Madonna’s heart is less rebel than sad and unoriginal
REMEMBER when Madonna used to push boundaries? She did it at awards shows, in interviews and especially in videos. She burned crosses in Like a Prayer, gyrated in white lace for Like a Virgin.
Offensive? Maybe. But also original and artistic. Her surreal video for Bedtime Story, directed by Mark Romanek, is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; auteur David Fincher filmed Vogue, a spectacular tribute to old Hollywood glamour and the raging danceclub scene of the 1980s.
So what happened? Madonna’s media push for her latest album, the middling Rebel Heart, has been a parade of miscalculations. She’s trying hard, using social media and all that stuff to keep up with the whippersnappers. It hasn’t worked.
Take the Instagram campaign where she photoshopped the faces of historic icons into the same black-wire masks she wore on the album cover art. Turned out no one much cared to see Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King in crypto-S&M gear.
Madge, who has basked in controversy, responded to the furore in an unexpectedly banal way. She offered a half-hearted apology. And then she pressed on, releasing the video for her single Living for Love on Snapchat, because that’s where the kids hang out these days.
She appears to be putting less thought into her messages than their delivery mechanisms. What do the music and videos matter as long as they’re served up in the bitesized pixels that youngsters love?
And that’s especially clear in her sad new video for B**** I’m Madonna. She teased the video with a poster, touting the big A-listers who would be making cameos: Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus and Rita Ora.
With its black-white-and-red colour scheme, the poster looked a lot like the ones Taylor Swift released for her Bad Blood video premiere. Swift similarly took pains to namedrop the stars she had recruited.
Bad Blood was inspired by a feud Swift had with Perry and the video was a millionaire’s version of a schoolgirl taunt: You want to mess with me? Then you’ll have to mess with my powerful friends, too.
Madonna’s ambitions for her video are no less obvious but they’re a lot less persuasive. She wants to get in on the #SquadGoals trend, showing off her alliances with a powerful posse.
But she’s not convincing any- one. Aside from Chris Rock and Rita Ora, the A-listers don’t even show up in the same frame as Madonna. Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry agreed to lip-sync the words “B**** I’m Madonna” but they’re not even in the same room. Neither is Kanye West who appears for a fraction of a second. Their clips were obviously spliced in.
The faux-camaraderie feels even more fake given how many of these stars, like Madonna, proselytise for Tidal, Jay-Z’s muchridiculed new streaming music service. Madonna’s video debuted exclusively on Tidal, so only members could watch her strut and sing in her animal-print minidress – at least until a copy showed up on YouTube.
So what is this video? A promotional tool for Tidal? Madonna’s desperate bid to be part of the zeitgeist? Whatever it is, it feels empty, desperate and unoriginal – a sad development for an artist who used to refuse to conform. – The Washington Post