I must confess (on a dancefloor?) that I love Madonna. She was a gutsy, tortured little brat, who epitomised the struggle of egocentricity, only to become accidentally trapped by the very thing she thought was freeing her. She is a prisoner of fame, a woman who would end up being one of the few positive cultural evolutions we have in mainstream culture - if only for the recognition of what is so very wrong with it, that has become the recent journey of the most famous woman on the planet. It’s not perfect, but the phenomenon of Madonna represents an emerging breakdown of capitalism that is not quite so bad a thing.

 

To justify the controversy that would create the persecution over her romanticising of her own persecution (confused?), she pointed to the crucifixion taking place against a backdrop of Geldof-style “socially conscious” imagery. While she crucified herself to Live To Tell, a song about being the enduring victim of men, she honestly expected us to believe that it had a conceptual relationship with dying African children. That's a hard argument to sell.

 

And never mind that a plea to raise funds for dying Africans is a teeny bit undermined by a crucifix that came with its own press release, proudly announcing it cost 2 million dollars. But the token dying children are clearly a pre-emptive defense - consciously done, or otherwise. I've no doubt she is using the stunt to draw attention to her latest cause (the Malawi orphans), but it co-exists with other artistic impulses that have nothing to do with them. To understand the creative symbolism of Madonna's self-crucifixion (as opposed to how she uses it to bring attention to the orphans), you simply have to put those orphans out of your mind, all together. 

 

On her previous studio album, American Life (a wonderful record that sadly too many missed in the trendy-to-hate-Madonna-again period), she sang, “This type of modern life, it’s not for me.” But Madonna’s problem is that this is all she knows. At very least, she cannot let it go.

Sure, she can aspire to. She does. That’s what makes Madonna rock, in a sea of vile hypocrite rockstars who somehow manage to muster “credibility” (somebody please shoot Coldplay, and put me out of my misery). But Madonna can, in some part of her, will it into being all she likes; in the end, she is left with a concept – ironically, an image – that represents a longing (a positive one), but does not actually exist as the thing it represents (or longs for). Strike a pose.

“I guess I did it wrong,” she sang (also from the American Life single). But this revelation presupposes that the declaration of realising you've been doing something wrong, is in fact doing what is “right”. But it's only half the story. Realising you are wrong is not the destination; it's the first step on the journey towards it.

 

Madonna’s recent creative career (keeping in mind that her Confessions album is designed to sell, unlike the previous album that presumed everybody would dig where she was honestly at, anyway), is a wonderful metaphor for the horrible difference between knowing and doing. It’s an agonising kind of hypocrisy that most of us can relate to. So many of us, for all those secret monologues we have with ourselves, end up being all talk. Our behaviours just don’t come through with what we supposedly believe.

Madonna may say she wants a break from the persecution, she may decide to embrace credibility – but she’s often had both those things. In the end, she has always ended up finding these things don’t fulfil her like they’re supposed to, and so she ultimately crucifies herself, again – this time, literally.

But she knows the deal. She knows she fucked up, she knows the very bane of her existence – being MADONNA!™ - is ultimately a fantasy of something quite screwed up about modern human nature. She rejects “modern life”, but the truth is, she's still a slave to it. She's desperately searching for something that will replace it (hello, Kabbalah), but nothing's done the trick. She's a statement of how she wants to be, that never materialises into actually "being" it.

 

It’s why people talk about quitting smoking for years, without ever putting the cigarettes down. It’s why people realise they’re in unhealthy relationships, but tell themselves they’re going to leave, until one day, they realise they’ve been telling themselves that for a decade. Knowing and doing are two very different things.

Madonna is the pop projection of this crisis. She constantly tells us she’s figured it all out – but next year, she’ll figure it all out again. That’s not a bad thing, in itself. That can be said to describe a very productive growth. In this way, she certainly has the right idea. Madonna grows, and that’s one of the reasons I love her. She certainly embraces being wrong – something most human beings never dare to do. We constantly talk of Madonna ‘reinventing’ herself – but what that partly is, is the way Madonna actually turns the ability to reject herself into a cultural aesthetic. Madonna is always wrong. She’ll sit for hours in interviews and tell us all about how different she used to be, and how many mistakes she made. She never apologises for them, but she openly rejects her old ideas. And that’s pretty fucking cool.

But I do not hold the belief that this means she’s necessarily uncovered the final solution. Ultimately, Madonna, time and time again, finds herself trapped in an affectation of a solution. Because she exploits her position as pop star to embody various poses of something she is desperately projecting into her being. Years ago, she was the Zen mother Madonna, who found the answers to life upon having a child; then, she was the warrior of modernity, fiercely rejecting the construct of fame that she had so foolishly longed for; and more recently, we’ve had mystical Madonna. In her latest documentary, the fascinating I’m Going To Tell You A Secret, Madonna cries at a famous Rabbi’s tomb.

It’s the most mesmorising scene. Madonna simply demands to visit this Jewish monument on the strip. When her bodyguards try to explain to her that the police refuse to escort her, and that going into the urban warfare capital is simply not possible for a major Western figure like Madonna (hello, the most famous Western celebrity of the last twenty years), Madonna gets all… well… diva about it.

 

The bodyguard, understandably frustrated by having his boss ignorantly demand he put his life on the line so that she can go and be spiritual, eventually says to her; “Look, there is a war here. Do you understand? I don’t want you to get killed, and quite frankly, I don’t want to be killed, either.”

She gets rather shirty, because she feels the hired help is patronising little Miss Superstar. “Look, I understand it’s dangerous out there,” she says in the penthouse of the Israeli Ritz Carlton. “I heard it’s as dangerous as Central Park, so… you know… “

The bodyguard sits there, with his mouth open. This is a woman who has lived on the very apex of stardom, and wealth, and adoration, for 25 years. She’s all down with the energies of the force, and the power of the light, and all – but of course, Madonna doesn’t really have a clue what’s going on in the real world. She hasn’t spent a single part of her adult life in it. You’d be no different.

After a while, she gives in, and storms off to her room, barking, “Pussy motherfuckers!”

The next day, the police comply, and Madonna is led into Gaza territory. The country goes into a spin, and the paparazzi, and the people holding “Desperately seeking peace” signs, and the police, and the men arrested with guns (suspected of attempting her assassination) – it sends everyone into quite an understandable state of frenzy. And all because she has decided she wants to express her spirituality, and why shouldn’t Madonna be allowed to do that?

“Some people go to Graceland, to visit Elvis’ grave. Well, I want to visit the grave of a great teacher. I don’t see the difference,” she protests.

 

And Madonna, escorted by a troupe of security and police – and, of course, a film crew who are filming the documentary she’s producing about herself - goes into the tomb. The suspense mounts, until what happens? She closes her eyes, and weeps for a minute.

“I don’t know why,” the voice-over says poignantly, “I just started crying.”

Oh, Madonna. I mean, really. Well done, babe - you struggled against your cage, you rejected the very monster you realised fame and money was, and you declared yourself at the gates of the Utopia of Self. But it didn’t quite pan out like you thought it did, right? And so, in the end, you became a caricature of spirituality and goodwill. You beg audiences to save the children, while you hang yourself in a strange marriage of defiance and self-pity, on your 2 million dollar cross.

It’s excruciating, occasionally; but that’s exactly what I love about her. She is a tortured woman, but she so fiercely exists in this frenzied celebration of her own struggle of ego. She powers on, Madonna – and she did, after all, manage to conquer our culture. A rebellious, intelligent, loud, sexual woman has played the fame game like not a single other human being of our modern era. Credit where credit is due, thankyou.

And at least she knows. At least she does yearn to find an exit door to the personal hell her lust for fame created. She loves her Gucci, but at least she recognises the emptiness of such a world, and tries to look for meaning beyond it, by advertising intellectual and spiritual endeavour, and yes, by taking time to commit various acts of goodwill and charity. She'll go back to her Gucci, but it isn't her God. Take a long, good look around the world of the celebrity. Paris Hilton actually celebrates – all be it, unconsciously at times – the horror of being Paris Hilton. She actually believes in it. And there’s a cesspit full of supposedly credible artistes, all jumping in that spotlight to tell us how the coolest thing about them is that they’re not even cool. I loathe them.

Madonna is the very epitome of Americana capitalism. And you know what? She detests it. "Do you think I'm satisfied?" she asked us in American Life. No, she clearly isn't. But she can’t quite figure out any other way. She recognises that it has brought her nothing but pain (or, more to the truth of it, it didn't take her pain away); and if she could only get her being out of what she became (pretty difficult when you’ve been it for 25 years), she would dearly love to give us the solution to modernity. Nobody has that, yet. I don't. Neither do you. But at least people are finally admitting its bullshit. And for the most famous woman in the world to - a woman who, let's face it, could sit back quite snug in dreamland if she really wanted to - well, I think that's pretty cool.

 

So many of us are shades of Madonna, after all. And perhaps that’s a good thing. We crucify ourselves again, and again, because we reject the very thing of which we know no other way. We know the deal, now. Like Madonna, we begin a process of rejection; but it just hasn’t quite figured out what to replace what we’re rejecting, with. We’ve got the crucifixion pretty much perfected.

We just have to figure out the part where we ascend.

 

I imagine Madonna will keep trying to do just that.