Well let me retort. Rolling Stone

What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?

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.

Not that Madonna was exposing it to critique it

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKMHtcZ7dAQ

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.

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’d like to think madonna’s rightful heir is still forming.

What about Pink? The first time I saw her singing, no, performing ‘Stupid Girls’ I thought ‘Hmm, Madonna’s rightful heir.’

The contemporary heir to the material girl is arguably Paris Hilton, and she sure as hell doesn’t foreground any ambiguities.

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.

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” http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/i-remember-1968-and-i-was-there/2008/01/07/1199554568637.html

He remembers the 60s and he was there???

PS: Having a Mad Morning here!

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.