Why I Hate Madonna
This was written for the current issue of Plan B Magazine (I've said it before, but I'll say it again: the only UK music rag worth reading, so go out and get it).
You love her or you hate her, and that's a good thing, even if it's for all the wrong reasons [on both sides of the debate]. Madonna-bashers assert that at fifty the old bird should stand down and do the dignified thing; a vague moral stance, floating between crypto-Christian outrage and misogynist hypocrisy, describes an agenda in which Madonna's übersexualized image, public "bisexuality", and outspoken position on issues such as abortion and homosexuality are vehemently and ineloquently criticized. These, in my view, are all points in Madonna’s favour – as an artist, as a woman, and as a perfectly self-styled postmodern myth.
Meanwhile, on the pro-Madonna front, she is lauded for her business sense, her unerring nose for an edgy [and exploitable] subculture, and - almost, at times, as an afterthought - that career-spanning string of hits. Because Madonna is an icon of camp and retro - and because her position has ceased to be of any serious relevance - the willfully superficial hipster-fashionistas can afford to embrace her. Madonna has moved into the area of iconry that is beyond reproach, like Warhol and Monroe, those two other towers of blond ambition. She is the Colonel Sanders of Pop, churning out nuggets of chemically-enhanced flava from some music factory with exploited workers, and her content, or message - if there was ever a message - has fallen into irrelevance. Like the ingredients of the KFC spice blend, it's full of shit and ultimately damaging; but it sells like hot chicken.
We can all agree that Madonna’s a predator, honing in on the hot stuff and making bucks off the back of others’ innovations. We know that her talents, if any, do not lie in songwriting or musicianship or any aspect of the artistry integral to her career. We say she’s cynical and controlling, although it’s none of our business. But watching early videos of Madonna – in the tell-all feature Truth or Dare, for example, or that In Bed With Madonna clip with Wayne and Garth – one can’t help but warm to her: she’s this spiky little smarty-pants with huge charisma and a fuck-off attitude. She’s almost punk. You’ve gotta love her.
So what happened? How did she get so humourless and bloodless and lame?
My case against Madonna rests on the fact that she has sold out everything she ever stood for. Perhaps she never stood for much, but – like Warhol and Monroe, whose personhood thrust forth a transparent dialectic of inauthenticity and vulnerability that almost resembled a comment on the mass-media machine they sought to serve - her statement was in her very existence. Maybe Madonna never wanted to be an artist, except in the sense that Andy Warhol meant it when he said, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” And maybe she never wanted to be a role model for other savvy, tough, single-minded girls from the wilds of Buttfuck and Nowheresville; but I can’t forgive her for that when her agenda was so closely aligned with that of the humanist-feminist movement ("Let's forget about the mythical Jesus and look for encouragement, solace, and inspiration from real women ... Two thousand years of patriarchal rule under the shadow of the cross ought to be enough to turn women toward the feminist 'salvation' of this world" - Annie Laurie Gaylor, "Feminist Salvation," The Humanist, p. 37, July/August 1988).
At the very least, though, she has always been consistently transparent in her solipsism. “I am my own experiment,” she said, “I am my own work of art.” As an artist, though, Madonna has never had anything to say: ever the controversial figure, but never controversial enough for me. Despite constantly reinterpreting the feminine myth (a prevalent theme among female performance artists, from Nina Hagen to Cindy Sherman), and overtly challenging sexual morals, Madonna never dared to step over the line. She always had to be sexy and beautiful; she always had to be the princess, reaffirming gender roles and hierarchical structures anew with every reinvention. Madonna appropriated authorship and ownership of the strong-and-sexual blonde archetype as though Jean Harlow and Mae West and Greta Garbo had never existed, and determinedly cast herself as the star of every [meta]narrative. For those for whom this role was not appropriate or available, the message was clear: sexual power belongs to the skinny, rich, Aryan-featured elite – although Madonna herself was none of these things from birth.
Like KFC or Coca Cola, the Madonna machine is vast, ubiquitous and mechanically sophisticated. Her taskforce has included such luminaries as Bjork, William Orbit and Pharrell Williams, and without a little help from her friends, who knows, Madonna might have faded into washed-up obsolescence years ago.
Not that this is the just dessert of all veteran female troopers of the touring circuit. Look at Patti Smith: greying, uncompromising, hugely dignified. Joan Jett, born like Madonna in 1958, retains the credibility of being the original riot-grrrl icon whilst remaining firmly in the public eye; femmy third-wavers sport T-shirts proclaiming “WWJJD (What Would Joan Jett Do?)” and Gibson has honoured her chops with a signature guitar.
Would it have been possible for a genuinely transgressive artist to achieve such widespread power and influence? Maybe not, but with all the resources of the [corrupted] industry (an extensive army of stylists, producers, songwriters, radio pluggers, PR staff, plastic surgeons and yoga teachers paid good money to work their asses off on her behalf), couldn’t she have done something a little more interesting? The trend-setting wild girl with her church-baiting, tough-girl persona has calcified into a po-faced Kabbalist (a church, after all, is still a church) fashion victim, whose statements in the last years have all been about the sancticity of marriage and the rightful place of women. She is still a symbolic figure, but one that stands for everything that’s wrong with big capitalism and the dying, bloated music industry. Impossibly grandiose, cancerous and corpulent, Pop has eaten itself. In publicly and totally losing her mind, Madonna’s natural successor, Britney Spears epitomises the end of an era, and Madonna [the artist, the woman, the postmodern myth], skinnier and more drawn with each passing year, seems to be eating herself, too. The inevitable tragedy of having bought and sold and propagated one’s own myth so completely is that one is forever doomed to be equal to it in person. At fifty, this can’t be easy or fun. But really, it serves her right.
You love her or you hate her, and that's a good thing, even if it's for all the wrong reasons [on both sides of the debate]. Madonna-bashers assert that at fifty the old bird should stand down and do the dignified thing; a vague moral stance, floating between crypto-Christian outrage and misogynist hypocrisy, describes an agenda in which Madonna's übersexualized image, public "bisexuality", and outspoken position on issues such as abortion and homosexuality are vehemently and ineloquently criticized. These, in my view, are all points in Madonna’s favour – as an artist, as a woman, and as a perfectly self-styled postmodern myth.
Meanwhile, on the pro-Madonna front, she is lauded for her business sense, her unerring nose for an edgy [and exploitable] subculture, and - almost, at times, as an afterthought - that career-spanning string of hits. Because Madonna is an icon of camp and retro - and because her position has ceased to be of any serious relevance - the willfully superficial hipster-fashionistas can afford to embrace her. Madonna has moved into the area of iconry that is beyond reproach, like Warhol and Monroe, those two other towers of blond ambition. She is the Colonel Sanders of Pop, churning out nuggets of chemically-enhanced flava from some music factory with exploited workers, and her content, or message - if there was ever a message - has fallen into irrelevance. Like the ingredients of the KFC spice blend, it's full of shit and ultimately damaging; but it sells like hot chicken.
We can all agree that Madonna’s a predator, honing in on the hot stuff and making bucks off the back of others’ innovations. We know that her talents, if any, do not lie in songwriting or musicianship or any aspect of the artistry integral to her career. We say she’s cynical and controlling, although it’s none of our business. But watching early videos of Madonna – in the tell-all feature Truth or Dare, for example, or that In Bed With Madonna clip with Wayne and Garth – one can’t help but warm to her: she’s this spiky little smarty-pants with huge charisma and a fuck-off attitude. She’s almost punk. You’ve gotta love her.
So what happened? How did she get so humourless and bloodless and lame?
My case against Madonna rests on the fact that she has sold out everything she ever stood for. Perhaps she never stood for much, but – like Warhol and Monroe, whose personhood thrust forth a transparent dialectic of inauthenticity and vulnerability that almost resembled a comment on the mass-media machine they sought to serve - her statement was in her very existence. Maybe Madonna never wanted to be an artist, except in the sense that Andy Warhol meant it when he said, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” And maybe she never wanted to be a role model for other savvy, tough, single-minded girls from the wilds of Buttfuck and Nowheresville; but I can’t forgive her for that when her agenda was so closely aligned with that of the humanist-feminist movement ("Let's forget about the mythical Jesus and look for encouragement, solace, and inspiration from real women ... Two thousand years of patriarchal rule under the shadow of the cross ought to be enough to turn women toward the feminist 'salvation' of this world" - Annie Laurie Gaylor, "Feminist Salvation," The Humanist, p. 37, July/August 1988).
At the very least, though, she has always been consistently transparent in her solipsism. “I am my own experiment,” she said, “I am my own work of art.” As an artist, though, Madonna has never had anything to say: ever the controversial figure, but never controversial enough for me. Despite constantly reinterpreting the feminine myth (a prevalent theme among female performance artists, from Nina Hagen to Cindy Sherman), and overtly challenging sexual morals, Madonna never dared to step over the line. She always had to be sexy and beautiful; she always had to be the princess, reaffirming gender roles and hierarchical structures anew with every reinvention. Madonna appropriated authorship and ownership of the strong-and-sexual blonde archetype as though Jean Harlow and Mae West and Greta Garbo had never existed, and determinedly cast herself as the star of every [meta]narrative. For those for whom this role was not appropriate or available, the message was clear: sexual power belongs to the skinny, rich, Aryan-featured elite – although Madonna herself was none of these things from birth.
Like KFC or Coca Cola, the Madonna machine is vast, ubiquitous and mechanically sophisticated. Her taskforce has included such luminaries as Bjork, William Orbit and Pharrell Williams, and without a little help from her friends, who knows, Madonna might have faded into washed-up obsolescence years ago.
Not that this is the just dessert of all veteran female troopers of the touring circuit. Look at Patti Smith: greying, uncompromising, hugely dignified. Joan Jett, born like Madonna in 1958, retains the credibility of being the original riot-grrrl icon whilst remaining firmly in the public eye; femmy third-wavers sport T-shirts proclaiming “WWJJD (What Would Joan Jett Do?)” and Gibson has honoured her chops with a signature guitar.
Would it have been possible for a genuinely transgressive artist to achieve such widespread power and influence? Maybe not, but with all the resources of the [corrupted] industry (an extensive army of stylists, producers, songwriters, radio pluggers, PR staff, plastic surgeons and yoga teachers paid good money to work their asses off on her behalf), couldn’t she have done something a little more interesting? The trend-setting wild girl with her church-baiting, tough-girl persona has calcified into a po-faced Kabbalist (a church, after all, is still a church) fashion victim, whose statements in the last years have all been about the sancticity of marriage and the rightful place of women. She is still a symbolic figure, but one that stands for everything that’s wrong with big capitalism and the dying, bloated music industry. Impossibly grandiose, cancerous and corpulent, Pop has eaten itself. In publicly and totally losing her mind, Madonna’s natural successor, Britney Spears epitomises the end of an era, and Madonna [the artist, the woman, the postmodern myth], skinnier and more drawn with each passing year, seems to be eating herself, too. The inevitable tragedy of having bought and sold and propagated one’s own myth so completely is that one is forever doomed to be equal to it in person. At fifty, this can’t be easy or fun. But really, it serves her right.
posted by JD at
16:29
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