Deconstructing Madonna

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.