As the singer prepares to kick off her Celebration tour in the UK, six decades reveal what the 65-year-old phenomenon means to them.
Maya and Leila Crockski, twins, age 10
Maya: The first time I heard Madonna was in the car. We were going on vacation and we were listening to the song Holiday. I thought it was. . . good? Leila: I don’t forget to listen to Holiday at the end of the movie Trolls Holiday. My mom walked in and said, “There’s Madonna!” » Maya: Our mom is a Madonna superfan. Leila: She is a Madonna superfan. She doesn’t play it as much as she would like because our little sister plays her own music. But when she gets the chance, she just plays Madonna. Maya: She still plays Holiday and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Oh, is she rarely that Madonna thing? Oops! Leila: We didn’t see it live but we saw it on videos. She is bold. Maya: She’s sexy. She still tilts her head back and crosses her face with her arms. Leila: Her costumes are great and sexy. Maya: If there’s something we don’t like about her, it’s that she’s too sexy. Leila: Our friends have heard some of her songs, but they’re not interested in her. But we like her. She’s getting better and she’s only five years younger than our grandmother! How lucky for her that she still has it!
Micha Frazer-Carroll, columnist, in her twenties
In the smoky atmosphere of a gay bar, it will be the solemn organ of the church in Like a Prayer that will interrupt the verbal exchange and bring your friends back to the dance floor. During the preparation of the choir, someone inevitably mentions that “I’m on my knees, I need to get you there” is truly a two-way street: “Did you know?The mix of sexuality, drama, flamboyant costumes, character transformation, and provocative femininity that Madonna has become known for for more than her long career has resonated with queer communities.
Think of Jean Paul Gaultier’s tapered bra from 1989, which took the corset (a garment related to female restriction and regression) and made it spiky and weapon-like. Or three years later, when he wore a leather harness to attend Gaultier’s AIDS campaign. that exposed her absolutely bare breasts. Or the pink satin gloves and dripping diamonds in Material Girl’s Marilyn Monroe-inspired video, a ballad that poked fun at commercialism and nodded to the undeniable allure of bagging it all to become a gold prospector treated like a princess.
My generation grew up with an incarnation of Madonna who presented a femininity that was as provocative as it was chaotic. I’m old enough not to forget the famous VMA kiss between Madonna and Britney and the sensationalist fury that lasted for months. In hindsight, the strange details of all this prove a bit boring, and the potential exploitation of either seems to be the most worrying factor. Two years later, she wore hot pink again in the video for Hung Up, and her choice to wear a leotard and dance on the floor of a ballet studio seemed to push the boundaries for the then-47-year-old.
Madonna’s ability to completely reinvent herself, in the manner of the Beatles, is at the core of her relevance today. But her ability to shapeshift and deliver new, surprising, and undisciplined visions of femininity also resonates with those of us who have felt constrained by gender expectations and who see gender and sexuality as a position of functionality and play.
Shon Faye, author, in his thirties.
It’s 1998. I’m 10 years old and I’m watching the Frozen video for the first time. A shape-shifting, black-haired Madonna levitates over a desert as she sings the song, hunting like a sorceress. I became immediately obsessed. I record the video so I can watch it over and over again.
Since that time, Madonna’s music has been close. Being a star with so many eras (Madonna pioneered the concept of pop artists having “eras”), some corners of her varied catalog still sound on the soundtrack of my life. As a teenager, I learned the word “bourgeoisie” from bachelor Music (sorry, Karl Marx), and she, thoughtfully, released her latest wonderful album, Confessions on a Dance Floor, just before I went out and started going to gay clubs where there was music. The first single, “Hung Up,” has been a must-read. Frankly, you can’t spend as much time with gay men like me without having a ready-made edition of Madge capable of passing when asked to (inevitably). .
Madonna revolutionized pop music by making it both a visual and auditory experience (an upgrade in the industry at large that she hoped for and accelerated). After Madonna, being a pop artist is not just about songs: it’s also about fashion, video, photography, live tours and television performances. I defy anyone to watch Vogue’s live 1990 MTV Awards performance, in which Madonna and her dancers hung out in lively costumes around Marie Antoinette’s court, and not be dazzled by how incredibly exciting it still is in 2023. The choreography choreographed through Luis Camacho. and José Gutiérez Xtravaganza, either directly from the New York underground dance scene. They both gave an impression in the movie Truth or Dare. When it comes to Madonna’s prestige as an LGBTQ+ icon, two things would possibly be true at once: Truth or Dare, the first behind-the-scenes excursion film of its kind, pioneered the appearance of gay men on screen, and she spoke on HIV and AIDS when it is still controversial. However, some of the working-class Puerto Rican and black gay men who traveled with her felt used and abandoned by her after the excursion ended.
Did Madonna break barriers for women? Let’s not get carried away. As Bell Hooks argued, Madonna’s ambitious exposure of her own sexuality was based on the fact that she was a white woman. The degree of control Madonna has exerted over her career says more about her deft opportunism and ultra-thick skin than it does about pop women in general (Britney and Lady Gaga, considered Madonna’s successors, have been more visibly harmed by fame). Perhaps Madonna’s greatest transgression is the one that continues to unfold: to grow old and not fade modestly, as older women are regularly commanded to do in the culture.
Emma Forrest, writer, in her forties
If I had all the money in the world, I would buy my five most productive photographs of Gordon Parks and Marilyn Monroe’s certificate of conversion to Judaism. The latter I found in the access to the Christies catalogue of Monroe’s private property, which includes the first editions of Camus, Joyce, Ellison and Styron. Her personal taste was exceptional, as were those of the next blonde star orphaned of a ruthless upbringing, Madonna. Marinating in solitude, it’s no wonder that these young people can be narcissists and foragers. Of course, they are intermediaries and, of course, they collect art (paintings, first editions, historic houses) as talismans.
Famed agent Michael Ovitz, while admitting that he had failed to turn Madonna into a movie star, emphasized how cultured she was. It is said that there are enough paintings by Tamara de Lempicka in Madonna’s collection to turn it into a museum. As for owning Frida Kahlo’s My Birth, he said, “If someone doesn’t like this painting, I know they can’t be my friend. You might just covet the waistlines of the born-rich Kardashians, but their stuff?The houses and their contents are empty marble tents. “. I’m culturally interested in the Kardashians, but they’re not interested in the culture. In Michael Jackson’s documentary, what still haunts my nightmares is that he takes Martin Bashir to a shop full of fake antiques, where he tweets “YOO HOO!to the manager while handing out the horrible parts he needs to buy. Madonna exposed the oddity of clever flavor that coexists with excessive richness.
I think it’s because her mother died when she was six that Madonna’s “conversations” with female artists were so vital to her. Especially in love. Without a mother to communicate with, she recreated Lina Wertmüller for her husband and director Guy Ritchie. He quoted Anne Sexton in a love letter to his bodyguard. And in the e-book Sex, posing with her boyfriend Tony Ward, she said he meant her. admiration for Cindy Sherman.
Madonna has been an explorer of skills, an eye like Isabella Blow, with whom she shared a lover during her ascent to Basquiat. Even his backing dancer had cultural prestige: Debi Mazar, who would make her mark on the Freedmen. When Madonna sought to meet Antonio Banderas, it was because she liked Almodóvar’s films. Although her films as a director were poorly received, she gave the lead roles to Andrea Riseborough and Oscar Isaac a decade before anyone else.
Sign up for notes
Get music news, ambitious reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every season, every week.
After the newsletter
He defended David Fincher’s pre-celebrity in 4 common videos. Look on YouTube for Bad Girl, starring her and Christopher Walken, which merges Finding Mr. Goodbar with Wings of Desire and is one of the most important films Fincher has ever made. Studio 1:58 to 2:31 of Express Yourself for a dance masterclass with Martha Graham, with whom Madonna trained and excelled.
Her masterpiece is the album Like a Prayer, which makes it seem like all the female artists on her walls are looking at her.
Miranda Sawyer, journalist, in her fifties
I interviewed Madonna in 2000 for The Face. She was pregnant with Rocco and living in the UK. A lot of what we talked about was how strange he found living here. I couldn’t understand how dear our homes were, how we all stopped running. At six o’clock in the evening, he didn’t paint on weekends and in the summer he went on vacation for a month. And our newspapers: “I can’t get used to this,” he says. “You’re all a bunch of dirty assholes. ” He sat down on the floor, between the couch and the coffee table, and ate chips and olives.
She was scathing and asked me, “Well, what do you think it’s about?She saw that my charm bracelet had a Star of David on it (I’m not Jewish) and we talked about religion; it was about his Kabbalah years. She talked about love: She said she had met many other high-ranking people, artists, writers, and politicians, and thought, “Interesting, interesting, interesting,” but no one stopped her in her tracks. I fell in love with Guy Ritchie because “you know how other people say, ‘He turned my head?My head turned over my body. ‘
The strangest thing about this total interview was how familiar it felt. At that point, before the touch-ups, I knew his face as well as I knew it: the half-closed green eyes, the pointed chin, the area between the teeth. I’d been watching him for years, ever since he first made the impression on Top of the Pops in 1984 by doing a song “Holiday. “I cut out the poster of her with her matted hair, crop top, bracelets and rags from Smash Hits. And I hung it on my wall. And I had noticed her passage from Like a Virgin to Like a Prayer and beyond, as she conquered the world. So seeing her in genuine life was strange: a bit like seeing an old friend, a little bit No. I had been warned that she was “tough” and “a bloodless fish,” but she wasn’t like that at all. She was tongue-in-cheek, a little impatient and cautious about what she said because it would end up in the tabloids. She was much more beautiful than in her photographs.
I’m part of the generation of women for whom Madonna can do no wrong. I don’t care if she’s vulgar or embarrassing, if she fills her face with fillers or if she shows her ass in weird positions. Most of the other people who criticize her are directly men, and despite her sexy BOY TOY side, she was never for them. Too much camping and knowledge. She’s for clubbers, for women and gays, who don’t mind that she “can’t sing” or that her music is rarely very suitable, or that she likes to dance, show off and surround herself with other unserious and funny people. . . . I enjoyed it before I met it. And I still love it.
Vivien Goldman, writer, septuagenarian
I bristled and frowned when I heard Madonna for the first time, at the time Material Girl. No doubt that was his intention. Their sensual jubilation at the shift from our hard, bold survivalism of the 1970s to the shiny, gold-plated “materialism” of the awakening of the Reagan and Thatcher years seemed to be a wake-up call. Another kind of struggle was afoot, in which our seething rebels of punk fringe elegance would possibly no longer be the heroes, or even the anti-heroes. In the song’s video, Madonna exuberantly channeled the tropes of 1950s sexuality, adding our self-sacrificing blonde, Marilyn Monroe, either sassy or level-headed. while hoarsely singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend. “With Material Girl, Madonna noted, with a wink: “Don’t forget that Congress just rejected the Equal Rights Amendment!My old-school feminine tricks will win! »
It was instructive for me to compare Madonna’s palette (bright satin reds and sexy, shimmering pinks) to that of her beloved fresh punk artist, Patti Smith. At the time, Smith was wearing an oversized, dark men’s jacket that looked like it had been chosen. (This was before Smith befriended Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester, whose severe, angular designs might have sprung from an incredibly sublime scarecrow. )
To his legions of admirers, myself included (though I’m more of the satin parrot type), the austerity of Smith’s gaze indicated a physically powerful asceticism. Finally, to suggest, we might have an anti-lamura alternative, free from the likely endless cycle of passive preparation that is the fate of the sex symbol or trophy woman. They love it, but it’s not for everyone.
Madonna and Smith’s musical progressions also provide an attractive counterpoint. While Madonna is constantly searching for new sounds, new scenes, continually wrapping herself in a new chrysalis and reappearing as another gadfly, Smith has surrounded herself with the same unwavering sidemen from the beginning: guitarist Lenny Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty. The furthest she’s strayed has been performing with her ex-husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, fellow New Jersey native Bruce Springsteen and, most recently, their kids.
But the wonderful thing about Smith and Madonna is that they’re still there. The Poet and the Pin-Up offer us two different poles on which to dance.
Madonna’s Celebration tour kicks off at London’s O2 on October 14.