Madonna and Me (22 page)

By the time she came back, it was a far different place that greeted her. In 2009, after her divorce from British film director Guy Ritchie, she returned to New York, purchasing a townhouse mansion on, of all places, the Upper East Side, that bastion of rote privilege. Madonna’s trailblazing days were apparently over. She
became
the establishment, even as she complained that it had whitewashed the city. In 2008, she told
Vanity Fair
, “It’s not the exciting place it used to be . . . It doesn’t feel alive, cracking with that synergy between the art world and music world and fashion world that was happening in the’80s.” Conceited as that may sound, it is hard to disagree with her. Illegal lofts were converted into designer lofts decades ago. Nightclubs are tailored to the guys in suits now, instead of providing an alternative to them. Music is made mostly in Brooklyn, as is anything that would remotely be deemed “underground.” Manhattan today is strictly aboveground.

But then, as New York became more ostentatiously ordinary, so did Madonna. Gone is her capricious string of changing styles. Now, her personal style is interchangeable with any number of women for whom Jackie O would be considered an aspiration. Her blond hair falls perpetually shoulder-length, blow-dried and softly curled. She is most often spotted in either workout gear or a discriminating designer dress. The Madonna of today is in good taste.

It presents an amazingly stark contrast to the Madonna we first knew—the one who introduced lingerie-as-apparel to the world, and who wore a threadbare men’s coat around the East Village, making it look like something enviable. And even if that early version is in some sense contrived, it’s still the one I prefer. It’s the only one that represents, to my mind, something that would have been nice to be a part of. It’s the only one that inspires a yearning in me to have been
there for—the innovation, the creativity, the general atmosphere of something new and different and possibly even great happening. To be part of a scene
just before
it gets exploited for the mainstream. Madonna here represents a version of the American Dream that competes with the more common, suburban, familial one.

This American Dream involves escape (
from
that more conventional one), independence, worldliness, the eternal chase for something bigger and better and brighter. Above all, it represents the pursuit not so much of happiness as of fame. This photo of Madonna memorializes that pursuit, endowed by New York City, on the verge of its fruition, just before she lost her last name.

Colleen Kane

 

 

 

 

 

IT WAS A cinch to admire Madonna in 1984. At age ten, I awoke each morning under her half-lidded, come-hither eyes. My Madonna poster, across from my bed, showed a close-up of her face with the hand posed at one side, the rag tied around her dirty-blonde hair, the dozens of black rubber bracelets, and the yellow nail polish. For me, Madonna introduced a previously unknown age range between teenager and mom, where you could do and wear whatever you wanted—and it looked really fun.

Madonna was Catholic, and so was I. But Madonna was a slut! The fact that she was the only Catholic slut I knew of shows how young I was. I didn’t understand or approve of her, but I wanted to be like her. I didn’t get what it meant to be “like” a virgin, but I did know I was supposed to be one until I was married, and that I should not be writhing around and moaning like a strumpet in front of God and everyone else. Still, Madonna was so cool; how could she be wrong? Furthermore, she was a fox. (Could the word “foxy” ever apply to
me
when I was older? The mind boggled.) To ten-year-old me, Madonna represented the exciting grown-up business I secretly obsessed about but wouldn’t experience for years to come. Looking at her then was like looking ahead to a future me. But now I see her differently.

Cut to two decades hence. I’d had my own young and wild (in different ways) period in New York City. In July 2007, I was covering celebrities for an environmental magazine. Madonna headlined London’s Live Earth concert to fight climate change. There she thanked Al Gore for his environmental wake-up call and said, “Tonight’s concert is not just about entertainment, it’s about a revolution. Amen.”

But it was impossible not to notice the carbon footprint of her yearlong Sticky and Sweet Tour, which included 250 staff members, thirty wardrobe trunks, and four jumbo freezers to house ice packs for Her Madgesty’s feet. The tour also included twelve seamstresses, sixteen caterers, about one hundred technicians and dancers, and a stage set, all flown around the world, with Madonna flying alongside in her personal jet. Jeez, Madonna Louise.

What kind of revolution was this? Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to source those needs at each local tour stop? Even if Madonna spent a gazillion dollars for a greener tour, she could still afford to buy and sell most of planet Earth. (I did the math.) But embarking on a tour this extravagant after headlining the Live Earth event was a hypocritical move, not to mention plain lazy.

I know—it’s incongruous to hear “Madonna” and “lazy” in the same sentence. Madge, who reportedly spends two hours a day working out. The woman who can sing and dance in concert for longer stretches than I can do, well, anything except sleep. Now, reconsidering her for the first time in years, she’s no longer a cool role model; in fact, she’s gotten kind of boring.

When called upon to appear at an awards show, the fifty-one-year-old Madonna seems to think to herself,
Which hot young pop stars do the kids like today—who should I pair with? Check, Justin, and check, Britney!
Oh, and
What’s shocking and sexy—faux-lesbian kisses? Check!

Straight women kissing each other to titillate viewers—you know who already thought of that?
Girls Gone Wild.
B-movies like
Wild Things.
The entire straight pornography industry. None of those are outlets known for pushing the creative envelope.

For tours, Maddy needs some provocative costumes. She could choose to rock some sleek, stunning new gowns or bodysuits designed especially for her, which other women could only dream of wearing. But no; it’s time to trot out the knee-high, spike-heeled boots; the fishnets, the hot pants, the corset, the bra, the top hat, and the riding crop, and wear them all together at once. What tour is this, anyway? Blonde Ambition, Truth or Dare, or Sticky and Sweet? It’s all of the above, apparently. Boring. Lazy.

Her visual message has become muddled, too, from trying on so many personas. But original-recipe Madonna, in her downtown DIY dance-punk get-ups, seemed to come from somewhere genuine, even if she didn’t necessarily invent the look. A rosary worn as a necklace, and a hundred-plus O-ring bracelets piled on the arm at once? I never would have thought of such creative accessorizing without her helpful example.

But today, Madonna no longer represents anything I want. She’s an unmatched master of image manipulation, but many of Madonna’s latter-day looks (she’s tried on every hat short of an astronaut’s helmet) come off as contrived—like she’s putting on a new look because she’s expected to, not because she’s feeling it.

The 2009 video for “Celebration” shows images of Madonna humping the air, intercut with shots of her clutching her crotch like a little girl who has to go pee-pee, like,
rightthisminute.
I can’t claim to speak for fifty-somethings, but this isn’t generally what they do, is it? Unless there’s another unpleasant lady-problem I haven’t yet learned about menopause?

The jumping and grinding behavior was believable when she was younger. But even back then, did Madonna
ever
party? Have fun with friends? Get drunk and eat a big plate of cheese fries? Is
Madonna
human
? Or is she just a singing, dancing, moneymaking sex machine?

Speaking of sex, there’s her recent boy toy, Jesus Luz, who was twenty-eight years her junior. Does a simple young buck who barely speaks the English satisfy a mature woman’s companionship needs? Go, Madonna . . . I guess. I didn’t quite buy that someone so savvy is so horny at fifty-one that sex with a hot stud is all she desires from a partner. Was Madonna just doing what the public expected her to do, post-divorce? Was it a bonus that his name was “Jesus,” which goes so marvelously with “Madonna”? Boring and lazy.

And let’s talk about the ungraceful facial aging. Madonna’s injection-riddled visage of the past few years brings her ever-closer to resembling a living Madame, the puppet that once hosted
Solid Gold.
Her distorted face and her recent photoshopped-beyond-recognition Louis Vuitton ads are huge disappointments coming from such an iconic “strong woman.” She’s not fighting the good fight; she’s fighting a battle that can only be lost. (This is neither boring nor lazy, but delusional.)

Witnessing all of the above has been a gradual letdown. Madonna has aggressively transformed herself over the years, but all the while, I’ve morphed, too. In my mid-thirties, I want to savor life: discover new passion-inspiring places and friends and foods, repair some of the damage we humans have done to the environment, connect and share my experiences through writing and photography. I feel best when surrounded by my smart, funny friends, and I want to keep learning and improving and exploring and trying until I die at a ripe old age. Madonna was empowering to me as an uncertain, sin-burdened Catholic youth. She was about confidence and having fun being a girl. Now, as I start to see evidence that my own looks are not immune to the march of time, observing Madonna’s battle against nature is the opposite of empowering. I don’t have her millions to fight the pull of gravity on skin that can only remain elastic for so many decades. But I wouldn’t want to imitate the grotesquery she’s becoming in her fifties.

Madonna can’t do much for me now except stand as an example for how
not
to age. Of course, she’s still magnetizing to watch, albeit in a different way. Now I marvel that the surgeons have somehow made her eyes larger, and muse that there is such a thing as being too fit.

This is a harsh critique coming from someone who doesn’t spend multiple hours each day in the gym, who neglects to execute brilliant business strategies, who has never once riveted millions with my actions. So if we are both boring and lazy, Madonna is way more accomplished at being boring and lazy than I am.

Rebecca Traister

 

 

 

 

 

THE QUESTION I was asked Wednesday by more than one person was this: Is it too late to see Madonna?

They were asking me this because, at the last minute, my friend Sara had found tickets to Madge’s final stop at Madison Square Garden on her Confessions Tour. I couldn’t afford a Madonna ticket and I told Sara this and she said she would buy it and I would pay it off via a kind of social layaway plan. She also said, in a bracing way: “Look, I have never seen her. You have never seen her. And I don’t want us to see her when she’s sixty-five and it’s too late, you know?” Yes, I said solemnly. I know.

I understand that there are a lot of people out there who have never seen Madonna and who don’t consider it a missed opportunity. But I am a thirty-one-year-old American woman. I was nine when I watched a ratty-looking woman pleasure herself on a Venetian gondola while a panting lion looked on in the “Like a Virgin” video and
my father, glancing at the television, asked, “Who
is
that?” I am sure that my father, who has barely glanced at a television since, has no memory of this. But I remember. Because while I didn’t understand the first thing about who she was or what she was doing to that poor lion, I knew she was fascinating. And because my mother—who also never glances at the television and has never been able to remember anyone’s name, including mine—stunned us all by informing him, “That’s Madonna.”

The conclusion to which I stumbled by following the logic of that exchange turned out to be coincidentally accurate: If my mother knew who Madonna was, then she was the most famous woman in the world. Many years later, she is the most famous woman in the world—at least the world I grew up in. Even without having been a truly devout Madonna fan (too young to be a wannabe, I was a wannabe wannabe), I managed to own every one of her albums back when people owned albums. Even songs I think I don’t know the lyrics to—like “Music,” or “Ray of Light,” or “Take a Bow”—I know the lyrics to. Madonna has been the soundtrack to my life.

So I agreed with Sara that this was a pretty momentous event and besides, we had a hot ticket. They all sold out in four minutes or something, and this was the kind of concert the cool kids went to, and weren’t we hip to be going at all. In short, I felt the way I probably should have felt at fifteen if I’d scored tickets to the Blond Ambition tour.

Which became abundantly clear when I happened to mention to my mother that I was going to see Madonna. “My goodness,” she chuckled. “That’s really some old-fashioned entertainment.” That’s right. My mother—the sixty-two-year-old woman who still occasionally asks me what ever happened to “that young rock ‘n’ roll guy, Billy Joel,” which she still pronounces Billy Joe-Elle despite having been corrected a thousand times,
that
mother—was teasing me about being an old foggy because I was going to see Madonna.

Then my brother called. He’s been calling a lot recently because he has a six-week-old son and chatting with a six-week-old gets boring fast, which makes chatting with your sister a lot more appealing. I told him I was going to Madonna. “Well, you’re showing up a little late to that party, aren’t you?” he said. I should mention that my brother is twenty-eight and cannot drive a car so I don’t know where he gets off making fun of me. “No, I’m sure it’ll be great,” he said. “Like if Yente from
Fiddler on the Roof
got her own show for two hours.” Then my brother underscored just how doddering we both are (as if the
Fiddler
reference weren’t enough) by consulting with his six-week-old son as we spoke. “Do you think Madonna is still relevant to your generation, Noah?” he asked. “Do you think that the Material Girl still has the power to put asses in the seats?” I heard Noah burp loudly before hanging up.