http://observer.guardian....55,00.html

After 20 years of tireless invention, Madonna is not only still at the top but
has emerged as a happily married yoga enthusiast and mother of two - a
disappointment for critics who feel that by now she should have been punished
for her sins. On the eve of her UK tour, we celebrate the First Lady of Pop

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'). I
can't see any support bandages this time as Madonna rises up through the stage
floor, still in the crab position, then stands on her head.
Her dancers start coming down from the ceiling on swings, dressed in a way
that suggests they have escaped en masse from a casting for Les Miserables.
Madonna looks sensational, though her spangled corset and thigh boots are so
high camp they border on space camp. Watching her frolicking with her dancers,
I'm reminded that Boy George once said she was a gay man trapped inside a
woman's body. Right now, in the nicest possible sense, it looks as if the gay
man has escaped.

As the set unfolds (old songs: 'Frozen', 'Papa Don't Preach', 'Holiday'; new
songs: 'Nothing Fails', 'American Life' 'Hollywood'; horrible songs: 'Hanky
Panky', 'Die Another Day'; and unexpected songs: 'Imagine' ) the dry ice
swirls, and 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'. This was no virgin - anyone could see that - but even
then Madonna ladled on the irony and the metaphor just as much as the
eyeliner.

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'.

Around this time, Madonna appeared on the Jonathan Ross show. The last time
Ross interviewed her it was like watching a small boy being mauled by a man-
eating tiger. This time Madonna looked subdued and unconfident, constantly
twisting her fingers and fidgeting in her chair. She talked about hating the
way she looked and she sounded like she meant it. Ross even managed to slip it
in that her new music wasn't for him and Madonna - Madonna! - meekly let him
get away with it.

By the end I was watching in thoughtful silence. I've met Madonna,
interviewing her in 1995 at her New York apartment, and she was such a bright,
cheeky, 'Fuck you!' woman, speaking fearlessly and articulately about
everything from art and fellatio to God, rape, misogyny ('It's an aura - a
black cloud they carry around with them') and everything in between. When she
told me about being sexually assaulted as a newcomer to New York - the first
time she'd ever talked about it - I commented that even something like this
might end up being dismissed as a cynical publicity stunt. She laughed
dryly: 'Some people think everything I do is a publicity stunt. They think
when I go to the bathroom it's a publicity stunt.'

Did she feel she had been dehumanised, turned into a 'thing'? 'Yes
(mischievous) - but then most icons are.'

There's no doubt about it: the woman I met that day would have eaten Ross for
breakfast and used Michael Parkinson to mop the plate. This Madonna, this
latest Madonna, wasn't coming across like that at all. It made you wonder what
was going on: Where is Madonna placed now? What do we make of her? What does
she make of herself, come to think of it?

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 ('I lost my virginity as a career move').

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. 'She was so tight, she
squeaked,' said Jimmy Albright. 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 our parks surrounded by bodyguards as she did in the Eighties. She's
no longer spraying profanities on chat shows or feeling up lesbian friends to
wind up the media. Since she dumped Catholicism for Kabbalah, the church has
had scant excuse to feel affronted as it did when she kissed a black Christ in
her 'Like a Prayer' video or pretended to masturbate onstage during her Blond
Ambition tour. And it's 12 years since Madonna scandalised the world by
producing Sex, an erotic photo essay that had Norman Mailer grumbling it
wasn't dirty enough ('no beaver shots') but saw the rest of the world buying
it just to make absolutely sure they felt disgusted.

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 that are a million
literary galaxies away from Sex. The Kabbalah thing remains both amusing and
bemusing to outsiders, but if renaming herself Esther and wearing a red
braided bracelet makes her feel good about her life, then who are we to judge?
That said, following a branch of Jewish mysticism that seeks to annihilate the
ego must be darned hard work for a woman who once declared she wouldn't be
happy until she was 'bigger than God'.

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.

Is it just me, or do some people resent the way in which big, bad, ambitious
Madonna has managed to dodge some kind of 'karmic punishment', some designated
lonely fate, by finding family happiness in her forties? Of course, some
people just can't stomach all that 'We're a partnership / cleaning the car
together / doing Kabbalah together / strumming Scottish folk songs on matching
guitars together' stuff that keeps leaking from the Ciccone-Ritchie homestead
(and I haven't even got to the bit where Ritchie is supposed to be in the
habit of calling Madonna 'Mum'). One woman told me she couldn't work out
whether she was simply suspicious of the 'Guy effect', or just plain sick of
Madonna banging on about her perfect personal life. Married Madonna she could
take; smug Married Madonna, no way. Others seem to suspect that this is a
parody of domestic bliss, just the latest Madonna disguise.

I'm not so sure. It seems to me that a woman who lost her own mother as a
young child might be a key candidate to embrace family stability. But it's
about more than even that - it's about mega-celebrity and how to survive it.
Arguably, Madonna has transcended pop stardom to become the first great
reality show (Big Sister? Big Mother?). 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 is also extraordinary how, all these years on, some people, usually men,
still can't give it up for the idea of Madonna, the talented and relevant
musician, songwriter and performer. Where some are concerned she will always
be dismissed as a chancer, a media manipulator, who built her entire career,
spanning decades and continents, on a succession of good hair days. Never mind
the innumerable No1 singles, the hit albums, the constant creative evolution,
the provocation and the daring, the 20-odd years at the top of one of the most
cut-throat industries ever.

'Cherish', 'Like a Prayer', 'You'll See', 'Frozen', 'Mer-
Girl', 'Gone', 'Impressive Instant' - where did all these songs, and more,
come from? The 'hit single' fairy? Part of the urban myth surrounding Madonna
is that the songs she says she wrote were collaborations, and the songs she
says were collaborations were nothing to do with her. Even today you'll get
idiots at parties solemnly declaring that Madonna has no real talent: 'She's
just a great businesswoman who knows how to market herself.' And people wonder
why Madonna is always banging on about sexism in the music industry (for a pop
girl she always did have a big dirty rock mouth).

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 his 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 three-
way snog 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 tongueing is only
bearable because you know it would never happen. The 'guys' would be too
busy 'duetting' (though we could argue all day about what all that pointing at
each other with guitars is all about).

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 not referring to
her fabulously loyal gay fan base, or even to her love life (though before
Ritchie and motherhood she seemed to be on a one-woman crusade to give
heterosexuality a bad name). I am referring to where the true Madonna
heartland lies; namely the sprawling mid-twenties to late-forties 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. But it's not always a case of
dreaming about Madonna or even for that matter thinking about her. Grown women
have busy lives, and no one has time to sit around obsessing about multi-
millionairess pop stars, but the fact remains that for many it is a strange
mixture of comforting and exciting just to feel that Madonna's still around,
doing her thing, putting out great records, loving her children, digging her
man, practising her dance routines, kicking against the pricks. One woman I
know celebrated her 37th birthday with a toast to Madonna, an ironic gesture
but one which is probably more common than you think. Unlike most men, who
have spent over 20 years debating whether Madonna was too slutty (or not
slutty enough) for their tastes, it was always more about friendship than sex
for us.

I was thinking about this when I went to see Madonna perform at her Chicago
show. It wasn't the best-ever Madonna gig I'd seen - not as brazen as Blond
Ambition or as soulful as Drowned World - but it was instructive to see her
perform in America, the place that made her. America is just so vast, you feel
yourself being swallowed alive, rendered irrelevant and anonymous, the moment
you step out of the airport. It makes you feel fresh respect for the young
motherless Madonna Ciccone, the little-woman-who-could (and did), one of the
first to stare celebrity straight in the eye and beat it at its own game.

The crowd were a disparate bunch: families, gay men, large groups of men
drinking beer in a gruff heterosexual manner, even what appeared to be a
Kabbalah convert, waving a 'Queen Esther' banner in the crowd. And, of course,
there were the gangs of women out for the night on their own, all types, all
ages, all jostling together, buying their posters and $30 programmes as
souvenirs, and boogying with a disgraceful sense of abandon to the
encore, 'Holiday'. I overheard a group of them huddled over a programme: 'Oh,
I like that look, and that one, and I like her there.' It was like Madonna's
career itself: big cultural pick'n'mix, something for pretty much everybody.

So that's what we're looking at. While Madonna might not be inspiring young
girls any more (at least not in the gargantuan numbers she did in the
Eighties), 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.

Tessa said:

??? I could see someone questioning MJ's sanity, but Prince? He's got his act together a whole lot better than MJ. And how is Prince so much worse off than Madonna, or how can he be seen as some sort of pitiful creature, these days?

Not to mention, I don't buy the conclusion of this article...Madonna, indispensible? It's been years since I had any interest in her work. I could argue that Prince is indispensible, but others in the universe couldn't care less about him...

Tessa said:

UHhhhh slowly??

Madonna is playing here in Ireland for the first time at the end of this month: her tickets still not sold out so i would say her tickets are too expensive and also people not fasinated by her anymore.She is meant to b the queen of pop whatever ;her tickets are not selling out anymore why? cause she is nuts on her religion its too much she is not young anymore :yet excercises on the stage like a freak shes 46! she has passed out after some of her concerts.Someone should have a word with her tell her she aint 24 anymore and her religion is fake crap.

CandaceS said:

I was thinking the same thing as I read it!

apple2 said:

but then, aren't they all?


as for tickets selling out..... she sold out all of her US dates. maybe the irish are just some broke ass bitches





j/k (if you desire)

Interesting article,but it's always funny to me the way people constantly try to "analyze" Madonna.There's a reason why her latest CD features a song called "Nobody Knows Me".
[This message was edited Mon Aug 16 5:32:24 2004 by DavidEye]