![]() “ I wasn’t Madonna I was an old mom in the playground with Go-Gurt on her shirt.” “Fans love aging musicians not only because they are time-travel machines hold a mirror up to our own aging and offer clues to where we are going,” wrote Grigoriadis. In the feature, Grigoriadis expressed reservations about Madonna’s efforts to sexualize the aging female body. To promote Madame X, Madonna sat for a New York Times feature interview with rock critic Vanessa Grigoriadis. Even if some of Madonna’s riskier moments fell short, it’s remarkable to compare the album to simultaneous offerings from her presumed successors - in retrospect, Madame X was one of the least generic pop releases of 2019. Breakup ballads “Crave” and “Crazy” struck me as sensitive and emotionally intelligent, and I danced and jogged to “Faz Gostoso” and “Bitch I’m Loca” straight through the summer. Amid the Twitter fury over certain lyrical missteps (“I’ll be Israel, if they’re incarcerated”), I hesitated to admit that I was fairly impressed. Eccentric and high energy, the album drew influences from global dance trends such as Brazilian fado, Cape Verdean djembe, and German techno. Last year Madonna released Madame X, her 14th studio album. “You will be criticized, you will be vilified, and you will definitely not be played on the radio.” “ To age is a sin,” she said in a 2016 speech at the Billboard Women in Music Awards. The conventional trajectory of legacy acts, she claimed, was sexist and ageist. ![]() In the 2010s, however, Madonna resisted the nostalgia narrative, even as her music became increasingly self-referential. Male idols strum guitars and don leather jackets female idols wear sequined cocktail dresses and lean against grand pianos. Should they wish to remain commercially relevant, they embark on live stadium tours, but the shows rarely resemble Blond Ambition. Their personal lives might fall apart, but their nasty divorces and mid-life crises do less to inform their public personas than the memories of their younger selves. That’s how it goes, right? Our idols age, their albums sell fewer copies. ![]() The urge to mythologize Blond Ambition, and Madonna’s career more broadly, is understandable. Yet the pop star must keep this a secret - otherwise her fans wouldn’t spend $200 on tickets. What happens onstage represents just one component of the tour the performance extends to the press and the internet, so that the audience includes every witness of the tour’s media spectacle. The music serves not as the main attraction, but as a complement to the pop star’s dancing, fashion, and videos. In the 21st century, the pop star’s album promotion cycle culminates in a live stadium tour, in which she combines theatricality, sexuality, controversy, and autobiography. The tour has indeed become a blueprint for music industry success. According to Rolling Stone, the tour established Madonna as one of the world’s most successful musicians and is largely credited with “ reinventing the megatour itself extended provocation and upped the spectacle.” This year marks the 30th anniversary of Madonna’s Blond Ambition World Tour. “I was completely awestruck,” said Madonna, “and ten years later I’m standing in the middle of Times Square, looking at all you people.” I want a taxicab to drop me off on an unfamiliar street corner, swarmed by crowds of people. Suddenly I want to board my first plane, too. Three years later, the Times Square of Madonna’s youth no longer existed.īut I watch the speech again, and the mythology tightens its grip. The PR speech justifies the city’s erasure of cross-class urban space, I might say. I could point to Sarah Schulman, Samuel Delany, José Esteban Muñoz, the decades of queer scholarship on Manhattan’s gentrification and commercialization. I could explain why Madonna’s story is bullshit. The tricky thing about mythology is the way it coils around reality, like a serpent. And I didn’t know where I was going, I didn’t know a soul, and I asked the taxicab driver to drop me off in the middle of everything. “Ten summers ago, I made my first trip to New York City, my first plane ride, my first cab ride. “Now here’s the irony of the situation,” she told the crowd, grinning. She wore a strapless silver gown and fire engine lipstick, her hair cropped and platinum blonde. IN 1987, over 10,000 people gathered in Times Square to catch a glimpse of the pop singer Madonna, fresh off the plane from California.
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