Madonna Ultimately
- Mark Greene goes to see Madonna and wonders whether the real one is beginning to emerge
You expect superstar rock concerts at Wembley to start late. It did. You expect people to be wearing the T-shirt, or the hat, or the wrist band, and to rise to their feet and cheer wildly when the star first appears. They did. But you don't expect to find a quotation from Ecclesiastes in the programme but there was. And you don't expect a superstar rock concert at Wembley Arena to begin with long quotations from the visions at the end of the book of Revelation. But it did.
But there again, this was Madonna - full of surprise, energy and startling creativity and, I felt, an emergent sense of purpose and maturity.
Madonna's latest global gig is called The Reinvention Tour. The title is a self-confident, ambivalent dig at all the people who for years have talked about Madonna 'reinventing herself'. Certainly, the outfits have changed: from material girl, to conical-breasted hard gal to erotic sex-tigress to the oriental cool of the Ray of Light album to the cowgirl of Music to the decadent, dimple on the cheek Liaisons Dangereuses look that promotes her current tour and which links her not so much to a promiscuous 17th century aristocrat but, in the concert at least, to the Whore of Babylon!
But a new set of clothes doesn't constitute a reinvention. Reinvention makes it sound like she has become someone entirely different - as if there is nothing solid there at all, nothing consistent, no genuine, inner creativity - just the neurotic need to be different, to use novelty to generate interest in a persona that would otherwise be dull, hollow - mutton dressed as lamb.
But there is consistency there and it seems to be found in artistic integrity, in subversiveness, and in a genuine creativity seeking meaning and purpose. Madonna will not let herself become the prisoner of other people's expectations. This trait manifested itself relatively early in her career. Famously, though not laudably, she exposed her breasts at a concert. A week later she was introduced at a globally televised event by Bette Midler in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink kind of way as someone who had created quite a stir. Madonna, however, made it clear she wasn't taking anything off but put it in a way that broke a language taboo - and got a huge cheer for that. Certainly some of this behaviour, like the kiss she shared with Britney Spears, seems adolescent in its cocking of the proverbial snook, but she has the ability to challenge more serious spoken and unspoken prejudices. Recently, for example, in the wake of her much publicised and deep interest in Kabbalah, and the acquisition of a Hebrew name - Esther (which means secret) she was photographed wearing a black T-shirt with the words 'cult member' on it.
It's exactly the same technique that Jews for Jesus used with one of the tracts which their missionaries hand out on street corners. The headline declared "Beware of Religious Fanatics handing out Tracts." Madonna knows what we might be thinking and she's not afraid to name it and throw it back in our faces - you've labelled me, and I'm not ashamed. The impact is to make the viewer think harder about what the label really means. Material girl? Well, maybe she was, maybe she wasn't, but the genius of the song is the way it so brazenly articulated what so many in our corrosively material society perhaps unknowingly aspired to. Good Charlotte's recent song 'Girls don't like boys, girls just like cars and money' hits the same target, though, since it comes from a group of young and previously not very affluent men, it aches with the resentment and despair at the economic barriers to finding love. In the end, girls like cars and money. And also, I was recently told, make-up. But not character. Madonna's song, however, is chilling, precisely because of its nonchalant assertion that materialism is really an OK way to be. And it is that unashamed nonchalance that shocks. "They glory in their shame", as
This same subversion of the culture can be seen in the T Shirt she wore as she danced like a banshee to one of the closing songs her 'Drowned World' Tour. It read 'Mother'. 'Mother' isn't a word you associate with a high energy, high octane rock singer but it was certainly true that she had indeed become a mother - twice over. Far from being concerned about the impact that her motherhood might have on her raunchy rock image, and therefore minimising it, she flaunted it. Far from seeking to present herself within the usual, rather narrow parameters of a rock icon, she presented herself as a multi-roled human being. Rock icons can be mums too.
Nevertheless, the rawer, vernacular connotations of 'mother' come through. Is she also actually that she is a 'mother' in that cruder sense of the word? Madonna makes you think. And so when you see an official T-shirt with 'What would Madonna do?' emblazoned on it, you're caught. Is this blasphemy? Has she promoting herself to the same level as Jesus? Or is she merely sending up the fad for WWJD bracelets that we might think she regards as rather simplistic? And if she is, she is surely only too aware of the irony of doing so while she sports her own Kabbala bracelet?
It's rarely entirely simple with Madonna. So, unlike almost any other musical performer, when you arrive at a Madonna concert you are indeed asking 'What will she do?'
What she did was perform for just under two hours with a pace and intensity that belied her 45 years and with a level and range of terpsichorean agility that I have never seen on a single stage in a single night - jazz, rock, folk, Scottish, country, techno and even an extraordinary back to the floor, palms on the ground crab-like advance that seemed like a cross between yoga and things that men in black masks used to do to people in mediaeval dungeons. Interestingly, what was absent was anything overtly erotic and anything dystopically grungey in either music, visual effects or costume. This was a much more optimistic show than I was expecting. That is not to say that it was sentimental but rather that it's overall mood was not one of despair but of hope.
Amid all the arm-punching, there were three moments of real connection with the audience: the moment when a complex ensemble dance resolved itself into a small group of women dancing in a circle like country teenagers at a barn dance and then all but Madonna peeled off and we were left watching her twirl in the semi-darkness - a lone sylph-like, silver flame in the semi-darkness - a simple, mythic image. Wembley Arena held its breath.
The second was simply a moment of fun as a kilted Scottish piper whose bag had been wailing first to a military beat and then as accompaniment to 'Into the groove' suddenly slipped 'into the groove' and began to dance. The simple but unexpected match of lyric and action drawing laughter but also symbolising the capacity many of us would perhaps like to have: to be able to shed the shackles of a particular, inhibiting way of being and let ourselves go. Here was a little liberation to rejoice in. Not a reinvention but a becoming.
The third moment drew the biggest cheer of the night and it came in the midst of the song that Madonna delivered with the most intense personal passion. The song was originally released 34 years ago when 70% of the audience had not even been born and the singer-songwriter's career was already drawing to a close. The song was Imagine and the cheer came when a photo of John Lennon hit the screen. It is not, as I once wrote in this magazine, the neo-Marxist, atheist ideology of Imagine that resonates with people today but the melancholic, non-triumphalistic yearning for a better world for ourselves and for the hungry and war-torn peoples of the majority world. Madonna's own emphasis was on the word 'one', as if, like Pippin and Merry in The Lord of the Rings, she recognises that we are all 'part of this world.'
The intensity of her own engagement with the song connects closely to the stringent critique of the aspirations of contemporary American life on the album of the same name. There she explores familiar themes of identity, isolation, imprisonment and alienation, but there's no doubt that she's trying to help people see the corrosiveness of a shallow, consumerist celebrity culture and liberate them from it. This is not the world she wants.
Do I have to change my name,
will it get me far?
Should I lose some weight,
am I going to be a star?I tried to be a boy.
I tried to be a girl.
I tried to be a mess.
I tried to be the best.I tried to stay ahead.
I tried to stay on top.
I tried to play the part
But somehow I forgot
Just what I did it for
And why I wanted more.
This type of modern life is not for me.I'm just living out the American dream
And I just realised that nothing is what it seems.(American Life from American Life, Warner Bros 2003)
This greater directness also applied to her use of religious imagery in the concert. Gone was the blasphemy that was once the plutonium her publicity machine. Rather, the images used - and there were many - were marked by a respectfulness for their subject. She's no Christian, but she's stopped being an iconoclast for its own sake. Indeed, if her kabbalism remained largely unexpressed - except in the presence of Hebrew texts - she certainly seems closer to a personally coherent worldview which combines a sense of the beyond, and a sense of hope. With that, she seems also to have discovered a sense of simple beauty, of the solace that comes from others, and of fun. She still wants to make us think but it seems less of a game, a chase down a maze with no end-point. Suddenly it seems that it might be worth the effort.
This simpler, kinder side also emerges in her children's stories. The first The English Roses is a winsome tale of four girls of about 11 who ostracise a fifth called Binah. The less than fabulous four must learn to see beyond her gorgeous exterior and formidable talents to the person beyond - motherless and longing for companionship. Madonna doesn't expect either the four girls or the lone Binah to reinvent themselves, but rather to show simple compassion.
The second Mr Peabody's Apples is an updating of a 300 year old Rabbinic tale that was told to her by her Kabbalah teacher. It's about the damage that can be done when people jump to conclusions with limited information - a cautionary tale for children and culture-watchers alike. And a wholesome, unpretentious one at that. Do rock icons write children's stories? Why not? Do great apologists like C S Lewis write fantasy literature?
No doubt her journey is not over, as she sings:
Jesus Christ, will you look at me
Don't know who I'm supposed to be?
But she seems to be a lot closer and it just may be that the woman who showed a generation how to break free from the chains of what she regarded as purposeless conventions will perhaps now begin to have something positive to show them about how to use that freedom.
Of course, I could be wrong - it might all just be part of the show.
Mark Greene
American Life, Warner Bros, 2003 £12.99
The English Roses, Puffin, £12.99
Mr Peabody's Apples, Puffin, £12.99
This article originally appeared in the November 2004 edition of Christianity magazine.
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