I agree Love4Cheno -- SallyBrown, I think you would LOVE Madonna. I'm surprised you know so little about her, since she's right up there in the annals of rock & roll and pop culture, along with the Beatles and Elvis.
Madonna was probably the first international female rock superstar (there were other big female acts, but none reached the echelons of world fame and influence that Madonna did). Exploding out of the conservative 1980s, Madonna was a controversial and ubiquitous force: she embodied a sexual freedom and popularized a new, powerful feminist identity that spit in the face of the socio-political ethos of the time. You could call her the polar opposite of a Margaret Thatcher or a Nancy Reagan. She was the narcissistic slut in the bullet-bra armour.
Though there are some small-thinking journalists who say that Britney is the new Madonna, the comparison is reductive: no female recording artist today can match the cultural influence Madonna had during the heights of her career. She caused huge cultural shifts with the change of an outfit. Madonna was the first to really take advantage of MTV and use the music video as a form of artistic expression; her 1990 BLOND AMBITION tour was one of the first "rock mega-concerts" to combine Broadway-esque theatricality with rock & roll; she has made the careers of many fashion designers simply by wearing their clothes; no one had ever heard of Dolce & Gabbana until Madonna commissioned them to do her costumes for her GIRLIE SHOW tour. I still attribute the return of the capris to Madonna's appearance on Oprah in 1998; I remember thinking, "why is she wearing those ugly cut pants?" only to find everyone and their mother wearing them a few months later.
For better or for worse, she's also been criticized/praised for being a cultural pariah, with a keen ear for the "next big thing" and able to transform something avant-garde or undergrand to something mainstream. With RAY OF LIGHT, she brought electronica to the fore and made it part of pop music, and with VOGUE, she popularized a dance technique that had already become passe in Manhattan gay clubs.
Yet one must remember that Madonna is a quintessential post-modern artist, and her work has always been infused with a more intelligent sensibility than your typical dance/pop artist. While most female pop singers today are prepackaged corporate products with little artistry, Madonna's no graduate from the Micky Mouse Club. This was a woman who, while struggling as a street urchin in NYC, was best friends with Keith Haring, hung out with Andy Warhol, and dated Jean-Michel Basquiat. Watch some of her 80s music videos and you'll see how she drew inspiration from everything from art deco, The Great Gatsby, gay dance culture and Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS (and that's all just from the "Express Yourself" video!). Intimately tied with her knack for fusing together different influences, her ear for the up-and-coming and her control of mass media has been Madonna's ability to shapeshift: you talk of Madonna's career in terms of different "eras," different periods when she looked and sounded different from before. No two albums are the same, and she's an image chameleon. That's how this ever-evolving icon has remained interesting for so long.
People (like cutie ConvinceMe2) have tried to dismiss Madonna over the past 20 years, calling her a whore who slept her way to success (which she denied vehemently, of course). This smacks of misogyny, as no one ever accuses a man of the same thing. Yet more importantly, it doesn't explain how Madonna was able to stay on top of her game for so long, when many of her costars have fallen by the wayside. Madonna's unmatched success as a female superstar was really a result of being the right person to emerge at the right time: she was a figure who challenged the socio-political climate at a time when it needed to be challenged. I think that's why there has been all this controversy as to whether "Madonna is relevant anymore," when no one ever questions the (ir)relevance of other pop artists: it's because Madonna was always relevant before, because she had something to say, and people wanted to listen.
If you want to get a taste of what made Madonna so special (and still does), go rent TRUTH OR DARE, the documentary of her watershed BLOND AMBITION tour. There you'll see her bitchiness, her childishness, her narcissism, and her undeniable star presence.
BlueWizard's blog: The Rambling Corner
HEDWIG: "The road is my home. In reflecting upon the people whom I have come upon in my travels, I cannot help but think of the people who have come upon me."
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