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Mid-life Madonna
The scene is the United Centre in Chicago, where Madonna is about to begin the latest leg of her Re:invention tour. From my seat at the side of the stage I can see her preparing backstage, hoisting herself up into the crab position that had reviewers of previous shows both gasping at her suppleness (‘At 45!’) ... and pointing out her support bandages (‘She is, after all, 45’).
As the set unfolds and the dry ice swirls, it is as if Madonna has been joined onstage by the fog of truths and lies, preconceptions and misconceptions, that have dogged her over the years. Suddenly she runs along the moving pathway at the front of the stage and up into a superstructure which takes her high above the crowd. And there she stands for a moment or two, bathed in adulation, wrapping her legs around the bars: Watching us, watching her ...
At the start of Vogue, Madonna asks: ‘What are you looking at?’ It’s a question it seems pertinent to answer right now. Her 46th birthday is coming up and she’s done more than 20 years of hard time at the top. This year also sees the 20th anniversary of Like A Virgin, not her first hit but arguably the one that first set her apart from the common pop herd, the pretty hot-eyed ingenue displaying a moxie beyond her years as she flounced around in her wedding dress, announcing to the world that her latest love made her feel ‘shiny and new’.
Just now, she’s not looking so shiny or new. There are reports that tickets for her tour are moving slowly and sales of her current album, American Life, have been the worst of her entire career. Unlike 1992’s Erotica, another poor seller, released alongside the notorious Sex book, this time the content seems to be to blame rather than any attendant controversy. For me, a longtime Madonna fan, American Life seems too heavy on the Kabbalah homilies (Love each other; Don’t be meanies) and too light on the fun. That was a disappointment after her previous two albums: Ray of Light, an introspective masterpiece produced by William Orbit and documenting Madonna’s personal and creative resurgence; and Music, produced by Mirwais, a near-psychic explosion of rhinestones, sparse electro and nimble social commentary.
More alarm bells rang as Madonna seemed to lose her nerve, withdrawing the military-themed video for the American Life single as the Iraq conflict broke out. At the Chicago show she spent a great deal of time writhing about in combats and brandishing a gun, so perhaps she has had a change of heart — but at the time she deemed the images of helicopters, explosions and a Dubya doppelganger lighting a cigar from a hand grenade ‘inappropriate’.
Over the years there have been quite a few Madonnas to choose from. Born Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone into a large middle class Italian-American family in Bay City, Michigan in 1958, she seemed an unlikely candidate to become one of the world’s biggest stars and consummate shape changers. Much of her personal history has now passed into legend: her mother dying when she was seven, the subsequent rebellions, the running away to New York to ‘make it’, the career change from dance to music, the early stardom, the crucifixes and the attitude.
Soon Madonna wasn’t just ‘making it’ she was inventing it — or to be more precise, reinventing it. From that point, the Madonnas came thick and fast: Boy Toy, Dirty Bitch, Catholic screw up, Mrs (Poison) Penn, Disco Dolly, Tomboy, Whore, Clown, Evita, Earth Mother, Calculating Businesswoman in Corsets. And along with it came the seemingly endless parade of vile, diminishing boyfriends. Apart from Carlos Leon, Lourdes’s father, Madonna’s men were mainly distinguished by their predilection for slagging her off afterwards. “If she were a painting she’d have to be an abstract by Picasso because she has so many faces,” said Vanilla Ice. And, of course, Warren Beatty in the famous In Bed With Madonna clip: “She doesn’t want to live off camera, never mind talk.” (Pot, kettle, black?) The music was flowing all this time, too, but Madonna’s life has always been much more vigorously reviewed than her art.
Today things have quietened down considerably. Madonna is no longer jogging through parks surrounded by bodyguards as she did in the Eighties. She’s no longer spraying profanities on chat shows or feeling up friends to wind up the media. Recently it’s been about yoga, macrobiotic diets, another bad film (Swept Away) to add to her chequered movie CV, an iffy album, a Gap advert with Missy Eliot and a Kabbalah-inspired series of children’s books.
Madonna is clear about her affection for Britain — the country that produced her husband, film director Guy Ritchie, and son, Rocco — sometimes flattering us quite shamelessly: ‘Even the stupidest people in Britain are more intelligent than Americans’. And yet there still seems to be a love-hate relationship with Madonna: breathless magazine articles about how so and so boutique is now hip because ‘style icon’ Madonna happened to pass by its windows ... followed by more pages on her arrogance, her daughter’s Eve Lom facials, her nastiness to ramblers who want to roam across her country pile. And of course the perennial headline which has cropped up regularly since 1986: is Madonna a goner?
Maybe all this ragging can be put down to Madonna’s bizarre take on ‘down to earth’ English living (fish and chips, pints of Guinness and hanging out with Gwyneth Paltrow). Or maybe it goes deeper than that.
Arguably, Madonna has transcended pop stardom to become the first great reality show. She is somebody who rubbed out the boundaries between life and art and managed to survive. Indeed, if Madonna were a fictional character, one could only retain public sympathy for her by having her ‘pay the price’ for her unnatural behaviour. By rights, she should be living alone in a dusty Hollywood mansion by now — childless, embittered, staggering Norma Desmond-style down a Gone With The Wind staircase, a hideous bony claw shaking her diamonds at the world (‘It’s time for my close-up’). Instead she’s happily married with two lovely kids, everything’s worked out great for her — and some people just seem to find that gutting.
It seems the older Madonna gets, the more she is encouraged to shut up, put up and cover up, befitting a woman of her extreme years (one whole year older than Morrissey). But with her looks and fitness levels, why should she? It says something that she can perform excruciating yoga exercises onstage nightly on her world tour and be written off as ‘past it,’ while David Bowie can collapse on stage with heart problems and nobody suggests he give anything up.
This is not to say that Madonna has made no mistakes. Most recently, the over-affectionate behaviour with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera at the MTV awards was a miscalculation, if only because it flagged up how gender infiltrates everything — even mega-celebrity, even Madonna. Put bluntly, this was a painfully feminine way to grab attention or pass on a ‘baton’ that just wouldn’t enter an equivalent male musical icon’s head. The idea of someone like Paul McCartney grabbing Noel Gallagher for a brisk tonguing is only bearable because you know it would never happen.
While we’re on the subject of men, it seems increasingly clear that most of them just don’t ‘get’ Madonna in the same way women do. I am referring to where the true Madonna heartland lies; namely the sprawling mid-20s to late-40s female demographic, which should by rights be given its own Madonna-based name (Vogue Nation? True Blues?). One of Madonna’s greatest unsung achievements must surely be that for more than 20 years she has been an inspirational global totem for the women who have grown up with her. While it is universally acknowledged that Madonna inspired the first generation of ‘wannabes’, nobody ever seems to ask where they are now, and what happened to them, or, more to the point, what didn’t happen to them.
It would appear to be the case that Madonna has become more and more important to these fans as the years have gone by (and most of us quite frankly have become Not Gonna Bes). A book I own, I Dream of Madonna, a collection of women’s dreams about La Ciccone, beautifully captures how she has invaded women’s sub-consciousness over the years.
So that’s what we’re looking at. While Madonna might not be inspiring young girls anymore (at least not in the gargantuan numbers she did in the ‘80s), she’s definitely inspiring a lot of ‘older girls’ (and boys) just by being alive, and that alone makes her madly important. Add to that the music, the style, the humour and the sanity (see Prince and Michael Jackson for what could have happened) and not for the first time Madonna, circa 2004, starts looking positively indispensable. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service
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