Madonna video for anti-gun anthem creates fuss
Madonna’s woke, y’all, but not everyone is pleased about it.
From the start of her career, the singer has been defined by her provocateur status as much as her pop songs, often pushing sexual boundaries while dabbling in religious iconography. Now, she’s using her role as an instigator of controversy to take on gun violence in America.
The vehicle: An eight-minuteand-21-second video for her anti-gun anthem “God Control” that, with slick production values and borderline-cartoonish aesthetics, depicts a shooting in a nightclub, clearly meant to evoke the June 2016 massacre of 49 people at Pulse, a gay Orlando nightclub.
The video, released Wednesday, opens with a title screen bearing a message: “The story you are about to see is very disturbing. It shows graphic scenes of gun violence. But it’s happening every day, and it has to stop.” By Thursday morning, it had already clocked more than 1 million views.
Most of the Jonas Åkerlunddirected video intercuts two seemingly connected scenes. One shows Madonna, dressed like the 1960s ideal of a journalist with a white button-down and black-framed glasses, sitting at a desk surrounded by stacked books, crumpled paper and portraits of influential women, including Angela Davis and Frida Kahlo. As the camera cuts back to her, her lace gloved fingers are typing the opening lyrics of the song: “Everybody knows the damn truth / Our nation lied, we lost respect / When we wake up, what can we do? / Get the kids ready, take them to school.”
It’s intercut with a sequence showing a hipster-looking man shooting up a glittery nightclub with an automatic weapon. At one point, the shooter kills himself with a pistol, but then he seems to continue his attack. The chaotic camera lingers on bloodied bodies, and the gunshots drown out the strangely dance-y music.
This being Madonna, at one point the scene switches to a Catholic church. A statue of the Virgin Mary fills the screen, before the camera pulls back to reveal a string of rose-covered coffins lining the aisle between the pews. Toward the end of the video, Madonna, taking a break from attending a dance club of her own, is held up by two men wielding a long-nose revolver. It ends with shots of news coverage about various real-life shootings, and a closeup of the singer’s face with a single tear rolling down her cheek.
The message is clear: Madonna wants to raise awareness of gun violence. But it caused some real pain.
Patience Carter, a survivor of the Pulse shooting the video seems to portray, called on Madonna to apologize.
“As a survivor of gun violence, it was really hard to watch. For someone like me, who actually saw these images, who actually lived these images, to see them again dramatized for views (and) dramatized for YouTube, I feel like it was really insensitive,” she told TMZ.
“God Control, comes labeled ‘very disturbing.’ That it certainly is. The song itself is plain awful. The video of a shooting in some weird ’70s version of Pulse in Orlando is entirely revolting. Madge, just go away. It’s over,” tweeted another.
Some, though, found it powerful. The March for Our Lives organization tweeted, “Thank you for using your platform, speaking out, and creating this call to action,” and called it a “powerful video that highlights the everyday epidemic of gun violence.” Actor George Takei also thanked Madonna a in a tweet and called her “a much welcome voice in the battle for #GunViolencePrevention.”