‘Provocateur! Sex symbol! Opportunist!’ Six generations of women on the power and passion of Madonna
‘She’s a bit too sexy’
Maya and Leila Crockski, twins, aged 10
Maya: The first time I heard Madonna was in the car. We were going on holiday so we were listening to the song Holiday. I thought it was … fine?Leila: I remember hearing Holiday at the end of the film Trolls Holiday. My mum came in and said: “This is Madonna!”Maya: Our mum is a Madonna superfan.Leila: She’s too much of a Madonna superfan. She doesn’t play her as much as she wants to because our little sister is always playing her own music. But when she gets the chance, Madonna is all she will play.Maya: She’s always playing Holiday and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Oh – that’s not Madonna? Whoops!Leila: We’ve not seen her live but we’ve seen her in videos. She’s sassy.Maya: She’s sexy. She’s always tipping her head back and running her arms across her face.Leila: Her costumes are very cool and sexy.Maya: If there’s anything we don’t like about her, it’s that she’s a bit too sexy.Leila: Our friends have heard a few of her songs, but they’re not interested. We like her, though. She goes out there on stage and she’s only five years younger than our nanna! Good for her that she’s still got it!
‘Kissing Britney was tamer than dancing in a pink leotard’ Micha Frazer-Carroll, columnist, in her 20s
In the smokers’ area of a gay bar, it will be the solemn church organ of Like a Prayer that interrupts the conversation and makes your friends drag you back on to the dancefloor. In the buildup to the chorus, someone inevitably mentions that “I’m down on my knees, I wanna take you there” is actually double entendre – “did you know?” The combination of sexuality, high drama, over-the-top costuming, character transformation and provocative femininity that Madonna has become known for across her long career has always resonated with queer communities.
Think of the 1989 Jean Paul Gaultier cone bra, which took the corset – a garment associated with feminine restriction and regression – and made it spiky and weapon-like. Or three years later, when she wore a leather harness at Gaultier’s Aids fundraiser that revealed her completely bare breasts. Or the pink satin gloves and dripping diamonds in the Marilyn Monroe-inspired video for Material Girl, a ballad that simultaneously mocked commercialism and gave a wink to the undeniable allure of sacking it all in to be a gold-digger who’s treated like a princess.
My generation grew up with an incarnation of Madonna who presented an equally provocative and chaotic type of femininity. I’m just old enough to remember the infamous Madonna-Britney VMAs kiss, and the tabloid furore that trailed on for months. In hindsight, the queer element to it all feels a bit tame, with the potential exploitation of the two feeling like the most concerning factor. Two years later, she donned hot pink again in the video for Hung Up, and her choice to wear a leotard and dance around on the floor of a ballet studio felt unusual and boundary-pushing for the then 47-year-old.
Madonna’s ability to completely reinvent herself, in a Beatles-like fashion, is central to her ongoing relevance. But her ability to shapeshift, and to present new, surprising, unruly visions of womanhood, also connects with those of us who have always felt constrained by gendered expectations, and see gender and sexuality as a site of performance and play.
‘Breaking down barriers? Let’s not get carried away’
Shon Faye, author, in her 30s
It’s 1998. I’m 10 years old and watching the video for Frozen for the first time. A raven-haired, shape-shifting Madonna levitates over a desert wasteland as she intones the song, glaring like an uncanny enchantress. I am instantly obsessed. I tape the video so I can watch it again and again.
Since that moment, Madonna’s music has always been close by. Being a star with so many eras (Madonna pioneered the idea of pop artists having “eras”) some corner of her varied back catalogue always plays on the soundtrack to my life. In my teens, I learned the word “bourgeoisie” from the single Music (sorry, Karl Marx), and she thoughtfully released her last truly great album, Confessions on a Dance Floor,just before I came out and started frequenting gay clubs where its lead single, Hung Up, was always a staple. Frankly, you can’t spend as much time around gay men as I have and not have a prepared take on Madge ready to go when you’re (inevitably) asked.
Madonna revolutionised pop music by making it as much a visual experience as an aural one (a shift in the wider industry she both anticipated and expedited). Post-Madonna, being a pop artist was not just about the songs: it was about fashion, video, photography, live tours and televised performances. I dare anyone to watch the 1990 MTV Awards live performance of Vogue,in which Madonna and her dancers cavorted in costumes inspired by the court of Marie Antoinette, and not be gagged by how exciting it still seems in 2023. It was choreographed by Luis Camacho and Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza, both plucked straight from New York’s underground ballroom scene. Both appeared in the film Truth or Dare. When it comes to Madonna’s status as an LGBTQ+ icon, two things can be true at once: Truth or Dare, the first behind the scenes tour film of its kind, was groundbreaking for showing out gay men on screen, and she spoke about HIV and Aids when it was still controversial to do so. Yet some of those working-class Black and Puerto Rican gay men touring with her felt used and discarded by her after the tour ended.
Did Madonna break down barriers for women? Let’s not get carried away. As bell hooks argued, Madonna’s bold exhibition of her own sexuality always relied upon her being a white woman. The degree of control Madonna has exercised over her career says more about her slick opportunism and her ultra-thick skin than it does about women in pop more generally (Britney and Lady Gaga, both considered successors to Madonna, have been more palpably wounded by fame). Perhaps Madonna’s biggest transgression of all is one that continues to unfold: getting older and not demurely disappearing, as older women in culture are typically commanded to do.
‘She owns enough Tamara de Lempickas to fill a museum’ Emma Forrest, writer, in her 40s
If I had all the money in the world I’d buy my top five Gordon Parks photographs and Marilyn Monroe’s certificate of conversion to Judaism. I found the latter in the Christies catalogue entry for Monroe’s personal property, which includes first editions by Camus, Joyce, Ellison and Styron. Her personal taste was exceptional – as was that of the next motherless blonde star from a cruel upbringing, Madonna. Marinating in loneliness, it’s unsurprising such children can grow to be narcissists and gatherers. Of course they centre themselves and of course they collect art – paintings, first editions, historical homes – as talismans.
The famous agent Michael Ovitz, while admitting that he hadn’t succeeded in making Madonna a screen star, noted how cultured she was. There are said to be enough paintings by Tamara de Lempicka in Madonna’s collection for a museum. As for owning Frida Kahlo’s My Birth, she said: “If someone doesn’t like this painting, I know they can’t be my friend.” One might covet the waistlines of the born rich, got richer Kardashians, but their stuff ? Both the homes and the contents are marble warehouses of emptiness. I am culturally interested in the Kardashians but they are not interested in culture. In the Michael Jackson documentary, the part that still haunts my nightmares is him taking Martin Bashir to a mall store full of faux antiques, where he trills “YOO HOO!” at the manager as he points out the terrible items he wishes to purchase. Madonna exposed the rarity of good taste co-existing with extreme wealth.
I think it’s because her mother died when she was six that Ma