Happy 35th Anniversary to Madonna’s Who’s That Girl Soundtrack, originally released July 21, 1987.
In the scene in Who’s That Girl right before Madonna’s Nikki Finn snatches the keys to a Rolls Royce and goes on a joyride with a live cougar roaring in the backseat, she browses a music emporium and surreptitiously stuffs cassette after cassette into the pockets of her motorcycle jacket. Only a year later, in 1988, CDs would begin to surpass vinyl records in sales, but, overall, the cassette tape in the ’80s reigned supreme. Which is why I thought my parents were weird when they bought me the Who’s That Girl soundtrack on vinyl for Christmas ’87.
“Why a record?” I asked. Although I sat for hours in our den and listened to their records on the turntable, and even though most record stores still sold records and vinyl remained a normal, everyday option, I wanted to listen to Madonna on my Walkman. “It will last longer,” my parents said. “You’ll have it for a long time and it will always be special.” I remember getting sublimely stuck in the groove of the first two songs—“Who’s That Girl” and “Causing A Commotion”—lifting the needle and laying it back down with a surgeon’s precision over and over, losing myself in the chaotic, mysterious world of Madonna in the safety of the family den.
Maybe—even though I have no idea where that record is now—the memory of that pristine presentation of the music, of holding the record preciously between two hands and blowing away the slightest speck of dust, is why I still have a special place in my heart for a soundtrack that featured only a total of four Madonna songs, all of which have long been forgotten (or have at least been excluded from all of the important Madonna compilations). Who’s That Girl is, objectively, a dumb movie. It’s a screwball comedy that flopped at the box office. But I love the movie, too.
In 1978, Madonna Louise Ciccone arrived in New York City with $35 in her pocket and told a cab driver, “Take me to the center of everything.” He dropped her off in Times Square, and she ended up working in a Dunkin Donuts before getting fired. Later, she’d wind up working as a waitress at the Russian Tea Room and also posing for nude photos to make some extra money. She found cheap apartments in the then very rough-and-tumble Lower East Side and also in Corona, Queens, home to significant Hispanic and Latino populations. At night, she hung out in clubs like Studio 54 and Danceteria, played drums in a band called The Breakfast Club, and became friends with lots of people in the gay community.
“Her pre-fame years running around NYC’s scuzzy underground are key to understanding who she is as a person and as a pop star,” i-D observes. “She didn't study at stage school like Lady Gaga or hone her craft on a TV show like Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake. She learned on the street, figuring out who Madonna was and what sort of artist she wanted to be. She had room to grow and space to make mistakes because she didn’t become super-famous until she was 26 or 27.”
Her life wasn’t all glittery grit, however. “In the first year I was held at gunpoint, raped on a rooftop with a knife digging into my throat,” she said in a Billboard speech. “And I had my apartment broken into and robbed so many times I just stopped locking the door. In the years that followed, I lost almost every friend I had to AIDS or drugs or gunshots."
To have been a fan of Madonna in the ‘80s was to have been at least somewhat familiar with her scrappy pre-fame existence. And whatever you didn’t know, Madonna’s early movies—1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan and then Who’s That Girl two years later—helped fill in the gaps. Both movies are artifacts of a gritty, graffitied, pre-gentrified New York City, the city where Madonna polished her punk-inspired fashion sense, learned Spanish by virtue of living among Spanish speakers, immersed herself in a nightlife culture she’d end up translating for the masses, and developed an enormous, survival-based chutzpah and charming moxie whose roots were no doubt already in her background as a working-class Italian girl from the outskirts of Detroit.
Desperately Seeking Susan remains her most popular movie—and the one that garners the most nostalgia—likely because it depicts ’80s hipster New York City in such loving detail, as well as Madonna at her enigmatic best. It was only director Susan Seidelman’s second film, although she had had lots of practice honing a seedy punk aesthetic while directing her first film Smithereens, a bleak 1982 cult classic about the end of the New York punk-rock scene. While making Susan, both Seidelman and Madonna were out to prove themselves. “They made me screen test her, and they kind of put us all through the ringer a little bit before they would hire her,” Seidelman recalls. “She was relatively unknown, and they wanted a kind of up-and-coming young movie star.”
By the time they were wrapping up their nine-week shoot, Madonna had become a star. “The first day we shot on St. Marks, and there were no crowds whatsoever,” Seidelman says. “We were just filming. By the end of nine weeks, her album had come out. It was the best of both worlds. I could film with her before she was famous and then her fame helped the release of the movie.” Of course, the major appeal of the film is not only New York, but Madonna—her Sphinx-like yet take-no-shit ways, evading everyone from her boyfriend Jim, who has to place ads in the personals just to see her, to Rosanna Arquette’s Roberta, who’s enthralled by the woman in the sparkly pyramid jacket who lives such a free and badass existence.
Though it was never billed as such, I like to think of Who’s That Girl as Susan’s sequel. Both films feature the same basic premise—a man Madonna was romantically involved with is murdered, she ends up in hot water, and hijinks ensue. While in Susan New York serves as a character in its own right, it’s more of a backdrop in Who’s That Girl, though the city does serve in both films to highlight and critique stark class divides—the upper-middle class Glasses of Fort Lee, NJ, versus Madonna and her impoverished downtown hipster friends in Susan; and the filthy-rich Upper West Side world of Loudon Trott (Griffin Dunne) and his soon-to-be in-laws the Worthingtons versus the very working-class Nikki Finn in Who’s That Girl.
Which leads us to the enduring—and mostly overlooked—appeal of Who’s That Girl. Whereas Madonna’s Susan is aloof and preternaturally cool, Madonna’s Nikki is brash and bombastic, with loud clothes, a thick East Coast working-class accent, and a laugh like machine-gun fire. The movie opens with a cartoon depiction of Nikki, and it’s apt—Nikki Finn is a colorful character. It’s the first and only time—in the history of all of Madonna—that we are allowed to see her let loose and be completely goofy.
In 1987, a goofy Madonna wasn’t a major selling point, but now that we’ve had several decades of Madonna as Susan (or, now, maybe a complete morphing into her wealthy movie counterparts), it’s worth another watch. The endearing qualities of Nikki Finn are only enhanced by her working-class signifiers, particularly in her refusal to entertain Loudon’s uptight fussiness and snobberies. Who’s That Girl also features a before-its-time parallel love story so that, while Nikki and Loudon are becoming a counterintuitive romantic pair, the two male undercover detectives trailing them also fall in love, ending the very mainstream movie with a passionate gay kiss.
In addition to the four Madonna songs on Who’s That Girl, the soundtrack is full of nods to New York’s diversity, and the sounds of Madonna’s early years. “24 Hours” by Duncan Faure is a synth-y New Wave club groove, while “Turn It Up” by Michael Davidson is a pounding, shimmery dance track. “Best Thing Ever” by Scritti Politti is, in a similar yet slightly more mellow vein, a celebration of easy, smooth-flowing love—“Baby, baby your love is just about the best thing ever”—and it’s pure ’80s feel-good movie soundtrack music.
“Step By Step” by Club Nouveau features a funky, meandering R&B groove, reflecting the rhythm of the city on any typical day. And “El Coco Loco (So So Bad)” is an island-y Latin jam by Puerto Rican-American musician Coati Mundi, who also starred as Raoul, Nikki’s nemesis, in the movie. “When you’re the baddest dude in the street / Sometimes you’ve got to kick some behind / And keep the homeboys in line,” Mundi sings cheekily.
As for the Madonna songs, “The Look Of Love” is a moody, rainy grey-day kind of ballad, and it plays in a montage when it appears that Nikki and Loudon’s budding romance might not make it—“Should have left you standing right where you stood / Should have let you go, should have had the sense to know.” In December 1987, Madonna would file for divorce for the first time from Sean Penn, with whom she had starred in another movie—another flop—called Shanghai Surprise. In 1989, she’d file again, and it would stick that time. It’s hard to listen to “The Look Of Love” and not think of that spiraling relationship and feel a pang of sadness. Later, in a particularly bare moment in the 1991 documentary Truth Or Dare, Madonna would admit that Penn was the love of her life.
Another Madonna track, “Can’t Stop” is a somewhat lackluster über-pop song with dance-y beats, a hooky chorus, and some very dorky robotic-voice elements about not being able to stop thinking about your crush. On the other hand, “Causing A Commotion” is a total banger, a track I come back to again and again even though it’s no longer considered a Madonna classic. “Causing A Commotion” is a fun, somewhat bubblegum ode to being sexy and sassy and feelin’ yourself, and having the confidence to go after whatever, or whomever, you want (“You met your match when you met me / I know that you will disagree it’s crazy / But opposites attract you’ll see / And I won’t let you get away so easy.”) It captures the character Nikki’s rough edges, rounding them out just a little, and the song eventually peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.
“Who’s That Girl,” the album’s title track, peaked at #1. Madonna and co-writer Patrick Leonard took the success of the ballad “La Isla Bonita” from 1986’s True Blue and turned it into a quicker-paced pop song with an earworm chorus that inquires in both English and Spanish “Quién es esa niña? / Who's that girl? / Señorita, más fina / Who's that girl?” However one might feel today about Madonna singing in Spanish—whether it was cultural appropriation, or a way to make a world that was much less worldly in 1987 more unified and connected—the song maintains a certain place in the Madonna canon, documenting a time when Madonna was on the cusp of transitioning from New York pop star to mega pop superstar.
Due to the song’s, and the soundtrack’s, success despite the movie’s flop status, Madonna would use Who’s That Girl as the moniker for her 1987 world tour, mostly because she liked the way it was a hat-tip to her dynamic nature. "I called my tour Who's That Girl because I play a lot of characters and every time I do a video or a song people go, 'Oh that's what she's like,’ Madonna said. “And I'm not like any of them. I'm all of them. I'm none of them."
Enjoyed this article? Read more about Madonna here:
Like A Virgin (1984) | Like A Prayer (1989) | Bedtime Stories (1994)
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