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Deconstructing Madonna

By Leanne McRae - posted Friday, 21 April 2006


I tuned in on a recent Saturday night to watch Parkinson on the ABC. Madonna was billed as the only guest for the evening, demonstrating the extraordinary power of the pop culture icon. She spoke for the hour about her career, family and spiritual interest in the Kaballah. As the session came to conclusion, very little information of any interest had been communicated. I was not informed, shocked or enlightened. I was sedated. Madonna has become mundane.

The controversy and critique that have punctuated her career have all but dried up. Instead of being provocative and proactive, Madonna was boring. Her discussion with Parky was prescriptive at best. It was decidedly disappointing compared to the cigar-smoking, swearing suitor she was on Letterman in 2003. The move across the Atlantic has caused her to lose her wit and rebellion.

From the beginning of her career, Madonna was a contradiction. She both challenged and conformed to the status quo. Her dialogue with difference reactivated and revised the conventions of our culture. It is a cliché to say that she pushed boundaries. She made dance culture and pop culture synonymous.

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The literacies of movement were measured by her music. She framed fashion trends and fan-based frivolity, all the while writing and recording catchy pop songs that dominated pop, dance, singles and album charts simultaneously.

She buffed up in the 1980s making her feminine physique muscular and sculpted, moving it away from soft curves towards taut. It was a tough body for tough times. It was used for dancing through danger. She was blonde, had ambition and was not afraid to demonstrate her success and sexuality.

Madonna made her underwear outerwear revealing the mesh, lace and bodices of lingerie that fragmented and packaged the female form. Then she took it all off for her sex book. She bought sex back to a post-AIDS population. The fear of fornication was diffused and discussed through Erotica and Human Nature.

We sang loudly with her when she chorused, “I’m not your bitch, don’t hang your shit on me!” Madonna mobilised the music video format and we "vogued" via her vocalism and moved through her incarnations. She was a dancer, musician, poet, producer, filmmaker, actress and pop figure.

In Truth or Dare we went backstage and on the road. We watched her transgress the boundaries of boss, lover, sister, performer and manager. It was fascinating viewing. She dissed Kevin Costner and beguiled Warren Beatty.

But as I watched Madonna on Parkinson, the fickleness of popular culture was confirmed along with the tough times in which we live. In her latest incarnation, Madonna has yet again appropriated and recycled the past.

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This is not something foreign to Madonna or other musicians who always draw on previous samples, chord progressions and song structures. Popular culture and music in particular, is always cyclical - forever activating, hailing and harvesting the recent and distant musical memories.

In Confessions on a Dance Floor, Madonna has returned to the 1970s and to disco. Her blow-waved hair and gloved left hand - Michael Jackson style - the ABBA samples and reactivation of the dance-floor metaphor transports us to a time before AIDS, corporate globalisation, underemployment and war on Iraq.

Her latest film-clip for “Sorry” featuring a disco versus hip hop battle attempts to deconstruct and even diminish the significance of the ghetto and street culture to popular music and champion the histories of shiny white middle-class movers dancing in the discothèque. There is little commentary here.

But, perhaps this is unfair. Tara Brabazon affirms that we expect too much from our pop culture figures - that if they do one thing to change the culture, then that should be enough. It is unfair to expect them to do it over and again. Madonna has most certainly fulfilled her quota for questioning and transforming our times.

It is also important to understand that Madonna’s latest musical move is deeply indicative of our age. Her recent attempts, before Confessions on a Dance Floor, to provoke - to think through - about violence particularly with “How it Feels for a Girl” - have been commercial failures. MTV refused to screen the video more than once. She had to pash Britney Spears to recover from that blunder.

Consumers do not want to be uncomfortable. They want their pop culture predictable. Madonna has always understood this relationship. Even when she was challenging the status quo, she was giving her audiences what they wanted. There is now less room for Madonna to be contradictory - to bridge the gaps and absences between official and unofficial cultures. She now conforms to the culture.

What is most disappointing is the borg-like, yoga body Madonna now possesses. She is 47-years-old and looks no older than 27 with a taught and excessively toned body that is unnaturally fit. The curves she had in her “Holiday” days are gone. The bulking buff body for Blonde Ambition has been replaced by this ultra thin artificial replica of femininity.

If Madonna was truly rebellious she would have allowed herself to age and put on a few pounds. For a woman to wear her wrinkles is heresy in today’s image conscious, age-defying, Botoxed-bodied context. Instead of being the difficult and dramatic doyenne that rebelled against the convention, Madonna now conforms to it.

But this has more to do with the consequences of conservatism and generational literacies in the media than it does with Madonna as an artist or performer.

Generation X has much to answer for. In the past I have written through my anger at the Baby Boomers for filling out our culture and consciousness with their versions of the past and present. There are serious consequences for the health, well-being and social mobility of future generations resulting from this colonisation of the culture. Yet, they have only been able to achieve this because Generation X disengaged from social and political commentary.

Rather than deploying a critical and interpretive engagement with the past presented to them, Generation X embraced the postmodern platform and turned inwards towards themselves and their own identity politics.

Madonna was certainly one anchor for this style of self. Images and surfaces were mobilised - which was why she was able to transgress so many boundaries. It was of its moment and nobody thought it would translate out of its time. There was no depth so there were no consequences.

Raiding and appropriating the knowledges, identities and artefacts of another culture or consciousness was part of popular cultural literacies.

For Music Madonna was able to mobilise Indian symbolism without worry. The neo-colonialism of another identity is not problematic in an image-literate and style-conscious culture. All symbolisms are removed from context and their deeper significance to become fashionable and funky.

For Generation X, the disengagement from any critique outside popular culture meant that the free-floating signification of ideas and identities was normalised. This framework for understanding the world has consequences for newer generations who have no language for critique outside of fashion and frivolity.

Popular culture is important and worthy of study. It can reveal patterns and strategies of political thinking within the lives of individuals. However, our contemporary popular culture terrain reveals more about our ability to consume than it does to critique. Madonna’s latest embodiment and performance reveals this most acutely.

While Madonna has always been in the music industry as a major manipulator of the image in order to sell a product, she has also been able to exist in liminal spaces between acceptable and unacceptable identities and knowledges. With her latest album she demonstrates how these spaces are reduced.

In an age of war on terror we are dancing through difficult times. There is nothing wrong with a dance floor metaphor. It can save us when things are really tough. But when there is no other method of making sense of these changes, dancing can be dangerous. By privileging the image and a disengagement with difficult issues, Generation X quietly consumed their way through trouble.

Now present generations are doing what they were taught - by Boomers and Xers - to consume. We cannot blame them for that or wonder why they would rather dance than dialogue.

This consumer culture creates a consciousness of the present. Individuals are captured in the moment of conspicuous consumption and are unable to translate beyond it. There is no future and no consequences in this context. Madonna has mobilised these memories most powerfully.

At 47 she has created a holding pattern of youth, beauty and beats by reverting to the past - to a cleaner and clearer time where everybody danced and forever was found on the dance floor.

The stretching of this musical moment into and through time generates a bubble around us where we do not age, put on weight, ponder the political or question the culture. But perhaps this is Madonna’s greatest contribution. She is still at the cutting-edge of our consciousness and performing the problems of our age. By encouraging us to dance she is also simultaneously presenting us with a politics of the present where dancing is both all we can do and not nearly enough.

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About the Author

Leanne McRae is the senior researcher and Creative Industrial Matrix Convenor for the Popular Culture Collective http://www.popularculturecollective.com

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