Get well soon, Madonna. Please.
When news broke Wednesday that Madonna had been hospitalized, my first, admittedly bizarre, thought was that I really want — no, need — her to die of old age. Madonna was set to launch her career-spanning “Celebration Tour” on July 15 in Vancouver. But it’s been postponed after the 64-year-old singer developed what Guy Oseary, her longtime manager, called “a serious bacterial infection which led to a several day stay in the ICU.”
It’s not just that despite Madonna’s many tours in the past 40 years, I’ve somehow never seen her in concert, something I hoped to rectify during a two-night Boston stop that had been scheduled for late August. For now, no one knows when her much-anticipated tour will begin or when she’ll take the stage at TD Garden.
While never a rabid Madonna fan, I’ve come to respect her longevity as well as the fact that she’s made some of the most indelible pop records of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. But there’s also this: among the massive 1980s music icons, Madonna is pretty much the last of her breed.
Her contemporaries like Prince, Michael Jackson, George Michael, and Whitney Houston, all in their 20s when they dominated MTV, sold millions of records, scooped up awards, and packed worldwide arenas, are now gone. None of them lived to 60; Whitney didn’t even make it to 50.
That leaves Madonna, who turns 65 in August. In his last interview, hours before he was murdered, John Lennon reflected on turning 40 and making “Double Fantasy,” the final album released in his lifetime, for the generation of fans growing older with him.
When he and his wife, Yoko Ono, were writing and recording the album, Lennon said, “I was visualizing all the people of my age group from the ’60s being in their 30s and 40s now, just like me. And having wives and children, and having gone through everything together. I’m singin’ to them.
“I hope the young kids like it as well, but I’m really talking to the people who grew up with me,” he said. “And saying, ‘Here I am now. How are you? How’s your relationship going? Did you get through it all?’”
I wasn’t part of the generation Lennon hoped
“Double Fantasy” would reach. Yet I recall being mesmerized by the reaction of those who seemed not just grief-stricken but unmoored by his death. Yes, there was the sudden and shocking violence of it all. But his fans hadn’t just lost a musician they adored or a man they admired — they also lost something vital in themselves.
It was as if Lennon’s death brought an end to their youth, a time when life’s hash marks were sound-stamped with his music.
Getting older comes with the realization that if you live long enough, you don’t die all at once. You perish a little bit at a time as what you knew, what you loved, what sustained you slowly fades away, like the family photo Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly carries in the film “Back to the Future.”
Losing parents, close relatives, dear friends — those are earthquakes. But the steady loss of artists who helped mold who we become and who remind us of who we were are constant tremors. It makes the ground beneath our feet more like a rug that can be yanked out at any time. There’s a reason why time seemed to stop when Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, and David Bowie passed away. For many of us, it felt like threads of our shared cultural DNA were unraveling.
That’s why news of Madonna’s hospitalization left me shaken. So many of us can peg milestones of young adulthood to one of her classic songs — my first apartment (“Holiday”); my first serious, and seriously disastrous, relationship (“Physical Attraction”); my first move away from my home state (“Into the Groove”). Every step of the way, Madonna’s been there, breaking down the confining boxes of how women should behave. And she remains as staunch a supporter of LGBTQ+ rights in her AARP years as she was at the beginning of her career.
According to published reports, Madonna is now home and “feeling better.” Oseary said “a full recovery is expected.”
Make that a full and speedy recovery. Get well soon, Madonna. I hope you have decades ahead to be what you’ve been for 40 years — a road map to empowerment, ridiculousness, and sheer celebration.