Desperately Seeking Madonna

An original collection of writings almost as diverse as the Material Girl herself, attempting to uncover as many interpretations of Madonna’s appeal as is possible
 
With voices as diverse as Russell Baker, Sandra Bernhard, Art Buchwald, Al Hirschfeld, Camille Paglia, and Andrew Greeley, Desperately Seeking Madonna sheds new light on one of the world’s most famous—and infamous—women. Essays, cartoons, horoscope, tabloid journalism, academic essays, comic book art, a David Letterman top-ten list, and every year’s Rolling Stone polls collected here tell the complete story behind the story of Madonna’s illustrious career.

“A fascinating compendium of Madonnathink.”—Vogue

Introduction:
Justifying My Love
 
by Adam Sexton
 
What is there to say about Madonna that her clothes, accessories, hairstyle, and historical references don’t already explain?
—J. Hoberman
 
1. Express Yourself
 
In the winter of 1987 I wrote my last published piece of rock and roll criticism, a Jonathan Richman review for a weekly newspaper located in Texas. When friends asked me how I could willingly forsake the free albums, the promo goodies, the press box perspectives and plus-ones that went with the gig, I told them it was simple: I’d run out of adjectives.
 
That wasn’t much of an exaggeration. I was plain tired of having an opinion on everything, especially the vast, decidedly second-rate bulk of mid-eighties major-label record releases (remember records?)—on which, frankly, I had no real opinion at all. Worse, the process of fabricating passion in situations where none existed had made me cynical about popular music in general, the very pop that once had sent me into raptures regarding its ability to surprise, its capacity to satisfy, and, ultimately, its (I believed) essential importance.
 
At the time, I was living in Hoboken, New Jersey, Frank Sinatra’s hometown and the world capital of jangly guitar bands, with my girlfriend, an architect. My girlfriend made things, and suddenly I wanted to make things too—instead of just passing judgment on the things others had made. I thought that doing so might, at the very least, serve as a kind of physical therapy for my rock-crit malaise. And so I decided to sum up my abortive career with a few concrete gestures, and thereby either find a way back in, renewed, or let go for good. I began planning my projects.
 
For starters, I figured I’d unwind an entire roll of Bounty, print a single modifier culled from an actual review of mine on each sheet, one of the very adjectives I’d used up—you know those rock reviewer adjectives: stunning, quirky, plodding, and the like—and roll it all up again. Then proudly, ironically, I’d hang the results over my desk.
 
What else? Well, rock and roll was about hero worship, so I’d build an altar to Bruce Springsteen in a corner of the living room. That’s more or less what I’d been doing in print anyway.
 
Finally, I was going to buy the latest issue of a mainstream skin magazine, Playboy or Penthouse, and then paste, over the models’ faces but making sure to leave the rest exposed, photos I’d clipped from Rolling Stone, Spin, and People.
 
Photos of Madonna.
 
 2. You Tried to Criticize My Drive
 
Rock and roll has always been about sex—“rock and roll” means sex, for God’s sake—but especially after the advent in 1981 of MTV, much of rock and roll began to seem, to me at least, like pornography. Not community; not a voice for those who otherwise would have none (my ideals regarding the aforementioned significance of the form)—just an aggregate of two-dimensional images representing male fantasies of carnal and material desires satisfied: porn. And although she was far from the only practitioner of the burgeoning MTV ethic, Madonna seemed the most egregious at the time. Already there were stirrings to the effect that Madonna meant more than she appeared to, but I gave it a few seconds’ thought and decided that my interest in her, and probably most people’s, was primarily prurient.
 
I wasn’t alone in my essential disrespect for Madonna, either. The so-called Virgin Tour (Madonna’s first, logically) had been launched nearly two years earlier, in the spring of 1985. Apparently the show pleased Madonna’s fans, but it was received by at least one critic less than warmly. “The fact of the matter was,” wrote Robert Palmer,
 
“that Madonna—backed by a competent but rather ordinary touring band—simply didn’t sing very well. Her intonation was atrocious; she sang sharp and she sang flat, and the combination of her unsure pitch and thin, quavery vocal timbre made the held notes at the end of her phrases sound like they were crawling off somewhere to die. In her higher range, she had a more attractive sound, with just a smattering of street-corner edginess to it. But this woman needs to see a good vocal coach before she attempts another tour.”
 
Indeed, the nay-sayers were all but ubiquitous. Paul Grein of Billboard sniffed, “Cyndi Lauper will be around for a long time. Madonna will be out of business in six months. Her image has completely overshadowed her music.”
 
Greil Marcus was less censorious but still (so far) wide of the mark: “I don’t think Madonna, whom I like, has any particular interest in music,” he said in 1985. “She’s going to end up a big movie star. There’s nothing wrong with that.” Cult icon Morrissey, of Britain’s The Smiths, asserted that “Madonna is closer to organized prostitution than anything else.”
 
And to Mick Jagger, last seen in an Emilio Estevez vehicle entitled Freejack (available for rental at a video emporium near you), her records were characterized by “a central dumbness.” Barry Walters summed up the prevailing attitude (the epitome of which was Christopher Connelly’s Rolling Stone hatchet-job cover story) in the parodic opening paragraph of his own astute and complimentary Like a Virgin/Virgin Tour review: “MADONNA is a slut. Madonna IS a slut. Madonna is A slut. Madonna is a SLUT.”
 
Madonna’s fans, most of them teenage girls, didn’t care. At Radio City Music Hall, all 17,622 Virgin Tour tickets sold out in thirty-four minutes, a house record. And on May 27, 1985, Madonna, a virtual unknown two years before and still unheard of by many (see Russell Baker’s column reprinted herein), appeared on the cover of Time.
 
The profile inside was written with the glibness characteristic of the magazine, but it was surprisingly sympathetic (if a little patronizing) to Madonna, and almost before it began it had introduced a new term to the language:
 
“Now then, parents, the important thing is to stay calm. You’ve seen Madonna wiggling on TV—right, she’s the pop-tart singer with the trashy outfits and the hi-there bellybutton. What is worse, your children have seen her.… The bright side of this phenomenon is that these Wanna Be’s (as in “We wanna be like Madonna!”) could be out somewhere stealing hubcaps. Instead, all of them … are saving up their babysitting money.”
 
Having dubbed them Wanna Be’s, Time proceeded to interview a few. The responses—some of which are quoted in the John Fiske piece that follows—remain significant.
 
Madonna was most often compared in those days to fifties blond bombshells like Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doren, and—ad nauseam—Marilyn Monroe. To photographer Francesco Scavullo, she was “Little Dietrich”! And Time, groping for a rationale for her youth appeal, proposed that
 
“the neoconservative mood of the kid culture seems to be just right for an entertainer whose personality is an outrageous blend of Little Orphan Annie, Margaret Thatcher and Mae West.”
 
A year later, after the first of dozens, it now seems, of startling shifts in appearance, Madonna would be matched with the gamines of 1950s and 1960s movies: Audrey Hepburn, Leslie Caron, and Jean Seberg—polar opposites of the era’s sex goddesses that Madonna had seemed to emulate at first. And since then the list has expanded to encompass Jean Harlow and Judy Holliday, Rita Hay worth in The Lady from Shanghai, and Elvis Presley (in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train).
 
What’s most interesting about these analogies, I think, is not which actress, singer, despot, or cartoon character Madonna is being likened to but rather the theme of comparison itself. Is it merely a sign of our current, postmodern condition that Madonna hasn’t (until recently) been taken on her own terms?
 
Or does our culture need to pigeonhole women in order to (pretend to) understand them? Certainly American literature has featured a few heroines who ultimately are destroyed by the tragic inability of the men in their lives to classify them as something besides … well, virgins or whores: Temple Drake in Faulkner’s Sanctuary, for example, and Henry James’s Daisy Miller. (Interestingly, Madonna revealed in a recent interview that “Daisy” is tattooed on her ex-husband Sean Penn’s toe. She says it was Penn’s nickname for her—after Daisy Miller.) Inasmuch as Madonna messed, from the start, with our apparent need for such a dichotomy (being a woman named after the Virgin Mary who sang primarily about sex), maybe the best observers could do, in their frustration, was reach for, say, Monroe—a rather forced simile, after all. I mean, besides blond hair, a big chest, and the “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number that Madonna appropriated for her “Material Girl” video, what do the two have in common? (See Liz Smith herein.)