself. It was in that moment, that Dolly Parton was to emerge for me. 

I was already a big Dolly Parton fan by that point having discovered her when I was 13 a good eleven years before I moved to Brighton, and considered myself a fan of country music more generally from around the age of 17, and so it was not that I suddenly discovered country. However Madonna had been my biggest musical inspiration for the past eight years up until then and so at that point around 2015/ 2016 there was a definite shift in how I saw my music taste. A particular Dolly Parton song began to resonate with me: 

‘Lookin' outta my windowpane
Tears minglin' with the rain
I'm so lonesome I could cry, just like old Hank
Starin' down on the city street
Feelin' empty and incomplete’

I was in the middle of Brighton, a city that I had built up so much in my head to represent the belonging I needed that ultimately it could not fulfill. So like Dolly I was ‘starin’ down on the city street’ and feeling lonely. There is something about being by yourself in a city compared to in the countryside. In the countryside you kind of expect to be by yourself that it becomes a kind of healing solitude, but in a city I’ve often wanted to be part of a community and so the times I’m by myself, involuntarily, stick out more. There was something about the direct honesty of country music that stuck with me: a certain fearlessness to look at a situation and summarise it plainly. Whereas Madonna was empowering and aspirational, country music gave me solace when empowerment and aspirations had failed, but also the strength to carry on. As Parton’s song continues:

‘There's a place I need to be to fill my tank
A place I can go where I can be free
Where I can be happy and just be me
Ho-o-ome
Where the warm wind's blowin' and the river's flowin' along’

One of the things I most love about Dolly Parton is her ability to understand and describe hard times and yet in the space of a few lines to flip this to hope and willingness to make the best of it. Her song ‘Two Doors Down’ is a great example of this where she starts off lonely and dark but refuses to stay in that place: 

‘ ‘Cause I can't stay inside
This lonely room and cry forever
I think I’d really rather join 'em
Two doors down’

Back to ‘Home,’ Parton creates this beautiful and nostalgic feeling of being completely accepted and belonging both in the pleasurable melody and the warm chirpy way she sings. Country music and Dolly Parton in particular thereby represented what I needed.

This has taken me to where I am today both personally and professionally. A key concept for what I’m working on through my PhD is the idea of ‘metronormativity’ a word coined by queer theorist, Jack Halberstam to describe the way in which cities such as Brighton are framed as the ultimate place of home and belonging for LGBT+ people and this dominant narrative obscures alternative experiences and stories. It’s important to make clear that this is not a reactionary anti-city stance, but more critical of the way in which certain narratives, in my case, build up certain expectations and foreclose certain other opportunities that might suit particular LGBT+ people better. 

‘Home’ just happens to come from the album Parton was promoting during her 2014 Glastonbury performance: Blue Smoke, an album that epitomises Parton in the past decade. Since changing manager in 2004 Parton has focused on promoting her persona and using projects as extensions of that. Blue Smoke captures the different facets of the Dolly Parton persona: the ‘authentic’ mountain singer with blue grass tinged songs such as ‘If I had Wings’ and the murder ballad ‘Banks of the Ohio’; the self-help guru on ‘Try,’ the diva on ‘Lover du Jour,’ and campy yet earnest left-field choices that make rock songs sound like Parton classics with her version of the Bon Jovi song ‘Lay Your Hands on Me’ that she turns into a gospel song. 

Over the past couple of years I have noticed Parton being acknowledged for an incredibly broad fan base stretching across class, political, sexuality and a whole host of other boundaries/ divides, and Parton has embraced new media and streaming platforms. Most notably in 2018 with Dumplin’ on Netflix, where I found people my age and younger were engaging with Dolly Parton as a figure, almost unanimously positively. Beyond this, Parton and country music provide me with a centred and grounded mind set to approach the world that seems increasingly fractured and confused, in a way that is both unflinching in confronting that complexity, but with an idealism that could be called naïveté, but I would say is a determination to not give up on the world and its people yet. In some ways it’s easy to throw in the towel and give up hope; it takes a lot of strength and hard work to see the world as it is whilst keeping faith in humanity. Both of which are there in country music and Dolly Parton. 

The 2010s for me have very much been bookended by Madonna and Dolly Parton. Even as I have moved away from Madonna slightly in recent years, nevertheless her music is as important to me as it ever was, and I still bought her last album from this year on its release day! Like Brighton, my shift away from Madonna is not so much to do with anything lacking in her work, but more that I found a genre that was a better fit for me, for now. Dolly Parton, just like Madonna, is always looking to explore new musical territory, ending the decade with a series of films based on eight of her songs (Heartstrings on Netflix); and three collaborations on songs about faith. These collaborations see Parton collaborating with dance DJs Galantis (“Faith”), Christian rock singer Zach Williams (“There Was Jesus”) and Christian alternative rock duo For Kind & Country (“God Only Knows”). The latter of which is nominated for Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance at the upcoming Grammy Awards. This goes to show that Parton is very much a current artist and as much as her legacy deserves all the recognition and praise it gets, the 2020s may give us Parton’s best music of her career yet!