Using pop to provoke: Madonna and Father John Misty

Pop provocation is a difficult business. The sense that it's all been done before is at least as old as the Jane's Addiction album Nothing's Shocking, which celebrated its quarter-century anniversary last year.

You can still make trouble and get under people's skin. Kanye West is pretty good at it - although after you've obnoxiously jumped on stage at an awards show on behalf of Beyoncé once, it's not as interesting the second time around. Twerking worked for Miley Cyrus, but she had youth and the presumed innocence of a Disney sitcom childhood to strike out against.

The limits of outrageousness can be seen in the recent career moves of Lady Gaga. This time last year, she was being puked on by a performance artist at South by Southwest. But she since has classed up her act, duetting with Tony Bennett and singing songs from The Sound Of Music at the Oscars. (She's set to swing the pendulum back toward the grotesque by starring in American Horror Story this fall.)

All of this brings us to Rebel Heart by Madonna and I Love You, Honeybear by Father John Misty, new albums that take to the role of the provocateur in divergent ways.

Madonna's 13th album - which comes out officially on Tuesday (much of it was leaked and six songs were released on iTunes in December) - uses provocative ways we're quite familiar with, and have been for some time.

Her impact in remaking the pop landscape in her own button-pushing, confidently sexual image is indisputable. She's earned the right many times over to tell her haters where to go by simply declaring "Bitch, I'm Madonna." Which just happens to be the title of a track on Rebel Heart, featuring a sterling Nicki Minaj guest spot and helmed by former Philadelphian and producer-to-the-stars Diplo.  

Madonna arrives at the Wells Fargo Center on Sept. 24, two days before Pope Francis comes here for the World Meeting of Families, and she plays Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City on Oct. 3. In a cover-story interview in the current Rolling Stone, she says she has faced a double standard her entire career, dating to when she was a rising 1980s superstar in the same period as Prince. "Why can't I be sexual and intelligent?" she asks. "Why can't I strut around stage like Mick Jagger and not be pigeonholed as a bimbo?"

Madonna calls herself "a troublemaker" and says that "my nature is to provoke." A prerequisite of provocation, however, is surprise, and she no longer has that on her side.

Back in her prime, which ran all the way from Madonna (1983) to Music (2000), you never knew what she was going to do next. Now, it's more like we've seen it all before.

Many groaned at Madonna's Grammy production number in which she cavorted with a battalion of shirtless, devil-horned hunks. Fans of the "Material Girl" mother of four - biological children Lourdes and Rocco, plus adoptees David and Mercy - rightly call such complaints sexist and ageist.

But it's also true that over-the-top Rebel Heart tracks such as "Holy Water" (wait till Francis hears that one) and "S.E.X.," which includes a laundry list of turn-ons from dental chairs to latex thongs, work so hard to titillate that they just seem silly.

The array of big-name collaborators on the uneven 19-song album - Diplo, Kanye West, and Avicii produce multiple tracks - also follows standard pop practice rather than pursuing a unified vision. "I took the road less traveled by," she sings in the closing, quite catchy, "Rebel Heart." She did, back in the day. Not so much anymore.

Father John Misty, who will play a sold-out show at Union Transfer in support of the sly Honeybear on April 1, is a rebel of a different sort. I first saw him on a beautiful summer day at the Newport Folk Festival in 2013. Sailboats bobbed in the harbor, and songwriters delivered thoughtful takes on time-honored traditions.

Something felt lacking, though, at a festival still most strongly identified with a mythic act of rock and roll rebellion: Bob Dylan freaking out the faithful when he first went electric in 1965. Nearly five decades on at the now-NPR-branded festival, everything seemed a little too pleasant and polite.

Until, that is, Misty (given name: Josh Tillman), took the stage. Acoustic guitar in hand, the former Fleet Foxes drummer declared, "Let the Norwegian death-metal begin!" Then Misty went on a tirade about how successful folk artists "with two Priuses in the driveway have a responsibility to say something that really matters and give up this 'me me me I work in a coffee shop' attitude and talk about how [messed] up everything is. At least once."

I like this guy, I thought. Call him what you want - grandstanding jerk, subversive trickster, postmodern hipster beardo with a surfeit of testosterone - he wasn't boring. Not then, and not when he debuted Honeybear's "Bored in the USA" on the Late Show with David Letterman. It was a theatrical performance that included pretending to play a player piano, singing while accompanied by a string section and a laugh track, and gazing skyward and shouting, "Save me, white Jesus!" (Like Catholic rebel Madonna, Misty comes from a religious background: He is drawn as a bearded baby held by a haloed madonna on the Honeybear album cover; he was raised in an evangelical household.)

Tillman/Misty is an amusing dude. The Honeybear launch included a satirical site called fatherhjohnmisty.com/sap in which a crudely low-fi version of the album could be streamed, while asking the musical question "Is there a way to prevent anyone from spending money ever?"

The ambition carries over to Honeybear itself. The 33-year-old songwriter was inspired by his marriage to filmmaker Emma Elizabeth Tillman. In the liner notes, he describes the album as an attempt to "address the sensuality of fear, the terrifying force of love, the unutterable pleasures of true intimacy and the destruction of emotional and intellectual prisons with an imprint that is undeniably my own. Blammo."

That's a mouthful, and Misty doesn't always get all the way there, while drawing on musical inspirations such as Scott Walker, Randy Newman, and Harry Nilsson. His tendency to use a middle-of-the-road musical template to indulge in and comment on the conventions of romantic love songs results in dirgey, middle-of-the-road (if never lyrically predictable) romantic love songs.

But when he gets it right, as on the album's title cut or "Bored in the USA" or "When You're Smiling and Astride Me" - in which when he sings "I can hardly believe I've found you, and I'm terrified by that" - he hits it out of the park.

He's a rebel, with a heart.

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@delucadan

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