Musings On Madonna: Has the Queen of Pop Improved Over Time?
By abandoning the notion of natural talent, she has also done away with its consequence: natural decay
Some of Madonna’s fans might find the first act of the 57-year-old’s new tour — in which she descends in a steel cage flanked by shirtless dancers and stripping nuns before breaking into new numbers like “Bitch, I’m Madonna” — to be desperate.
They’re probably right.
But Madonna’s desperation is neither newfound nor a panicked response to her fading star. Madonna has been desperate since her earliest days, peddling her demo tapes to club promoters in New York and pushing anybody to listen and dance, but, mostly, to just admire the source of the energy — herself. That desperation, that shameless and unrelenting hunger to be seen, might be the most consistent part of Madonna’s persona — the muscle that sustains her long-lasting appeal.
And on her new Rebel Heart Tour, which started its U.S. leg last week, Madonna’s muscle shows no signs of atrophy. Onto those who ignore her, she flings herself mercilessly. To compensate for lack of prodigal talent, she hustles tirelessly. And to maintain the power of her myth, she appropriates indiscriminately. It’s Madonna in full form, delivering a powerful two-hour set divided in half between songs from her 13th studio album Rebel Heart, and classics like “Holiday” and “Like A Virgin.”
The show also defies the critics who’ve denounced Madonna as a middling songwriter with an unremarkable singing voice — a show-off performer overcompensating for her second-rate artistic caliber. These claims come from the media but also from the great “artist’s artists” like Joni Mitchell, who told W Magazine in 2002 that “Madonna has knocked the importance of talent out of the arena,” and that: “She’s manufactured. She’s made a lot of money and become the biggest star in the world by hiring the right people.”
But we didn’t need the great Joni Mitchell to tell us that — especially when Madonna has said it herself. “I know I’m not the best singer and I know I’m not the best dancer, but I’m not interested in that,” Madonna said in 1991. “I’m interested in pushing people’s buttons, in being provocative and in being political.”
It’s true that of the world’s five best-selling female artists, Madonna stands apart as the only one without the voice to match the sales. (The other four on the list, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, are Barbra Streisand, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, and Celine Dion, all of whom are universally praised for powerhouse vocals).
But placing a premium on natural talent alone sets us up for eventual disappointment. We saw it with Whitney Houston, whose voice in the last years of her life became frayed and painfully inconsistent, and with Mariah Carey, who, fresh into her Las Vegas residency, has surrendered control of her multi-octave register to a series of shrieks and rasps. By abandoning the notion of natural talent, Madonna has also done away with its consequence: natural decay. In fact, Madonna’s voice, like the synthetic and manufactured with which she’s associated, seems to have slapped nature in the face and actually gotten better with time.
On the Rebel Heart Tour, listeners will be able to appreciate the continued refinement in Madonna’s voice — still steely, cold, and emotionally vacant — but a technical improvement, nonetheless. Madonna’s live concert voice is a mature mezzo-soprano, with deep, resonant low notes and ringing highs that, despite being abrasively nasal, bring new color to classics like “True Blue” and “Burning Up.” Her vocals are forward, unadorned, and, in line with her persona, mold to service the given moment. If Whitney Houston’s voice embodied a certain God-given and natural ease, Madonna’s reflects her Midwestern work ethic: Well-rehearsed, durable, and results oriented.
Madonna, by abandoning the romantics of natural talent, has circumvented the vocal decline faced by her female rivals. But her new tour, with its self-referential videos and interludes, is a reminder that she’s also one-upped them in an even more important way: Taking complete charge of her aesthetic and artistic output.
Every other woman in the top five, except for Barbra Streisand, has relied on the heavy-handed guidance of an older industry man to jumpstart, and oftentimes sustain, their careers. Whitney Houston was only 20 when Clive Davis, the longtime head of Arista Records, discovered her in 1983. For the next 30 years, Davis carefully guided nearly every move of Houston’s career, from choosing her material to doing damage control when Houston, worn out and drugged out, failed to show up at concerts. Davis also coordinated Houston’s much-anticipated comeback in 2007, which was tragically interrupted by a series of stints at rehab and Houston’s eventual drowning in a hotel bathtub just a few floors above Davis’s Grammy’s party in Beverly Hills.
Both Celine Dion and Mariah Carey also benefitted from the careful oversight of industry insiders — insiders they both married — to help mold their careers. Canadian manager René Angélil met Dion when he was 38 and she was 12. His faith in the young singer was so great that he mortgaged his home to fund her first album and paid for her cosmetic surgery before pushing her career to American superstardom. And when Tommy Mottola, then head of Columbia Records, heard Mariah Carey’s demos for the first time, he made it his personal goal to get her to the top of the charts. Mottola succeeded, but Carey later told MTV that her relationship with him “was not only a marriage, but a business thing where the person was in control of my life.”
Madonna is, in this regard, androgynous, as she simultaneously plays both the performer and the career-guiding industry man, selecting her own producers and collaborators and reserving final say over the elements of her songs, videos, and tours. She is, to correct Joni Mitchell, both the manufactured and the manufacturer.
And it’s no coincidence that Mitchell chose the word manufacture to describe the Queen of Pop. The girl from Detroit has assembled over the course of her career a dizzying catalogue of masks, faces, and styles that reflect her insatiable appetite for attention: The Spanish matador; the cyberpunk geisha; the Marlene Dietrich-spin off; the Victorian gentleman; the henna-painted yogi; the S&M dominatrix; the rapper with cornrows.
On one hand, Madonna’s penchant for wholesale appropriation, particularly from socially marginalized groups, is lazy at best and unconscionable at worst. “Fascinated yet envious of black style, Madonna appropriates black culture in ways that mock and undermine, making her presentation one that upstages,” writes bell hooks, the cultural critic. And in her new tour, it’s not just black culture she tries on, but a Spanish flamenco dancer, a Japanese fan-flourishing geisha, and a Prohibition-era flapper — all in the course of two hours.
But on the other hand, these seemingly unrelated cultural artifacts are the set pieces of Madonna’s persona, and actually come together with a remarkable level of aesthetic cohesion compared to the sloppy pastiche pieced together by imitators. Madonna’s curatorial approach knocks the notion of authenticity off its pedestal and poses in its place the major question guiding her direction as a performer: Aren’t we all dressing up as something, anyway?
It’s that tension between artifice and authenticity, surface and depth, which makes Madonna one of the most compelling performers of our time. She has excelled in finding the balance between Madonna the artist and Madonna the persona, allowing us to, at once, revel in her superficial, high-gloss constructions around sex, love, and music, but also be privy to occasional glimpses of the artist herself. We see this on tour when Madonna croons “HeartBreakCity,” a surprisingly personal song about being duped by a lover, or when she strums a pared-down performance of “La Vie En Rose” on her ukulele.
Glimpses into Madonna the person, though, must be limited considering how threatening they can be to her carefully crafted persona. Watching Madonna try too hard these days can be painful, leaving a crack beneath the promise of illusion and exposing the Wizard of Oz herself trying fervently to stoke the flames of her own myth. But we can be sure that Madonna will continue teasing the tension between herself as a symbol and herself as a person — it keeps us wondering who she really is.
In the second half of her show, Madonna sings a slowed-down version of her 1987 hit “Who’s That Girl?” and framed the song’s title as a rhetorical question. It’s certainly the question her biggest fans have been asking for 30 years: Who is that girl?
“When I find the answer, I’ll let you know,” she winked at the audience.
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