Madonna and Me (25 page)

The reason should be obvious: Madonna’s genius is stealing ideas and remaking them in her own image. Madonna stealing from Madonna stealing from the Golden Era of Hollywood is like Superman taking steroids. She went, during the reign of that song, from being just Madonna to being Super-Madonna. And everyone hitting dance floors, from New York nightclubs to my junior high school dance benefitted. Just not those of us trying to put together ’80s dance parties twenty years after the fact.

Unfortunately, the problem with hitting your peak is there’s nowhere to go but down, and that has defined Madonna’s career since “Vogue.” The fun was gone after that song, which was a single for the
Dick Tracy
soundtrack and never had a proper home on a proper album. A few months later, Madonna released
The Immaculate Collection
, a greatest hits album, tantamount to an admission that a major phase of her career was over.
The Immaculate Collection
had two new songs on it, one of which was “Justify My Love,” a tedious song that substitutes “whispery” for “sexy,” and ushered in the Trying Too Hard phase of Madonna’s career, a phase she’s still in these days, more than twenty years later. Like I said, being derivative without being cheesy is really hard to do, and Madonna pulling it off for nearly a decade before fizzling out is to her credit. That the swan song of Madonna’s career was “Vogue” is all the more reason for even the snobbiest of music snobs to offer her at least grudging respect.

Lisa Crystal Carver

 

 

 

 

 

MADONNA DOESN’T HAVE a non-thieving bone in her body. She’s a vampire. She steals from every subculture without giving credit. It started with Jellybean Benitez and the New York street scene. That was the only music, message, and fashion I liked of hers: “Borderline,” “Lucky Star,” “Burning Up.” The rubber bracelets, star earrings, weird socks . . . I got fooled into thinking that was her. After she sucked that fun DJ/producer and his whole scene dry and moved on, the trick was up. Fad runs through Madonna’s veins in place of blood.

She doesn’t reinvent herself—there is no “self” to re-anything. She simply switches up who she steals from. Remember when she was appearing everywhere with Sandra Bernhard, and all that summer she was on talk shows, temporarily gay and funny? That woman is neither. She can’t even hang onto one name. Her nicknames are Nonnie, Maddy, Mo, The Material Girl, Boy Toy, Madge (British
shorthand for “Your Majesty”). She even legally changed her name to the Hebrew moniker Esther in 2004.

Because Madonna came before Britney, as far as whorey, evanescent pop singers who can’t sing go, people assume that Britney nicked that nasal whine from the old lady. Nope. Britney has always sounded like a drunken, negligee-wearing, Long Island shut-in; she can’t help it. Madonna, on the other hand, has never had a voice that sounds like hers. She tries low, high, middle, silly, and dead-serious tones; different producers keep punching different effects buttons. Sometimes, when she’s live and desperate, she even tries them all in one song. The truth is Madonna ripped that nasal thing off Britney. Probably when she was making out with her. Madonna makes out with everyone, on camera and off—I guess that’s how she sucks their essences.

Whether it’s adopting gay men’s vogueing, adopting an African child (I mean, geez—that baby had a dad!), or adopting an accent, she sneaks up on lesser-known people (which means everyone, for her), snatches the surface of their lives, and fashions a show or a children’s book or a life decision from it. Remember when she moved to England and was suddenly doing photo shoots atop a horse (or off the horse, in the stuffy parlor) dressed to the teeth like an equestrian? No wonder she keeps falling off those horses and breaking things!

Remember the cone bra? Madonna didn’t simply pull that straight off the Jean-Paul Gaultier rack. Another sexual, vocally challenged but very charismatic songstress did it way before Madonna, and way better. I’m talking, of course, about Lydia Lunch and her nail-adorned bra—stuck pointy-end out. Black leather. Scowl. So hot. If you’re going to flaunt danger-breasts, it’s so much better to do it all hagged-out, with threatening eyebrows . . . Not a blonde ponytail and a perky smile to take the edge off. Lydia’s nail-bra sent a message: try to cop a feel and you will bleed from the palms like the Second Coming. What was Madonna gonna do with her goldie cones—haute-couture us to death?

But I’ll tell you what makes me really mad, besides absolutely all of it: her chasing-Antonio-Banderas-around phase. She co-opted a whole culture pursuing one married man’s drawers. When he resisted her advances, she hired a matador to masturbate to in “Take a Bow.”

I admit, that bull was a handsome accessory, along with the matador’s tight pants, epaulets, and cape. When I was young and first watched the video, that’s all I saw—how elegant it all looked. But here’s what I didn’t know at the time, and Madonna must have, since she wasn’t young and naïve like her viewers: Before bulls go into the ring, Vaseline is smeared on their eyes so they can’t see; wet newspapers are stuffed in their ears; they’re drugged and locked in a box for days to disorient them; then they’re bled out by a series of men with knives before they even get to the matador, who stabs them some more before cutting off their tail and ears—sometimes while the bull is still conscious and the crowd throws empty beer cans at the poor, felled creature.

She treats living things as accessories, as if life itself isn’t any more real than a screen or the pages of a magazine. I think she thought she was just playing another role—lady of the British manor—when she bought three thousand baby pheasants for her rich friends to shoot and kill for fun. But that wasn’t a “role” for the birds. They died.

When your claim to fame is opening the world’s eyes to variety in sex, I’d think it would be helpful to be able to play more than one part only through costume changes. Sexy boxer stroking herself. Sexy powdered-wig lady stroking herself. Sexy guitar-humper. Sexy pole-humper. “Quit masturbating, Madonna!” I want to yell. “Quit that sexy stuff! You’re starting to irritate me!” I don’t care for masturbation in my pop music. If it’s not part of the storyline, it’s just kind of embarrassing. Some things—well, that one thing—should stay shrouded in darkness and shame, just stay verboten, not trotted out as fashion. Let me feel guilty for at least two minutes a day. (I also hate anyone saying the word “dildo” out loud.)

Pretty much every woman who lost a parent early passes through the shallow attention-whore phase: bisexual, promiscuous, and able to give headline-creating blowjobs in bathrooms and backrooms all across this nation (and a couple others). In high school, I looked to Madonna to guide me through mine. With her fun sexual aggression and messing with gender identifiers, she was a female pop star switching from being object to objectifier. But then I grew up, experienced some life, and I understood that when you merely switch from being a prisoner to being a guard, no one is freed, not even yourself. Madonna never grew up. She did attention-whore better and funner than anyone, but she couldn’t stop. That HEALTHY shirt she wore in 1985—when she raised her arm, not having shaved recently—how utterly happy she looked, dancing back then. It made you happy just looking at her; it made you healthy. That kind of raw, selfish, desire-full shallowness of youth she did so damn well got brittle and horrible when she clung onto it through the next three decades.

She got all that money and power and could have used it to change the world, but instead she kept doing the same thing-appearing as a hypersexual, in-control, heavily coiffed and corseted figure—so she could acquire more and more and more. Same with people. In her “Open Your Heart” video, Madonna initiated what looked like a ten-year-old boy into the porn industry. That boy is in his mid-thirties now, a decade and some-odd older than Madonna’s recently dumped acquisition, a model named Jesus.

Maybe youth isn’t wasted on the young; maybe it wastes the ones hanging onto it. You’re not expected to be a whole person, a good person, at first. All you need to be is young. It’s what comes after that’s the hard part—learning kindness and thoughtfulness. You stop having good-looking sex; you learn how to connect with another human, learn how to
be
human.

You know who can really tell you about sex? Old people. Ones who have been through the Depression and war and losing legs and
houses and family and who get put on antidepressants and morphine as they die of cancer, and then they really open up. People like that know what’s precious. They’re worth listening to on every topic, especially sex and love and even fashion.

Will you have this to remember? That moment in bed when you acquiesced to the loss of your youth, and found, by surprise, something so much more graceful in its place. You would have found yourself looking, as if for the first time, into someone’s eyes, and there was no longer the invisible audience, there was no outfit, there was just . . . forever.

Dying people talk about the smallest things with such urgency and love—an airplane ride, the way a cloud looked as they lay in a field half a century ago, the smell of a certain meal a certain someone always cooked. Small kindnesses, petty slights. Life. The feel of an old saggy spouse crawling into your old saggy bed, one breast missing, desire whole. Every single thing that was left out of that
Sex
book. Every single thing that matters.

“I’m strong, ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. Now, if that makes me a bitch, okay.”

Bee Lavender

 

 

 

 

 

WHEN I WAS thirteen, my parents drove us forty-five minutes from our home on a rural wooded peninsula to a suburban-mall movie theater to see
Desperately Seeking Susan
.

I wasn’t eating popcorn: One year after a surgery that removed a portion of my jaw, I could barely chew. This was just one of the small humiliations that had accumulated after I had been diagnosed with terminal thyroid cancer, undergone extensive surgery and testing, survived a recurrence of the cancer, and traded a death sentence for the murkier and far less glamorous reality of a rare genetic disorder. My neck was sliced halfway round, my jaw riddled with holes, and I had been diagnosed with a second, separate and distinct, type of cancer. The treatments had just started to remove the skin cancer ravaging my torso. Over the next three years I would have nearly four hundred biopsies.

I sat with cold hands tucked into each armpit, only half-awake until the movie started, and my perception of the world shifted in a sudden and irreversible way.

The film offered something that made every hair on my body stand on end: a glimpse of a world that might be out there somewhere—urban, messy, lawless; with cool, caustic boys on scooters, careless girls bedecked in ripped vintage clothes, and enormous empty warehouse apartments.

In the film, Susan was a trickster, a character with no motives, no back story, and no possessions except what she could carry with her or fit into a Port Authority locker. She was all gesture and blithe indifference. She took what she wanted, whether that was a bottle of room-service vodka, the contents of a wallet, a pair of studded boots, or sex on a pinball machine.

Roberta was different: constrained by tradition, rules, responsibilities, life. She had a place in the world, even if she did not like it. And then in an absurd flight of fiction, one knock to the head, a change of wardrobe: Roberta became Susan.

And that wardrobe change seemed to be all she needed. She found a place to stay, a love interest, a job based on her newfound clothes (and confusion). Even after she regained her memory and kept exclaiming, “I’m a housewife from New Jersey!” the truth was subsumed, not just to the cops or the people in her new life, but also to her husband and friends from home.

The movie proposed this radical vision: A costume can change not just perception, but reality.

Precisely when a thirteen-year-old most wants privacy and autonomy, I had lost all control of my body. Blood, vomit, pus, shit: Everything was discussed, examined, weighed, quantified. Doctors made the major decisions, my parents the minor. I had no choice in even the smallest details; not food, not even bathing. I was not allowed to immerse my skin in water, not allowed to shower. My mother washed my hair in the sink every third day, wrapping fresh scars in plastic to keep them dry and safe.

Other girls might have worried about their appearance, but I didn’t need to bother. I knew that I was ugly—so mutilated, in fact,
that I had a permanent gym class waiver to avoid having to disrobe and endure the mockery of my peers.

The surface is indeed superficial, but it matters—it is what you show the world, what you want the world to think and know. And the primary presentation of my essential self, then as now, were the scars. At the start of 1983 I looked garroted, as though I had been hung or strangled or cut in a knife fight. By the end of 1986, I would have hundreds of jagged red slashes and pearly white lumps trailing across my face, chest, shoulders, belly. Others were more obscure, hidden. But even if you couldn’t see them, I could feel them. They throbbed.

Desperately Seeking Susan
suggested: So what? Don’t try to conform. Wear the costume, be a freak, because if someone is looking at your dress they are not looking at whatever you have hidden underneath.