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| Blond Ambition Image: Wikimedia |
When I was younger, I considered sneering at certain things an important part of maturation. It's not unlike the "I discovered Feminism (or what have you)" or "my first beer" overbearing behavior all of us fall into at a certain age - and, in my family, either formalized or not (I'm not even kidding), sarcasm training is part of the territory.
I was fourteen when Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone hit the big time, and fourteen ... is that certain age. After Cher, she was the first big performer who went by a single name, and - growing up, as I did, in what we not-very-jokingly-at-all referred to as Beautiful Down Town White Flight Suburbia - I was mystified at the idea that this was her actual name. Surrounded by Lauras, Kellys, and Karens, even the girl in middle school whose name was Athena seemed almost incomprehensibly exotic. Madonna was ... well, positively biblical.
Lucky girl, that Madonna. Having a name quite so calculated for those obsessions which dominated her thematically (and calculated was always the word for Madonna), she was built in set dressing for her own provocative ideas. She also has a middle name like mine, which in my case inspired a novel.
So here's my personal progression with Madonna. See girl at bus stop near Hallowe'en, "wanna-be'd" out, ask her what gives, hear the name for the first time, shrug and move on. See a video in which she's wearing green skirt, orange shoes, go "oh, that is who that chick meant", shrug and move on. Madonna became huge at what back then was top speed, but let it not be said I didn't have time to be ignorant for a little while. And then: she is huge. She's on the cover of TIME (this was a benchmark accomplishment in 1985). She's the crass competition for Cyndi Lauper. She's screechy and vain. I am done, probably by the time I see the BOY TOY belt buckle under her midriff. And that was only the *first* of her incarnations. Insert sneering here.
Like most pop cultural contrarians, I sniffed at her, sniffed at Duran Duran - I even sniffed Prince while I was turning up my nose about Michael Jackson. Prince, I reconsidered first (maybe my review process should be called The Prince Principle - but it doesn't have the same ring; and I never found him as snob-inducingly execrable; just needed to be negative about any music that popular).
By 1991-92, between Beatty, the movie, that effing BOOK, and the ugly gold tooth and greased hair she was sporting in her latest efforts to scandalize (fetish gear, meet fashion), most of us were done. Even the gay boy hipsters were sneering how over she was - I remember this, because I took inordinate hope in the idea. But, man, does it take a long time for an icon with her kind of stubbornness to fade away.
I did come to believe she had finally gone away. And then came Ray of Light, and Music, and I felt like Pacino, complaining they drag me back in!
And I found myself alone in front of one of her videos at some point around that time, and I let myself watch it. And damn if I didn't enjoy it. I don't remember what it was. Perhaps one of the scandalous cuts from her SEX days, but I have a feeling it was something closer to her chubby girl/messy-hair days like Lucky Star or Borderline. Doesn't matter, I sat there and let it make me bounce and admitted it: I liked the damn song. Didn't *admire* it - nor her. But I liked the hook, it was doing its job.
And so was born The Madonna Principle: I began a policy of giving certain things a chance. Not to hate Anna Nicole Smith just for being Anna Nicole Smith. To accept that some of Madonna's music is catchy. To review my prejudices to see whether they are valid. I let time get between me and a knee-jerk reaction, and I allow myself to evaluate something on its own terms. Being a person who's let go of many of the self-conscious snobberies of my youth anyway, I take an awful lot more of our pop culture on its own terms than perhaps is quite discerning - it seems only fair to question those things I have sneered or screeched about in the past.
There are those offerings in this world which I find it possible to revise a negative reaction to in this kind of a review. That one song from Madonna, for instance, made it possible for me to a little bit guiltily dig the gold lame and beef-jerky skinnyness of the clips from her Music years.
But there are those things, too, I can't ever get around to forgiving upon review. Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Howard the Duck. (I tried to give it a fair viewing, I did - and I swear to heaven, the VCR spat out the tape my brother gave me as a joke THREE TIMES before it would actually play - and the VCR was RIGHT.) Most of the Real Housewives I can still look down on with impunity; reality TV exists precisely so we can hate its participants.
Open mindedness is important to me, but I can't commit to indiscriminacy.
Anyway, so. Truth or Dare was on tonight, and I let myself peek at bits and pieces. Even using her as my guiding principle for this tenet, there's only so much of Madonna's ego I can watch sanely. And yet, she does exert some kind of curiosity, even if only for me.
The movie is (astoundingly) twenty-two years old now. I remember a friend in college having it on at her college rooms (she had CABLE, in COLLEGE, in 1992). I recall pooh-pooh-ing the idea of Madonna starting up seventies retro so soon after they happened. BELLbottoms - to be sure. And still bemoaning it ten years later, when the same retro fad was still hanging around. Eighties retro got short shrift by comparison - heh. I remember the coverage of her *around* the making of the movie, its release, the constant barrage of flotsam and jetsam which soon enough we'd come to recognize on DVD releases: the extras she was pioneering so relentlessly. Back then, though, we didn't have to buy the disc - Madonna was the hell every damn where, and I would be surprised if I didn't put it something very like that at the time.
By now, Madonna is as much a part of the cultural furniture as any other hugely famous person whose advent predated the internet. She might as well be Elvis, as far as old-people's idols go - she may not be dead, but she's not quite the living, vital, messy little human person she was now over thirty years ago. It's been a generation since Madonna spawned her wannabe's, and most of those are moms and even grandmothers now. She herself has become wannabe-British, went through her sinewy early middle age, and has entered a strangely dewy and terrifyingly ginger approach to what some are still able to call, even if sarcastically, The Golden Years. With a decade on me, I'm still part of the Madonna Generation, but the good news is, fewer and fewer people all the time find even me relevant, and she herself is more and more only a useful 80s-shorthand yardstick, more than a living part of culture right now.
So it's interesting to look at her "then" - at the height of her power, complaining about vulnerabilities, constantly hoarse (that was always amusing, given even her own admission about her level of talent as a singer), thin in that way she was when she first lost all that tender flesh ... eminently blond. The film looked as contrived as anything she'd ever done, back then, but looking at it now, it's curious to view the different ideas she had about contrivance before motherhood, before Kabbalah, before her attempted grafting of a veneer of fake British diction onto her more raw, earlier personae. Before (at least so she claims in the movie) it was acceptable to her to allow any part of her body (except the peroxide and hairpieces) to be FAKE. Erm.
Back then, her affected accent was Noo Yoak broad, and it suited her well enough, especially with the hoarseness, which I have a feeling she found appealing as a sort of gritty, sexy accessory. Back then, her protestations of weakness and not at all self-deprecating laughter at her own "joking" arrogance seemed unsparingly honest, in comparison with the faces she's worn for the past fifteen years or so. She was already a mega-star in 1991, even a force beyond her own limited reckoning and prodigious calculation - but what she is now is literally unreal. Her distance from the constant exposure she courted for her first twenty years or so renders her as remote and inconceivable a human character as her stratospheric wealth, fame, and success rendered her (as she was so desperately trying to show us) in the film itself.
She seems almost quaint, of course.
I still don't "like" Madonna - even "the old" Madonna, the one with the fishnet hair ties, big black glasses and tiny, actually very pretty little hands. The one I suspect many would call, as a yardstick, "my" Madonna (by virtue of my own predating of the internet, and the unfortunate conformities of so many of my teenaged ... peers). But I can study her with a lot less trepidation than my self-defensive snobbery about her used to produce.
She may not be interesting in herself anymore. And yet ... a generation later ... I'm still talking about her. And without that exhausting angry denial I needed in dismissing her in 1991.
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