Madonna

(I mean the one people world wide still worship after all this time)

Coming on fifty, I still feel very grateful to have been reared by Madonna, because she taught me, at eight, nine, ten, that a woman could do whatever they wanted with whomever they wished. As Ariel Levy pointed out in her seminal book ‘Female Chauvinist Pigs’, in the 2000s era of Girls Gone Wild, young women came to believe they had a duty to appear sexually available at all times to everybody. That led to, amongst other things, having no inkling of what actually turned them on. Being able to fine tune my own radio dial, so I can pick up exactly the right pirate station deep in my soul is the biggest gift for a writer or any artist, and I do partly credit Madonna for this.

By my teens I had an understanding that Madonna was not necessarily pledging to take her female fans with her on her upward trajectory - which was fine, because I’d by then switched my allegiance to Neneh Cherry and Lady Miss Kier of Deee-Lite, who in the most deep 90’s moment possible, signed an autograph for teen me in The Body Shop, proclaiming ‘EMMA! You are deee-groovy!’ Her proclamation remains my palate cleanser any time I come across a two star amazon review of one of my books.

A fundamental flaw in our humanity is that none of us understand what our best qualities are - it’s like how you can’t smell your own smell or hear your own accent. So Madonna, who has just released yet another hi-NRG dance track, may not know that it is her whole parallel path in vulnerable ballads that she might be best celebrated for, fifty years from now. For every ‘Erotica’ there was always a ‘Live To Tell’, songs for a housewife trapped in the wrong life to dream into on their way through a soul numbing errand.

Her undisputed masterpiece remains the ‘Like A Prayer’ album. It was the record made in the wake of her divorce from Sean Penn, the love of her life and - given that she still defends him despite the devastating 1988 domestic violence police report she filed at the Malibu Sherriff’s office available to anyone with internet - the scratch in her vinyl. Her personal collapse existed inside the sense of societal apocalypse, as the vinyl (scented with frankincense to invoke the church) came with an insert pamphlet about the AIDS crisis.

Of course I remember the dance routines I made to ‘Express Yourself’, and how the video is arguably one of David Fincher’s masterpieces alongside ‘Zodiac’ and ‘The Social Network’. But it’s only in middle age that I see this was perhaps the one time she could explore with clear eyes what her marriage had been and how it had happened to her. The death of her mother when Madonna was only six, how her father detached from her emotionally, remarried a woman who was violent, the total annihilation of any childhood comfort. The way Catholicism as practiced was wielded against her, as it was against Sinead O’Connor. Recreating all this violence with her marriage (what psychiatrists call ‘Pattern Repetition’, this idea that even if it’s awful, we gravitate towards what we recognise).

I could definitely live without ‘Dear Jessie’, a song so twee I’ve always dreamed of a “director’s cut” version of this album that doesn’t include it. It feels like a failure of nerve on an album that is musically and emotionally courageous. There are days I listen to ‘Til Death Do Us Part’ on repeat, and others when the lyrics are just too much to take:

“You hit so hard with the things you say
I will not stay to watch your hate as it grows
You're not in love with someone else
You don't even love yourself
Still I wish you'd ask me not to go”

When I re-watched the (again, David Fincher directed) video for ‘Oh Father’ I had the same convulsive reaction as when you think E.T has died in the river. She documents the pain he caused. And she comes to understand what was done to him. And she is able to love him whilst still walking away. Detach with Love, they say in 12 Step.

This is followed by ‘Spanish Eyes’, which has become the paean to all the young men Madonna knew who were lost to AIDS. This song still blows my mind because Madonna, whose cellular make-up is built from Catholicism, doubts the existence of G-d:

“And if there is a Christ/he’ll come tonight/and pray for Spanish eyes”

“What kind of life is this? If God exists…”

Living through domestic abuse will take you there. Madonna may not be able to see this herself because, as I say with great empathy, there is a scratch in her vinyl, but…

I occasionally wake up in the morning with this thought: Sean Penn may have three Oscars and be held in such high esteem by the Academy that he doesn’t even have to show up to collect them, but he has never made anything as beautiful and self-aware as ‘Like A Prayer’.