Albums: The Immaculate Collection (1990), Celebration (2009)
Songwriters: Lenny Kravitz/Ingrid Chavez, additional lyrics by Madonna
Producers: Lenny Kravitz/André Betts

After eight years and eight Billboard number ones, tens of millions of records sold and, finally, undeniable critical acclaim with her most personal album yet… For a Madonna with no perceptible end to her creative or commercial peak in sight, where do you go? How better to demonstrate the potential for true, unreined artistry in the mainstream than to seductively whisper your way to number one?

But the fact that Justify My Love is also the highest-selling video single of all time reinforces the role of controversy in her work - largely to generate dialogue and keep her in the public consciousness, but also what her fans understate and her critics overemphasise: to sell records. And despite MTV’s banning of the Justify My Love video, the resulting debate over censorship and video single sales - the first of their kind - served to continue their symbiosis with Madonna in the long run.

In a way, Justify My Love is controversial for the wrong reasons. Each individual sound in the minimally produced song - the warm yet never-quite-resolving synth strings, the mind-bending drum loop, the generous reverb on Madonna and Lenny Kravitz’s backing vocals - is perfectly executed. The lyrics are poetic, sensual; possibly the most direct, genuine expression of desire Madonna ever put to record. But they weren’t exactly her expressions.

Our culture has matured beyond viewing popstars who don’t necessarily write all their own material as some sort of discrediting fact. Were the Beatles or Aretha Franklin in any way diminished as artists for including so many covers on their albums, or Thriller worse because Rod Temperton wrote it? Pop music is about interpretation through performance - as vital an aspect of artistry as anything else. But Justify My Love’s original writer never intended for Madonna to record it. Ingrid Chavez - a poet, Prince collaborator and actress (for a part Madonna rejected) in his widely panned film Graffiti Bridge, originally wrote it as a poem, recording the song in its initial form during a studio session with André Betts and then-lover Lenny Kravitz. In search of commercial interest, Kravitz wrote the chorus and other instrumentation, eventually bringing the song to Madonna of his own accord. Kravitz convinced Chavez to sign a document granting her no songwriting credit, with a mere 12.5% of publishing royalties for the song’s airplay - but at least invited her to the studio whilst the final mixes took place. She was stunned by the quality of Madonna’s vocals, stating:

Chavez sensed an unspoken awkwardness from Madonna, who may or may not have been fully aware of Chavez’s role in effectively ghostwriting the song. Her feelings lay dormant until after the song’s release when Prince, recognising her vocal style, warned of the copycat accusations that could arise upon the release of her own, similarly styled solo album. When a journalist finally confronted her directly, she admitted she wrote the song - the article sparking widespread condemnation of Madonna’s “wholesale thievery”. Chavez ended up suing only Lenny Kravitz, reaching an out-of-court settlement where she received credit and another 12.5% of disc royalties on subsequent pressings.

Kravitz had also, discovering the beat by picking the album up from a pile off the studio floor, sampled Public Enemy’s instrumental Security of the First World as the backbone for Justify My Love without credit - ironically, taking from a group who often sampled and reinterpreted dozens of uncredited songs on single tracks, turning sampling into an art form. Though their producer Hank Shocklee expressed vocal affront via the Young Black Teenagers’ answer record To My Donna, the lack of credit for the sample was generally accepted - or perhaps ignored, either in the face of its incredibly effective reappropriation, or due to the much further-reaching issue with Ingrid Chavez. The latter raises many questions - though the song itself is undeniably brilliant, does attempting to pass it off as belonging to someone else diminish our perceptions of the artist? Lenny Kravitz certainly appears to deserve the blame on both counts - yet he also deserves praise for the song’s production.

By suing Kravitz, what did Ingrid Chavez gain in the long run besides further royalties? In a world where the misconception that Madonna does not write her own songs still exists, how many casual listeners are even aware of songwriting credits? Taking that into consideration, Justify My Love is perhaps not so different from Like a Virgin - another song where Madonna skilfully adopted (some would say imitated, or stole), and likely surpassed the vocal style on the original demo. Madonna’s performance should not be underestimated - for example, compare her version to Vita and Ashanti’s cover for The Fast and the Furious soundtrack - in an act of extreme irony, Madonna denied permission to release a cover with Vita rapping her own original verses, allowing only the direct cover’s release. As a result, it fails completely at both interpretation and imitation - its stilted, read-aloud delivery over the exact same beat effectively renders it mediocre karaoke.

In the end, though Ingrid Chavez is entitled to feel betrayed, her lack of regret is the most mature response possible. No matter what it did to/for her, the song’s far greater exposure through Lenny Kravitz and Madonna was ultimately a victory for the art, if not the original artist. And we’re all a little bit more fortunate for it.

Producer: Phillipe Dupuis-Mendel
Director: Jean-Baptiste Mondino

The video takes place in the rather intimate setting of a hotel room, instead of the song’s sweeping “kiss you in Paris/hold your hand in Rome” visions. But on the other hand, where the song is an intimate exchange between lovers, the video shares Madonna and then-boyfriend Tony Ward’s oddly surreal experience with a number of androgynous, contorted figures - perhaps reflecting the very public context in which anything pop or celebrity-related, however personal, is viewed and dissected. The initially burned-out Madonna meets her lover in a hotel corridor, he submits, she takes control and delays his pleasure as the onlookers become participators… and rejuvenated by the end, the message is simple: sex (or at least Madonna’s idealised view of it) as an equalising force is empowering, rewarding, self-improvement. As always, Madonna lends weight to the marginalised - depicting elements of S&M in such an open, unselfconscious manner asserts that there’s nothing wrong with experimentation, going beyond the vanilla.

Where Madonna presented the sexual openness of her Erotica period as a borderline crusade, interwoven with a tongue-in-cheek irony not so decipherable to the mainstream, Justify My Love can more easily be taken and understood at face value. As a result, it is easily her clearest, most resonant message regarding sexuality. Feminism was never so seductive.

Infamously, MTV banned the video, more due to its suggestive themes than its very brief nudity - apparently they found “the whole tone” too threatening to even consider playing it late at night. Madonna’s impassioned appearance on Nightline to defend the video is essential viewing - it’s still inconceivable to imagine a popstar cutting through the record companies and press releases to make such a public, vocal statement. Though she acknowledges the resulting video single sales with a wink - “lucky me” - and though she deems MTV an “important marketing tool”, it’s entirely Madonna-as-artist, explaining that as the necessary visual expression of the song, the video was shot without concerns over censorship or an intention to sell it. With Nightline as a legitimising platform, she expresses two main concerns: firstly, and less overtly, that “businesswoman” is as much a compliment as an artistic dismissal. Her conviction and sincerity are convincing - though combined with, secondly, her agenda to promote public discussion of censorship, she elicits even more of a reaction from conservative detractors.

Without wishing to paraphrase excessively, she touches briefly on other important issues:

Madonna’s vision of the future… how telling. And yet, another 19 years later, in a victory for practicality, Justify My Love appears with breasts censored on her Celebration: The Video Collection DVD. I refuse to suggest there’s a single conclusion to be drawn here.