Madonna’s Rapper Fetish is Old News — and an Old Problem
The “queen of pop” became the godmother of hip-hop appropriation
Pop icon Madonna made headlines after her now-infamous make out session with hip-hop star Drake at the 2015 Coachella Festival. She unexpectedly appeared onstage as Drake was seated, tilted his head back and planted a very intense wet one on the YMCMB star’s lips. He tried to put his hand on the back of her head in faux intimacy, but she moved his hand away. When it was over, Madonna stood behind him leering triumphantly as he sat dazed. Drake’s shocked expression, and wiping his mouth as soon as the exchange ended, was interpreted by many as discomfort or disgust. Though Drizzy later said he meant no disrespect and was fully into the moment, the jokes began almost immediately. So did the critique.
Fans and pundits scrutinized their kiss. Some took aim at the history of black men being fetishized as sexual objects by white women — or was the backlash just ageism against Madonna; would people have reacted similarly had an older male celebrity kissed a young starlet? What’s been somewhat lost in the cloud of conversation, however, is Madonna herself.
Madonna’s move is just the latest in her long history of empty provocation. This is Madonna, after all. She lives to get tongues wagging (no pun intended.) It’s notable how often she has aligned herself with hip-hop stars specifically in both publicity stunts and private associations.
In 1992, Madonna was at the height of her popularity and at her most controversial. That year, she released SEX, a collection of erotic photographs and sexually-explicit anecdotes. Included amongst the pages were photos of celebrities such as Isabella Rosselini and supermodel Naomi Campbell, as well as images of rappers Big Daddy Kane and Vanilla Ice, her then-boyfriend. Both the book and the music video for her single “Erotica” feature Madonna in a simulated ménage a trois with Campbell and Kane. The book was shocking for its frankness, (“We come together, waking up the neighborhood,” “I love my pussy”) but she doesn’t verbalize her feelings on interracial sex. Those images, apparently, speak for themselves.
“She said she was doing a book and [asked] would I be interested in posing in her book with some photos,” Kane told VladTV last year. “And she said it was going to be nude photographs. I said ‘Shit — even better. Let’s do it.’
“I knew they were going to be nude shots, but I didn’t know it was going to turn into a sexual thing, but it worked for me,” Kane said, before adding, “There were a lot of mixed feelings. There were people that felt like I shouldn’t be naked in pictures with a pop star. Also, with my Islamic background, a lot of people really had a problem with me being up there with a white girl. But Madonna is a great person… [who] showed me a lot of respect.”
Vanilla Ice wasn’t quite as accepting.
“I broke up with her after she printed [SEX] because I was hurt to be an unwitting part of this slutty package,” he told News of the World back in 2011. “We were in a relationship, yet it looked like she was screwing all these other people. I thought she was taking pictures and running ‘round naked because she was like that. Then when the book came out I was so embarrassed and ashamed. It was a porno. [Madonna] threw me in like I was a product off a shelf, and I didn’t appreciate it. That was it, and I ended it. She said she didn’t have sex with these men, but it looked like she was.”
A year after her fling with Ice and simulated sex romp with Kane, Madonna began an association with another famous rapper: 2Pac. During his 9-month stint in Clinton Correctional Facility in 1995, there were reports that the pop diva was going to be visiting Tupac Shakur — though the visitation never actually happened.
“Madonna is real nice,” Pac told MTV in 1995. “She’s a good person. She helped me a lot. She was real cool. Like any one of my homeboys. One time, they had a story on the local news out there that Madonna was coming to visit me. Madonna has so much power that the guards let me take an extra shower because they thought she was coming to visit me.”
Madonna appeared on Howard Stern’s radio show recently and casually alluded to her relationship with Shakur while discussing her famous profanity-laden appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman in 1994. “I was in a weird mood that day,” she recalled. “I was dating Tupac Shakur at the time and the thing is he got me all riled up about life in general. So, when I went on the show I was feeling very gangster.”
There were a host of rock & roll “bad boys” lying around while Madonna was storming the charts in the 80s and 90s. But, apparently, they didn’t pique her interest or curiosity. There are no photos of Axl Rose or Bret Michaels in SEX. She wasn’t spending intimate time with David Lee Roth or Anthony Kiedis. Despite their visibility and penchant for controversy, Madonna’s preference seemed to have been with b-boys as opposed to rock gods. Hip-hop also directly influences her art.
All too often, when Madonna wants to make a point, she tends to use hip-hop to make it in some way. In 1990 she released “Justify My Love,” which took the beat from Public Enemy’s “Security of the First World” without consent, later resulting in the Bomb Squad-produced answer record “To My Donna” by Young Black Teenagers. Following this, “Human Nature,” the fourth single from her 1994 album Bedtime Stories, featured a prominent Main Source sample and was probably the most explicitly hip-hop-flavored song she’d released up to that point. The sexually-charged video features a BDSM theme. The song itself is Madonna sarcastic “answer” to the critics who’d felt she’d gone too far with the previous two years of explicit content.
In her 2000 music video for “Music,” Madonna emulates the ballerific hip-hop videos of the day. Dressed in a gold pimped-out suit with rings and gold chains, she made it rain on the girls shaking their booties for the camera in her ghetto fabulous limo. She tapped Lil Wayne to appear on “Revolver,” where she compares romance to weaponry — an extended metaphor that led to a controversial performance in Colorado during which she pointed a Kalashnikov rifle at the crowd — just months after the 2012 Aurora shooting.
Currently, there are a host of pop stars who, unlike Madonna, have literally grown up with hip-hop as a part of mainstream American culture. Taylor Swift bops with boomboxes and breakdancers in videos and recites Kendrick Lamar lyrics. Miley Cyrus does songs with Juicy J and DJ Mustard while “twerking” and quoting 2 Chainz. However, they are reflective of the same problematic behavior: white pop stars who can appropriate facets of other cultures — to the point of parody — while not having a vested interest in those cultures.
Teenage Hunger Games actress Amandla Stenberg recently addressed this in her viral video “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows.” It’s become increasingly fashionable for 2010s pop stars to wear gold teeth or braids or rock hip-hop clothes — but these things are still largely marginalizing for the people who actually created the culture. Madonna’s co-opting of hip-hop for her patented brand of sensationalism is little more than fetishizing. Her fairly-brief personal flirtations with rappers hardly result in any lasting affinity or respect for them as artists afterwards. In the “Music” video, her co-star Ali G (Sacha Baron Cohen) satirically wears a “R.I.P. 2Pac” jersey; not exactly a heartfelt tribute to her murdered ex-beau.
Hip-hop’s relationship with the mainstream seems fairly seamless on the surface. Rappers and their aesthetic are virtually everywhere nowadays. But, at a time when young black people are both literally and figuratively under fire, can we afford to still simply cheer whenever white celebrities decide to “borrow” elements of a culture that still results in stigmatization for those young black people? When you frame it against the times, Madonna’s dabbling in hip-hop whenever she wants to stoke the fires of controversy or remind people that she’s still “relevant” is actually more damaging and anti-black than ever.
It also doesn’t help that she’s fairly tone-deaf on matters of race and racism. In 1995, she told SPIN that “I believe that I have never been treated more disrespectfully as a woman than by the black men that I’ve dated.” She went on to say that “I think black men have just been shit on for so long, that, in a way, black women are maybe more willing to accept rage from a black man, because they see what’s happened to them.” Even after her experience with her volatile (and baseball bat-wielding) ex-husband Sean Penn, the “Vogue” singer still considered black men the worst men she’d dated.
She came under fire last year after she posted a photo of her 13- year- old son, Rocco Ritchie, boxing and included the hashtag #DisNigga. “I am sorry if I offended anyone with my use of the N word on Instagram,” she later wrote. “It was not meant as a racial slur. I am not a racist. There’s no way to defend the use of the word. It was all about intention. It was used as a term of endearment towards my son who is white. I appreciate that it’s a provocative word and I apologize if it gave people the wrong impression. Forgive me.”
She drew criticism in February when she compared the ageism she’s experienced to other forms of discrimination. “It’s still the one area where you can totally discriminate against somebody and talk shit. Because of their age. Only females, though. Not males. So in that respect, we still live in a very sexist society,” she told Rolling Stone.
“No one would dare to say a degrading remark about being black or dare to say a degrading remark on Instagram about someone being gay. But my age — anybody and everybody would say something degrading to me. And I always think to myself, why is that accepted? What’s the difference between that and racism, or any discrimination? They’re judging me by my age. I don’t understand. I’m trying to get my head around it.” Ageism is as real as society’s sexism, but it’s careless to compare it to racism and homophobia — social diseases that have led to terrorism against and systematic marginalization of entire communities.
In the 1992 book, Black Looks: Race and Representation, author and activist bell hooks addresses Madonna’s tendency to pimp black culture.“White women ‘stars’ like Madonna, Sandra Bernhard, and many others publicly name their interest in, and appropriation of, black culture as yet another sign of their radical chic,” hooks writes. “Intimacy with that ‘nasty’ blackness good white girls stay away from is what they seek. To white and other nonblack consumers, this gives them a special flavor, an added spice. After all, it is a very recent historical phenomenon for any white girl to be able to get some mileage out of flaunting her fascination and envy of blackness. The thing about envy is that it is always ready to destroy, erase, take over, and consume the desired object. That’s exactly what Madonna attempts to do when she appropriates and commodifies aspects of black culture.”
Madonna’s affair with hip-hop isn’t going anywhere. She performed with hip-hop stars Nicki Minaj, M.I.A. and Cee-lo Green at Super Bowl XLVI. She worked with Chance the Rapper, Kanye West and Minaj on Rebel Heart. Madonna’s rap fixation doesn’t have to be insincere to raise questions. At this point in her career, it’s almost futile to dissect anything she does too deeply. But it is more than fair to question what her approach has helped to influence in popular culture. Cultural appropriation is not something that began with Madonna. But her admitted, and often praised, penchant for “pushing buttons” means that this is intentional — an attempt to deliberately bait the public. In that, she exploits blackness by pandering to anti-blackness.
Madonna is the biggest female pop star of the last 30 years, her persona has shaped an entire generation of performers. Her desire to provoke and to use blackness as a means to that end most definitely provides a template for the Cyruses and Swifts of the world. These are pop starlets who were able to ease out of their teen idol phases with a healthy sprinkling of hip-hop swagger. So Madonna making out with Drake isn’t shocking; it is just a case of her being up to her old tricks. But maybe we should encourage younger stars to develop newer tricks and stop emulating their idol.
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