2003's American Life is a startlingly original work of post-9/11 folktronica, Mirwais Ahmadzaï's stuttering vocal treatment and sparse electroclash textures melding guitars and synths to produce an aggressively left-field pop album. The lyrical concepts are some of Madonna's best, investigating the intersection of the personal, political and cultural in a world tarnished by the horrors of 9/11 and saturated with materialism. Interspersing critiques of a fame-hungry culture with love letters to Guy Ritchie (the marginally less awful of her two husbands), American Life rejects the stereotypes that 1980s 'Material Girl' Madonna had sought to cultivate, and aims to answer the question of what 'the American Dream' actually is these days. The fourth and final single, 'Love Profusion', advocates cutting out all the noise, and instead focusing on the only thing that matters: love.
True, "there are too many questions", "there is so much confusion", "there is so much destruction" – but there is also so much love. American Life is an album about emptiness and fullness, nothing and everything, and 'Love Profusion' falls firmly on the 'everything' side; a profusion is a large quantity of something. There's so much love out there – so go and find it! In this respect, the song is so much more hopeful than much of Madonna's discography, begging us to refocus our lives around meaningful interpersonal relationships rather than material desire. The message is simple, but beautiful: love is the only solidity, the constant that will weather the storm.
Musically it's one of the least interesting songs on the album, a fairly radio-ready mix of chugging guitars and stuttered vocals, accompanied by a ricochet of artificial hi-hats. The lyrics, too, are simple in exactly the same way as the lyrics of Kylie Minogue's contemporary mega-hit 'Can't Get You Out of My Head': cut the intellectualism, love is the only thing on my mind. Where Kylie mindlessly repeats "la la la", Madonna's song descends into a loop of "I got you under my skin".
Representing the blissful honeymoon period of Madonna's marriage to Guy Ritchie, 'Love Profusion' suggests that when the world gets too much, we can always languish in love. But isn't that a dangerous indulgence? Doesn't it stunt our political awareness? I'm not sure it's an entirely health outlook – but perhaps that's the point.
As Madonna confesses "only you make me feel good", we see her recentring the claustrophobic everything of American Dream material culture as the all-consuming everything of romantic love. Who can blame her? In the context of the album and its contemporary socio-political climate, 'Love Profusion''s ostensible sweetness becomes an almost desperate attempt to shut out all the noise. But as that unending loop of "I got you under my skin" illustrates, love emboldens but it can also blind. If American Life is about the conceptual states of 'everything' and 'nothing', 'Love Profusion' demonstrates how if you allow anything to become your 'everything', it ultimately becomes meaningless.
Losing yourself in love is an ever-tempting indulgence, especially after a pandemic has left everything feeling a little unmoored, when we're all in need of something stable to direct us. 'Love Profusion' promises that love will keep us afloat – but it also warns us not to let love become our everything.
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