Madonna as the titular character in Desperately Seeking Susan once said, “Good going, stranger.” It seemed, in its odd way, to presage a song of hers that would come out fourteen years later: “Beautiful Stranger.” While it was the lead single for a less than elegant movie, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Madonna’s message on the track (which sounded like a holdover from the Ray of Light era, but was actually recorded the same year it was released, 1999) captures a timeless message: love at first sight. Or, at the bare minimum, lust at first sight. The thrill of initial attraction that can only come from not actually knowing someone. From being able to project all of your fantasies and expectations onto them. And yes, this is usually based on looks alone as opposed to “energy radiated.”
At the time, Madonna’s inspiration for the song was reported to be Andy Bird, a British “regular person” posing as a “filmmaker” (which was a loose way of saying unemployed). Obviously, he was Guy Ritchie 1.0, a set of training wheels before Madonna unearthed a more legitimate Brit in the world of film. Nonetheless, you didn’t see Madonna being inspired enough by Ritchie’s looks to write such a song about him (instead, he got “Push”). Indeed, Bird typified the phrase “tall, dark and handsome” or, even better for Madonna’s songwriting purposes, “tall, dark stranger” (this being a common vague description for fortune tellers to assure, “You will meet a tall, dark stranger” [a cliché that Woody Allen turned into a title for one of his “late era,” particularly bad movies]).
And yet, despite the attraction she feels for this stranger, Madonna knows that she’ll pay the piper later if she ignores her instincts about him being fundamentally dangerous. For, as it used to be said before the arrival of apps like Uber and Airbnb: “Stranger danger.” What’s more, some of Madonna’s most formative years were at the height of AIDS in the 1980s, when sex with strangers suddenly started to feel more dangerous than ever (regardless of being gay or not). This fear of the risk that came with “casual sex” (the latter practice seeming to reach a crescendo in the late 70s) is also inherent in Madonna’s 1993 video for “Bad Girl,” which riffs on the premise of Richard Brooks’ 1977 movie, Looking For Mr. Goodbar. Itself a cautionary tale of what can happen when one falls down the rabbit hole of meeting beautiful strangers almost every night (especially as a woman). And going home with them.
With FKA Twigs’ latest single, “Perfect Stranger,” it’s difficult not to recall Madonna’s 1999 song also highlighting the agonies and ecstasies of encountering someone new (for sexual or romantic purposes, needless to say). Except that, in Twigs’ case, there seems to be no drawback whatsoever to a perfect/beautiful stranger. In fact, throughout the song, she riddles off all the ways in which keeping someone at arm’s length skillfully enough to remain a stranger is the hottest thing since latex. So it is that she sings, “You’re perfect, baby/My perfect stranger/You’re beautiful, you’re worth it/You’re the best, and you deserve it/You’re a stranger, so you’re perfect/I love the danger/You’re the perfect stranger.”
In another instance of ostensible Madonna homage, Twigs ruminates at one point during the outro, “What is this human nature?/No answer, I’m infatuated.” Madonna’s own song, “Human Nature,” also has a video punctuated by Madonna and her backup dancers in “boxes” (just as the “Perfect Stranger” video is characterized by “box rooms”). Not to mention the same S&M aesthetic that Twigs wields during one particular “vignette” from the Jordan Hemingway-directed video.
In contrast to Twigs’ lustiness in the song, Madonna approaches her stranger (and strangers in general) with much more cautious arousal. Which is why she self-deprecatingly says, “If I’m smart, then I’ll run away/But I’m not, so I guess I’ll stay.” She also notes that one has to have a predilection for the dangerous (as Twigs does) in order to give in fully to an attraction to a perfect/beautiful stranger, singing, “You’re some kind of beautiful stranger/You could be good for me/I have a taste for danger.” If one doesn’t have that taste, however, things could get dicey. From Madonna’s perspective, anyway.
As far as Twigs is concerned though, “That’s okay with me/To live my life with some mystery/Please don’t say that I must know/And that’s alright, I say/We’re all getting through this our own way/I’d rather know nothing than all the lies/Just give me the person you are tonight.” Madonna, conversely, seems to want her expectations of the perfect/beautiful stranger to eventually pan out in some way once the two get to know one another more fully. Even if more than part of her expects to be disappointed…if the following lyric is anything to go by: “I looked into your eyes/And my world came tumblin’ down/You’re the devil in disguise/That’s why I’m singin’ this song to you.”
But the reason Twigs is singing her song to her perfect stranger is to emphasize that disappointment can never come if you never truly get to know someone. Thus, the dual definition of “perfect stranger” to mean, on the one hand, simply “a total stranger” and, on the other, someone being “perfect” solely because they are a stranger, and one therefore doesn’t have any awareness of their “defects” yet. It’s also interesting to hear Twigs’ predilection for incorporating the sound of 90s house and dance music into the production, whereas Madonna’s song, actually made in the 90s, is deliberately intended to be more sonically reminiscent of music from the 60s. While this might have been because it was made for the Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me Soundtrack, there’s also another element at play: the idea that meeting a stranger in the 60s—especially the late 60s—was infused with just as much of a sense of danger as it was titillation, what with Cold War paranoia besetting everyone.
In the here and now, Twigs’ chooses to ignore all the paranoia associated with the present (from catfishing to being scammed in some other egregious way) and play up the sheer romance of encountering a stranger, particularly on the dance floor. The not knowing is what makes it sexy rather than scary (“I don’t wanna have the anxiety/Please don’t say so I won’t know”). And besides that, “What we don’t know will never hurt.” Granted, it didn’t hurt Twigs to “meet” (a.k.a. invite) former stranger Madonna and “powwow” with her at the Central Saint Martins BA fashion graduation show back in 2022. Surely, that meeting of the minds might have helped with the genesis of “Perfect Stranger,” if Twigs happened to brush up on M’s back catalogue afterward. Not that she wasn’t already pole dancing to “I’d Rather Be Your Lover” and incorporating “Vogue” into live versions of “Give Up” well before the fashion show came along.
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[…] of light” (re: that phrase, Madonna has been quite the influence lately on lyrical language, from FKA Twigs’ “Perfect Stranger” to Shygirl and Saweetie’s “Immaculate”). Of her overall prowess/embracing her feminine […]