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Madonna · S1 E3
The Father
Silvio Ciccone, the remarriage Madonna never fully accepted, and the discipline she inherited
Rochester Hills, Michigan, early 1970s. Ten-year-old Madonna Ciccone scrubs the kitchen floor before breakfast because her father runs the household like a shift at the plant, and she will later say this is where she learned the only thing he ever really taught her: finish what you start.
"Oh Father", Madonna, official music video (1989). Directed by David Fincher, shot in black and white. The video opens with a child's burial and ends with Madonna standing alone at the grave as an adult. Fincher shoots Silvio's stand-in with his back mostly turned.
The Man Who Made the Rules
Silvio "Tony" Ciccone was raised in a family that emigrated from Pacentro, a village in the Abruzzo region of Italy. He trained as an engineer and worked in the defense and automotive industries in the Detroit corridor. He raises his children inside a strict Catholic framework: weekly mass, parochial school, structured silence.
“My father was very strict. I was rebellious and I didn't understand why I had to follow so many rules. But now I look back and think he gave me the most important thing, a work ethic. He worked hard his entire life and I watched that.”
— Madonna, interview with Carrie Fisher, Rolling Stone, June 1991
Silvio "Tony" Ciccone
Oh Father, Madonna (1989)
"Oh Father" is the most direct letter to Silvio Ciccone in her catalog, and also, somehow, to her dead mother at the same time. The lyric "you didn't mean to be cruel, somebody hurt you too" is not a metaphor. She is reconstructing her father's grief over a loss neither of them ever properly named. The production is sparse piano and restrained strings, almost no percussion, deliberately stripping away everything that had made her famous by that point.
What He Actually Gave Her
Keep It Together, Madonna
From Like a Prayer (1989). Where "Oh Father" is the wound, "Keep It Together" is the scar tissue. A declaration that family, fractured as it is, is the thing you cannot outrun. Listen right after "Oh Father" and hear the two sides of the same story.
Which Madonna album features both "Oh Father" and "Keep It Together"?
In the basement of a house in Rochester Hills, a fourteen-year-old is teaching herself to move alone in front of a mirror, long after the chores are done. Then she meets a ballet teacher named Christopher Flynn, and everything changes.
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