Madonna defines reinvention, not the other way around. She’s a pop star and a performance artist whose radical changes are a way to self-expression and freedom. She invented the game Lady Gaga plays, and uses fashion, genre, and culture as her toolkit. Madonna doesn’t have Gaga’s voice or St. Vincent’s virtuosity, but she tore down barriers for a generation of female pop artists by refusing to be defined. The meaning of “La Isla Bonita” by Madonna aligns with this aesthetic.
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Madonna’s ambition challenged the status quo with unrelenting free expression. She bent censors out of shape, the pope called her satanic, and still she survived them all. She shunned expectations and “appropriateness,” creating the room, as Michelle Orange of the New Yorker put it, for “a woman’s determination, above all, to be free.”
An Italian girl named Madonna Ciccone wrote “La Isla Bonita,” a Latin pop song. It’s one of many diamonds in the Material Girl’s catalog.
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The Beautiful Island
“La Isla Bonita’s” writers, Patrick Leonard and Bruce Gaitsch, initially intended the song for Michael Jackson. Leonard met Jackson while working on the Victory Tour in 1984. Afterward, Quincy Jones asked him to write a Sade-inspired song for Jackson, but he ultimately turned down what he’d written.
After the Victory Tour, Leonard became the musical director for Madonna’s Virgin Tour. They connected musically, oddly, at a barbecue at his house, and she invited him to produce her third studio album, True Blue, with Stephen Bray, who’d worked on Like a Virgin (1984). The barbecue resulted in “Love Makes the World Go Round.” Then they wrote “Live to Tell,” a rejected film instrumental Leonard reworked with Madonna.
He gave Madonna the “La Isla Bonita” demo, and she wrote the lyrics. The title translates to “The Beautiful Island.”
She wrote it in Hong Kong, on-location, filming Shanghai Surprise with then-husband Sean Penn. Gaitsch didn’t like the title, arguing it wasn’t commercial enough. Though Gaitsch misjudged the lyrics, he does burn beautiful flamenco guitar work on the track.
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She Made It Up
Madonna invented an island named San Pedro. She told Rolling Stone, “I don’t know [where San Pedro is]. At that point, I wasn’t a person who went on [holiday] to beautiful islands. I may have been on the way to the studio and seen an exit ramp for San Pedro.”
Last night, I dreamt of San Pedro
Just like I’d never gone, I knew the song
A young girl with eyes like the desert
It all seems like yesterday, not far away
It wouldn’t be the last time Madonna and Leonard build a Latin pop track. They wrote “Who’s That Girl,” the title track to the 1987 film. In Matthew Rettenmund’s biography, Encyclopedia Madonnica, Madonna said “La Isla Bonita” is a tribute to the “beauty and mystery of Latin American people.” She said that Pat and I “both think that we were Latin in another life.”
Tropical the island breeze
All of nature wild and free
This is where I long to be
La isla bonita
And when the samba played
The sun would set so high
Ring through my ears and sting my eyes
Your Spanish lullaby
Blending sounds and countries, “La Isla Bonita” uses Spanish-influenced guitar but mentions Brazilian samba in the lyrics. The fusion of culture and sounds echoes Madonna’s experience living in New York City—the world’s ultimate human mixtape.
Angel and Diablo
Mary Lambert directed the music video, where Madonna—residing in a Latin neighborhood—plays two different women. Lambert previously directed iconic videos for “Borderline” and “Like a Virgin.” Actor Benicio del Toro, unknown at the time, is an extra in the clip.
Madonna uses Catholic imagery and flamenco dance, wearing a flowing red dress surrounded by burning candles. She’s dressed in white for one character, with purity standing opposite the sultry flamenco dance for the other. Wearing the red dress, she exits the apartment and dances with her neighbors on the streets below.
She dominated MTV at this time. “La Isla Bonita” became MTV’s most requested video for 20 consecutive weeks.
Apropiación Cultural
Writing for the Spanish edition of Vanity Fair, Juan Sanguino accused Madonna of cultural appropriation for the video treatment. He wrote that Madonna “looks more like a drunk girl at the [Seville] April Fair than a dancer, but at least she had the decency to grow her eyebrows.”
Regardless of inspiration or appropriation, this era of Madonna exposed her to a global audience. True Blue-era Madonna is one of her most striking visual periods.
Madonna’s breezy song is romantic melancholy. The electronic beat and Latin percussion drive a celebratory anthem that is at once despairing and hopelessly romantic. One of her finest songs, “La Isla Bonita,” is true blue, and even when she’s shapeshifting, faithfully Madonna.
Photo: Courtesy of Warner Music Group/High Rise PR
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