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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
As a Democrat who was supporting him until Obama showed his mettle during the primary debates, I was shocked by how badly John Edwards has behaved during the lurid flap over his private life. I'm not surprised and really don't care that Edwards had an extramarital affair, but what a craven, sniveling little worm he has turned out to be -- fleeing into hotel bathrooms, pretending to know nothing about payoffs under his nose, offering a paternity test while the mother bizarrely refuses it, and canonizing his long-suffering wife while doing her dirt. Elizabeth Edwards too has been ethically compromised because of her aggressively sanctimonious defense of her husband's reputation over the past year. Both of them well deserve their exile from the Democratic convention.
On the pop front, Madonna's life has been passing before our eyes like a decadent German expressionist film. There's been a tabloid avalanche: rumors about Madonna's rocky marriage; a flirtation with a juvenile if humpy New York Yankee; an accusation of alienation of affections from the baseball player's furious wife; the release of a tart memoir by her brother, Christopher Ciccone; horrifying paparazzi pix of Madonna's wan face looking as resculpted as a plastic doll. With a New York magazine cover story on the new plastic surgery, Madonna has become the poster girl of android metamorphosis. This has hardly been a dignified run-up to her 50th birthday -- the big party for which has just been postponed because of the latest in a series of mysterious injuries leading to the launch this month of her world tour.
Ciccone's retrospective doesn't contain many bombshells. Who could be surprised that Madonna is a tough, egotistical and sometimes rude personality, given the vast scope of her professional empire? I can't get too exercised over Ciccone getting a smaller room than Gwyneth Paltrow's at the Scottish castle where Madonna staged her wedding to Guy Ritchie. Stiffing her brother on out-of-pocket interior-decorating bills, on the other hand, was pretty lowdown and tacky.
I was pleased to see that Ciccone confirmed, from an insider's perspective, my dim view of Madonna's symbiotic link with Ingrid Casares, which turns out to be even creepier than I thought. Ciccone quotes a barb of mine about Ingrid (from New York magazine in 1998): "She's turned herself into Madonna's flunky and yes-girl, and I think Madonna's dependence on Ingrid Casares is a self-stunting sickness. Madonna should go to the Betty Ford Clinic to break her addiction and detox from Ingrid Casares." Ciccone's unsettling tales do indeed chronicle Ingrid's masochistic sycophancy. I have always maintained that the pivotal downturn in Madonna's creative life came after she abandoned the ultra-hip and unsparingly blunt Sandra Bernhard, with her acute power of social observation, for Ingrid Casares, a spoiled Cuban heiress and wifty nightclub denizen. (I didn't even know at the time that Bernhard and Casares had been an item, split by Madonna. Quel tangled web!)
Listening to Madonna's latest CD, "Hard Candy," was a melancholy experience. There are several interesting songs on it, but musically, it retraces old steps, and the overall effect is uptight and claustrophobic. Even as a wife and mother, Madonna can't seem to escape an adolescent angst and self-absorption. Yet the CD's brassy cover image, with that ostentatiously exposed crotch and hard-bitten face lolling its tongue like a dissolute old streetwalker, is still hammering at sex as if it's Madonna's last, desperate selling point. Sex for sternly workaholic Madonna has become a brittle concept rather than a sensual reality, a monotonous compulsiveness diverting her from artistic self-development.
Though her reputation has receded in the U.S., Madonna retains a huge fan base around the world. By shrewdly monitoring trends, she has been able to maintain her relevance and sell out concerts at stratospheric ticket prices. Young women performers everywhere have been massively influenced by her persona and stagecraft, even if they don't know it because they've borrowed from intermediaries closer to their age. Madonna's great songs have become canonical on radio airplay. But she is no longer a game-changer; she's lost her once unerring sense of the cutting edge. In a performer this talented and ambitious, it's a tragic decline.
What happened to Madonna? I have had a series of revelations about this since my trip to Brazil in May, which I wrote about in my June column. I described the moment when, after my art lecture at the Teatro Castro Alves in Salvador da Bahia, five DVDs arrived wrapped in red ribbon from Daniela Mercury, the charismatic superstar who has been called "Brazil's Madonna." It was literally electrifying: I felt as if I had been hit by lightning, causing some mysterious rearrangement of brain cells. My boredom and disillusion with popular culture, which have been intensifying over the past 15 years, seemed to vanish. Since then, I have been enthusiastically exploring Brazilian history and Mercury's career through the wonders of the Web -- that revolutionary instrument of cultural exchange.
The artistic career (in literature, the visual arts and performance) has been one of my major subjects of scholarly inquiry since college and graduate school. It is a main theme of my first book, "Sexual Personae,"
Thinking about Daniela Mercury, I suddenly realized that Madonna is a displaced person, a refugee. She has lost her roots -- Motown, the city of Detroit (called the Motor City because of its auto industry), outside of which she grew up. Detroit had been a major capital of black music in her youth, but its vitality ebbed, partly because of the economic recession that devastated so many Midwestern industrial cities. Madonna would be instrumental in giving artistic legitimacy to disco music, once an underground style of black and gay clubs. As a dancer, she zeroed in on the propulsive, percussive African rhythms at disco's heart.
