The first few bars of any classic Madonna song would be it. Think the fresh and then-sensational 80s disco synth pop intro of Into the Groove (1985)—and don’t forget the world had moved a mere three years beyond Studio 54 hymns like those of Evelyn “Champagne” King or Shalamar. Or think the first few chunky Prophet-5 chords that defined Like a Virgin (1983), which was satirized only shortly afterwards by “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Like a Surgeon—a sure sign of the original’s signature quality. Or think the excited and excitable string- and finger snap intro of Vogue (1990), a song that started a short-lived dance fad of the same name and that finally became a dance pop classic. In the 1980s, Madonna’s songs became the soundtrack to everyone’s lives. And yet, what really made Madonna the biggest female pop star of all time was the marriage of sound and image: no Into the Groove without the film sequences from Desperately Seeking Susan, no Like a Virgin without her dancing lasciviously on Venetian gondolas in a belly top and glitzy tights, no Vogue without Madonna looking like “Greta Garbo and Monroe, Dietrich, and DiMaggio” (well, the first three anyway). She was the first female pop star whose music was irrevocably married to her look.
In the 1980s Federal Republic of Germany, Madonna’s rise to stardom dwarfed political events like the NATO Double-Track Decision or Reagan’s “Empire of Evil” declaration against the Soviet Union, at least if the number of times she adorned the covers of political magazines like Stern or Der Spiegel is any indication.
In the 1980s Federal Republic of Germany, Madonna’s rise to stardom dwarfed political events like the NATO Double-Track Decision or Reagan’s “Empire of Evil” declaration against the Soviet Union.
Her cover shot for Stern magazine, in her Like a Virgin “blasphemous” outfit, with her signature crucifix earrings and black petticoat, eyebrows and eyeliner to kill for, and a look like she’s just had both your brother and your dad for breakfast, was sensational. Madonna was clearly a bad girl. From today’s perspective of a culture flooded with USP “bad girl” images from Kathleen Hanna to Rihanna, this may be unexciting, hackneyed even. But in 1984, Madonna’s look on the cover of her second album was revolutionary. My 9-year-old self was irritated, as, while my mother said she was the biggest pop sensation since the Beatles, my dad insisted that place belonged to Simon and Garfunkel. But everyone, as they say, wanted a piece of her.
Madonna’s allure, as I read somewhere, was that she was the “opposite of self-destructive”. This description has stuck with me. Of course, that didn’t mean that in her day, Madonna was shallowly jovial and merely happy-go-lucky; she was not Aerobic try-hard positive like Olivia Newton-John or Jane Fonda. She also wasn’t merely tough like “hang with the gang” Debbie Harry—and therefore also lacked the ineffability of the Blondie front woman. From circa 1985 until perhaps the 1992 Erotica album, before the yoga, the Kabbalah, and the liberal politics kicked in, Madonna was the biggest icon in the pop world, thanks to just one simple truth: the self-evidence of Madonna’s empowerment. No need to mention it, because, as you can see … Yet, pop culture today—from “Gaga” to “Riri” to “Tay-Tay”—forces its constant narrative of “empowerment” on everyone and rings so desperate precisely because it is self-evident that it is not empowering—not because these women aren’t “empowered”, but because none of us are.
Madonna climbed the peak of pop stardom precisely because she wasn’t susceptible to what is today’s NGO and psychotherapeutic jargon of safetyism, vulnerability, and the apotheosis of weakness, which, let’s admit it, has presented a firm undercurrent in US cultural language since the 1960s. She was the opposite of all the liberal feminist pop stars of later generations—remember Beyoncé’s ridiculous “FEMINIST” background lettering on stage at the VMA in 2014. Madonna was no ambassador for a political idea. She did not promote a “message”. Madonna had nothing to promote but herself.
Madonna was no ambassador for a political idea. She did not promote a “message”. Madonna had nothing to promote but herself.
From a 1985 issue of Spin magazine:
“I couldn’t be a success without also being a sex symbol. I’m sexy. How can I avoid it? That’s the essence of me. I would have to have a bag over my head and over my body; but then my voice would come across, and it’s sexy”.
Like Ayn Rand, according to whom radical individuality and self-sufficiency are the meaning of freedom, Madonna was fully dedicated to nobody but herself and nothing but her own freedom. This is also what inspired millions of girls to be “outgoing and flirty”, as a fan and winner of a Madonna lookalike contest put it in 1985.
No cultural idea is more outdated.
Compare Madonna’s early self-invention to the sterile attraction of Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift—all modelled after Madonna but strangely inert (watch Madonna’s constantly enthusiastic physical movement and contrast Taylor Swift’s strangely motionless performance during their respective stage shows). It’s not merely that the musical compositions of today’s artificially empowered girl boss icons poor in quality and sound like what they are, AI music pre-sets. The painful positivity Democratic Party ambassadors like Swift embody is just not very positive. It is contrived. It represents nothing. The contrast between Madonna and someone like Swift in fact correlates to the contrast between the exciting bits of 1980s neoliberalism and the post-ideological, post-political world of what we might call technocratic culture, and that never comes without The Ideology, usually a message of social awareness.
The contrast between Madonna and someone like Swift in fact correlates to the contrast between the exciting bits of 1980s neoliberalism and the post-ideological, post-political world of what we might call technocratic culture, and that never comes without The Ideology of social awareness.
While Madonna, not unlike Wham!-phase George Michael, represented the now outdated cultural paradigm of neoliberalism, in which “you long to be something better than you are today” (Vogue), you work hard, play hard, or “choose life”, Taylor Swift stands for a programmed kind of joy imposed on her audience, a kind of mute joy that lacks genuine excitement, because there really is nothing to be excited about. The likes of Lady Gaga and TayTay symbolize a culture that values nothing beautiful, interesting, or individual, simply because beauty requires elevation, interest requires intimacy, and individualism requires bravery—qualities that are perfectly alien to today’s lady singers.
But it’s not only Swift that stands in stark contrast to the meaning of Madonna in terms of inauthenticity vs authenticity—Swift was a pampered country music star, while Madonna played the drums in a punk band and ate from garbage cans. The phenomenon of Madonna is completely alien to our times more generally, because our new collectivist age no longer values the individual, never mind individual agency, a value Madonna embodied like no one before or after her, in terms of cultural influence and scale. Madonna does not fit the new utilitarian and “effective altruist” bill, as little as she fits the modern, very American victimhood paradigm that sings from the same autonomy-defying hymn sheet. Madonna felt this as early as 1985: “America is a really life-negative society. People want to know all the underneath stuff, your dirty laundry”. Indeed, America today, with its confessional mode of social interaction, the highlighting of “grievances” and trauma therapy jargon even in schools, universities, and workplaces, has become anti-life, anti-fun, anti-pop, and has perhaps even begun to shed the last vestiges of human civilization that made life bearable for 250 years.
In the 1980s, Madonna’s brazen celebration of self, autonomy, and personal freedom was not always appreciated by the moralist apostles of altruism and fake philanthropists. It has arguably suffered remarkably in her own trajectory towards whatever it is that Madonna stands for today.
Looking back, I think we were lucky to have her.
