Why I Hate Madonna

This was written for the current issue of Plan B Magazine (I've said it before, but I'll say it again: the only UK music rag worth reading, so go out and get it).


You love her or you hate her – and that’s always a good thing, even if both sides tend to focus on all the wrong reasons. Madonna-bashing forums assert that at fifty she should stand down and do the dignified thing as behooves a woman of her years. A vague moral stance somewhere between Christian outrage and misogynist hypocrisy provides an agenda in which her übersexualized image, public "displays" of bisexuality, and outspoken position on issues such as abortion and homosexuality are vehemently and ineloquently criticized, although in my view these all are points in Madonna’s favour – as an artist, as a woman, as a perfect postmodern myth.
Meanwhile, on the pro-Madonna front, she is lauded for her business sense, her unerring nose for an edgy [and exploitable] subculture, that career-spanning string of hits. Because Madonna is an icon of camp and retro - and because her position has ceased to be of any serious relevance - the willfully superficial hipster-fashionistas can afford to embrace her. Madonna has moved into the area of iconry that is beyond reproach, like those two other towers of blond ambition, Andy Warhol and Marilyn Monroe. She is the Colonel Sanders of Pop: churning out tasteless nuggets wrapped in chemically-enhanced flava from some music factory whose workers are shamelessly exploited, cashing in on obsolete values, a branded God. The content of her work is irrelevant, just like the KFC blend - full of shit and ultimately damaging, but it sells like hot chicken.
We can all agree that Madonna’s a predator, honing in on hot shit and making big bucks off the back of others’ innovations. We know that her talents, if any, do not lie in songwriting or musicianship or any creative aspect integral to her career. We say she’s cold and cynical and controlling, although it’s none of our business. But watching early videos of Madonna – in the tell-all feature Truth or Dare, for example, or that In Bed With Madonna clip with Wayne and Garth – one can’t help but warm to her: she’s this vulnerable spiky little smarty-pants with huge charisma and a fuck-off attitude. She’s almost punk. You’ve gotta love her.

So what happened? How did she get so humourless and bloodless and lame? My case against Madonna rests on the fact that she has sold out everything she ever stood for. Arguably she stood for very little, but – like Warhol and Monroe – her very existence was her statement. Maybe Madonna never wanted to be an artist, except in the sense that Andy Warhol meant it when he said, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” And maybe she never wanted to be a role model for other savvy, tough, single-minded girls from the wilds of Buttfuck and Nowheresville; but I can’t forgive her for that, especially when her agenda was superficially so closely aligned with the humanist-feminist movement ("Let's forget about the mythical Jesus and look for encouragement, solace, and inspiration from real women ... Two thousand years of patriarchal rule under the shadow of the cross ought to be enough to turn women toward the feminist 'salvation' of this world" - Annie Laurie Gaylor, "Feminist Salvation," The Humanist, p. 37, July/August 1988).

At the very least, though, she has always been consistently transparent in her solipsism. “I am my own experiment,” she said, “I am my own work of art.” But as an artist, Madonna has never had anything to say: ever the controversial figure, but never controversial enough for me. Despite constantly reinterpreting the feminine myth (a prevalent theme among female performance artists, from Nina Hagen to Cindy Sherman), and overtly challenging sexual morals, Madonna never dared to step over the line. She always had to be sexy and beautiful; she always had to be the princess, reaffirming gender roles and hierarchical structures anew with every reinvention. Madonna appropriated authorship and ownership of the strong-and-sexual blonde archetype as though Jean Harlow and Mae West and Greta Garbo had never existed, and determinedly cast herself as the star of every [meta]narrative. For those for whom this role was not appropriate or available, the message was clear: sexual power belongs to the thin, rich, conventionally Aryan-featured elite – although Madonna herself was none of these things from birth.

What we’re being sold is a brand. Like KFC or Coca Cola, the machine behind Madonna has become vast, powerful, ubiquitous and mechanically sophisticated. Without this taskforce – whose ranks have included such luminaries as Bjork, William Orbit and Pharrell Williams – Madonna might have faded into obsolescence years ago: laughable, Cher-like, all washed up.
Not that this is the just dessert of all aging female troopers of the touring circuit. Look at Patti Smith: greying, uncompromising, hugely dignified. Joan Jett, born like Madonna in 1958, retains the credibility of punk icon status whilst remaining firmly in the public eye; femmy third-wavers sport T-shirts proclaiming “WWJJD (What Would Joan Jett Do?)” and Gibson even honoured her with a signature guitar.

Would it have been possible for a genuinely transgressive artist to achieve such widespread power and influence? Maybe not, but with all the resources of the [corrupted] industry (an extensive army of stylists, producers, songwriters, radio pluggers, PR staff, plastic surgeons and yoga teachers paid good money to work their asses off on her behalf), why couldn’t she have done anything more interesting? The trend-setting wild girl with her church-baiting, tough-girl persona has calcified into a po-faced Kabbalist (a church, after all, is still a church) fashion victim, whose statements in the last years have all been about the sancticity of marriage and the rightful place of women. She is still a symbolic figure, but one that stands for everything that’s wrong with big capitalism and the dying, bloated music industry. Impossibly grandiose, cancerous and corpulent, Pop has eaten itself. Madonna’s natural successor, Britney Spears – by virtue of publicly and completely losing control – epitomises the end of an era, and Madonna [the artist, the woman, the postmodern myth], skinnier and more drawn with each passing year, seems to be eating herself, too. The inevitable tragedy of having bought and sold and propagated one’s own myth so completely is that one is forever doomed to be equal to it in person. At fifty, this can’t be easy or fun. But really, it serves her right.