I suspect they’re dead and gone now as uni courses (cos’ Madonna is a very Gen X phenomenon), but one of the staples of the anti-pomo anti-cultural studies culture wars used to be claims that Universities were teaching subjects about the Detroit diva rather than, you know, Shakespeare.
But I still think she was and is a cultural phenomenon. Her radicalism and her cultural reach into lives shouldn’t be underestimated. I was bopping around (bipedally in those days) to Like a Virgin in 1985 when I was just a little twelve year old thing, and I can remember being thrilled by Desperately Seeking Susan, which in retrospect now reads like a mirrored fantasy where both Susans incarnate different aspects of Madonna’s own biography and evolving mythos, transposed to New Jersey and New York City. In any case, she made a lot of sense to a Catholic school girl!
Flick the switch forward to 1993, and I can remember going to a gals’ party with friends from UQ to drink and sing and read Madonna’s book Sex, which one of the women’s collective members had bought via mail order from the States. Remember, this is in the days when the Internet barely existed, and the world wide web hadn’t hit Antipodean shores yet, if I remember correctly. So there were layers of excitement in touching the material form of the text which perhaps can’t be experienced in quite the same way now. In the climate of early 90s feminism, Madonna was hot property - twisting male sexual fantasies back in boys’ faces, and her book felt very transgressive on a back deck in West End somewhere, though we certainly weren’t uncritical or blind to the ambiguities in her persona - ambiguities she herself - intriguingly - seemed to foreground.
I’m thinking about this because her new album, Hard Candy, is now out.
Here she is talking to Parky of all people:
Elsewhere: More at Feministing.
But I still think she was and is a cultural phenomenon.
Surely it’s more a case of ‘was’ than ‘is’ these days. She’s continually churning out dance-pop fairy floss rubbish, and hasn’t been musically interesting for at least a decade, and maybe 15 years.
The contemporary heir to the material girl is arguably Paris Hilton, and she sure as hell doesn’t foreground any ambiguities.
Yep! That’s GenX’s Youth Rebellion for ya!
GenWers (as in “War-time / post-War”), we knew pop-music’s place: at rock concerts, on the stereo at parties; sung at demos & wakes … Someone left my cake out in the rain … 40th anniversary of De Galle’s demise & Prague Spring coming up. Cost a lot of GenW their credo / Manifesto, those tanks rolling into Prague - tho most of us had lost any desire to hold that particular credo when they’d rolled into Budapest in 56! “The aim of education” someone wrote (more or less/ sort of) - ?Goodlad - “is to provide the student with an in-built Crap Detector.”
What did our GenX kids do to pop-music? Bloody analysed it!! And themselves!! Navel Gazers!!
I ask you, Patsy: Where did we go wrong!
PS Blame the iBCD for my reaction to Henderson’s “I remember 1968 and I was there” [link]
He remembers the 60s and he was there???
PS: Having a Mad Morning here!
THR wrote:
That’s an interesting idea, but I’d like to think madonna’s rightful heir is still forming. The early madonna stuff (largely dance-fluff and un-ironic boys come hither but with sassy attitude) is pretty forgettable. The boundary pushing stuff (all that catholic imagery in the late eighties videos, bleeding black christs! Golly!) and a real peak with Sex. Then…. crickets. Dolly Parton does the whole “knowing bimbo” schtick much better these days although arguably she wasn’t really aware of it until madonna. Paris is just camp.
I’ve kind of been expecting the cod-madonna-lite of Kylie to morph into something more substantial, but she’s been content to wiggle her bum and rake in the cash. A missed opportunity, especially in the light of her personal experiences.
Some of her more recent work is under-rated, imho, but what I meant when I said that she “is” as well as “was” a cultural phenomenon was that her impact left a legacy.
What about Pink? The first time I saw her singing, no, performing ‘Stupid Girls’ I thought ‘Hmm, Madonna’s rightful heir.’
Pink.
Pink - perhaps promising Pavlov’s cat, although I thought the Dixie Chicks did a better take-down of GWB (”Not ready to make nice” vs. “Dear Mr President”). If you like your cultural artifacts insidious, then the Chix, who sound like they should be mindless flag wavers do a neat turn in walking the line between following opinion and leading it while draped in the cloth of conformity. Their song Goodbye Earl is a tonne nastier and funnier than anything Pink has displayed so far.
For a while, I thought perhaps Missy Elliott might take the ball and run too, but apparently to be a subversive cultural icon you have to be skinny, busty and whitey. Anything else is just too confrontational apparently.
I’m not sure the next Madonna is singular. Changes to the production, distribution and consumption of music mean that there’s less of a centralised top 100 culture. I suspect the next Madonnas are all over the place, playing in pubs, on Myspace, on independent record labels, on intertubes radio, etc, etc…
There is no heir to Madonna Imo and certainly not the vapid Paris who has challenged nothing. Rather, due to her excessive media exposure which she feeds and encourages, has seemed happy to reinforce every patriarchal construct of the feminine in its manifestation as whore or cretin. The media presents her as yet another example of the deficient feminine which is recycled endlessly in the media. Who she really is I dont know as she is subsumed by the images she has created and have been created for her. She’s a good girl and does the right thing by the patriarchal structures which order her. So she threatens no one.
Madonna on the other hand was shocking precisely because she deconstructed dominant discourses in a way which people could not stomach. Take religion, where she conflated sex and catholicism in such a way as to cause an uproar across continents. She did lots of stuff, rosary beads, Like a Virgin, but Im thinking of the clip “Like a Prayer” where she eroticises a saint in a church at night, cavorting about the altar, down on her knees etc etc. I still identify culturally a Catholic and have, over the years, watched amused at the plenteous examples of repressed female sexuality diverted into an intense worship of saints or the Pope of the day. Madonna outed this beautifully. Of course protestantism also does it rather well with the cult of Ian Paisely for instance. Not that Madonna was exposing it to critique it, but reading it and performing it unproblematically within the cultural context of her day. Maybe that was what was so shocking. She could see no problem conflating sex and religion in her performances. It was beautiful to watch. Her fascination with this aspect of her cultural past continued with the naming of her daughter as Lourdes. But, I guess, when your name is Madonna, you are going to have a complex relationship with religion.
Here is the clip to Like a Prayer. There is stigmata, miraculous bleeding statues, burning crosses, an heroic woman actually being the deliverer of the miracle, and a closing which suggests its all performance.
[link]
Why do you say that, casey? I thought she was - and perhaps more powerfully than Sinead because of its performative rather than denunciatory (heh!) nature.
I dont know Kim. I just think what she did was more disruptive than critiquing it. She exposed a sublimated sexual drive in the worship of saints and gods to the people who denied it was there and then celebrated it. To me she said: here it is, you all do it, its ok. Im with you. Madonna (named after the virgin mother) celebrated sexual power as much as she did the mysticism of her religion. She would not critique it, because from my readings of her life, she has her own madonna she worships. Her long dead very religious catholic mother who named her. What she did was get rid of the binary of sex/chastity. She held both postions at the same time. That freaked the church out. Within my readings of the patriarchal interpretations of catholicism there is, for me at least, only two positions a woman can take - virgin or mother. You cant be both. You cant be chaste and sexual at the same time. Actually you cant be sexual at all. You can only be virginal or maternal (now devoted to the child sexuality is also denied in this state). Only the Virgin Mary achieved both at the same time sans sex. Madonna, named after her, disrupted that bullshit for me. She was like a virgin and she was sexual, bisexual, polymorhous. She was everything a woman could be all at once. According to the stories I was told as a child, Mary Magdalene was only acceptable because she renounced her sexuality and lived a chaste life there after. Mary, Jesus’s mother, never had sex with Joseph and remained a virgin her whole life according to Catholics. The seething opposition to Madonna surely drew its strength from her exposure of the reality that sexuality cannot be renounced and is sublimated for some Catholics, in the worship of religious figures. Nor does it disappear for women in the states of virginity or maternity. The eroticism of opus dei, bleeding statues, pain filled eyes of saints staring at you and only you is pretty obvious to me. All round my mother’s house are incredible seductive pictures of beautiful white jesuses with green eyes staring at me longingly as I pass them. If were to suggest to my mother these pictures are eroticised sexualised god figures, I am pretty sure she would not be very receptive to the proposition. Madonna celebrated both religion and sex. She celebrated what was there. In this, she pulled out the preChristian roots of pagan worship which allowed for both sacred virgins and sacred prostitutes and sexual worship of gods. Of course thats not problem free either.
And she also took the position of the christ figure. I do remember her nailed to a cross in one of her concerts singing “if I live to tell” I do remember the Vatican having an apopleptic fit. God forbid our new saviour would be a sexualised woman.
But it wasnt like Marilyn Manson who rips up bibles and all that. She participated in the rituals of religion without critiquing them to my mind, an that disrupted the church’s prescriptive narrative for women more than anything else.
Thanks casey, that makes sense, and I think you’re right, but it’s an implicit critique and she must have been aware of that at least at some level. In other words, there’s more to it than performing/living a role and/or being transgressive. But maybe we’re agreeing?
Yep we are really I think….
Kewl!
DeeCee: “What did our GenX kids do to pop-music? Bloody analysed it!! And themselves!! Navel Gazers!!”
Well let me retort. Rolling Stone
What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?