The Opera Queen

Resolution Revolution, With Dancing

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On June 5, 2012

In music, radio

Today: 2pm hit and I made a face.

I don’t recognize this.

Then I remembered: Soundcheck ended. Well, not ended forever, but the celebrated afternoon music show on WNYC has taken a hiatus for the summer. It’s being re-imagined and re-tooled for its post-Labor Day return (in a new evening timeslot) and you can follow its progress online.

Friday’s final afternoon program was all about resolutions – specifically musical ones. John Schaefer’s call to listeners, asking them what musical promises they wanted to keep, got me thinking, and feeling more than a little guilty. I’ve been making audio commitments to myself now for ages: I’m going to listen to this new album. I’m going to check out that cool band. I’m going to get to more live shows. 

And despite covering The Cult’s new album, getting into a great new DJ, and seeing Garbage live, I still feel like I’m not doing enough. With every new week comes a new onslaught of albums, bands, shows, all of which I feel I should be paying more attention to.  Then there’s the backwards glance – and a glance is really all it’s been when it comes to my own, embarrassingly limited musical knowledge.

Raised as a classical music-playing child, I didn’t really find out about the work and influence Bob Dylan, David Bowie, or The Rolling Stones until well into adolescence. My house was filled with the sounds of Cash, Presley, and ABBA (to say nothing of Back, Beethoven, and Mozart) for many years. Later, with my very-own turntable in my bedroom, neither The Clash and nor Black Flag provided the soundtrack to teenaged rebellion; Aretha Franklin, Ronnie Spector, and Donna Summer did. I related to the strong, glamorous ladies whose music I could dance to. A big part of me still does.

The first time I heard Bob Dylan I was fifteen years old. The song was “Tangled Up In Blue” and it was played to me by a Dylan-loving friend of my mother’s. I’d never heard anything like it; the words dripped with angst, and anger, and a world-weariness I hadn’t quite known before. Somehow, it made the grunge explosion that followed in popular culture make more sense. A guest of Schaefer’s on Friday confessed she didn’t know enough about Dylan’s either, and that her musical resolution over the summer was to correct that oversight.

It was oddly comforting to hear that kind of confession in such a public forum. Admitting you don’t know the canons of such huge music monoliths in public is hard, and it was nice to see Soundcheck – a show I consider to be as much entertainment as education, and a major smarty-pants beacon of deep pop culture know-how -welcome such curiosity with open arms. It’s nice to not be afraid of judgment, or be worried about appearing uncool, of lacking taste, of being plain stupid, but to just be welcomed and accepted.

Perhaps that’s why the “ending” of Soundcheck hit me harder than I expected, and why today’s 2pm mix-up was a bit of a slug in the guts. Schaefer and the fantastic Soundcheck team have provided a wonderful forum for the musically curious masses (with whom I deeply identify) to learn, to ask questions, to branch out, to exercise our curious ear-muscles and maybe have a dance or two across our office/kitchen floors. Thusly inspired, this is what I’d like: to further my contemporary music-scene knowledge while deepening my appreciation of its past. Can it be done with any measure of success? I’ll let you know when Soundcheck’s back on the air in September. I’m starting here. Don’t judge.

Sinatra & Seduction

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On May 14, 2012

In opera

Fourteen years ago this week my life changed. Frank Sinatra died.

I don’t remember the exact moment I became a Sinatra fan. I started listening to his work in the early 90s, inspired by more contemporary singers who looked up to him than by any sense of music-history know-how. Having been raised to an eclectic diet of opera, Elvis, Abba, Olivia, and country gold (Cash, Jennings, and Cline, mainly), there was something vaguely … dangerous about Francis Albert. I couldn’t put my finger on it but his voice, even at its sweetest, had a hint of something that both scared and delighted me. Only many years later did I understand that quality to be sex appeal -not the smooth, suave, safe sort, but the rough-and-tumble variety, where passion came before pronouncements.

Sinatra never had to be smutty to seduce through song; it could be a slight pause, a tiny added grace note, a lingering phrase. He deeply understood how tied up creative power was with sexual power (and vice-versa), and he used it, grandly, carefully, proudly and loudly, as he got behind the wheel of The Great American Songbook, flashing a smile, a dark stare, a cocked eyebrow, cruising by, leaving a wispy trail of cigarette smoke in his wake, and enough baritone reverb to echo through eons. Since his passing that Songbook has been reduced to a series of pieces that are mere vehicles for a bland, safe, PC-style seduction, souped up in a red hot convertible and tinkling horn. Sinatra would never be so obvious.

Though he had an undoubtedly operatic approach, and knew a thing or two about a romantic tune, Sinatra’s sound let in the darkness through time; his voice became full of shadow, of color, of subtlety and suffering and self-doubt. It reflected life experience, of course – and what a life it was. James Kaplan’s exhaustive 2010 biography of Sinatra’s early-to-middle years is a mighty tome that rivals Ulysses in sheer size and detail. Until Kaplan publishes the companion piece, we won’t know about Sinatra’s final years – but I have my own specific memories of today, involving comforting older women in a shoe store, whose lives, memories, and perhaps even passions, were so tied up with the man and his music.

Bang Bang Shoot Post

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On May 8, 2012

In opera

Do you use Instagram? Do you love it? Hate it?

There’s been a lot of talk about the mobile app recently. A reporter friend sung its wonders last summer; her prescient enthusiasm anticipated Instagram’s huge dent in public consciousness over the last few months.  The mobile app was bought by Facebook for a big price tag; it was the subject of Jon Stewart’s acerbic wit; it’s been featured on the PBS Idea Channel (above); it’s inspired a snarky (and very funny) parody video of its features; it’s even made the pages of the Grey Old Lady. Oh, and  I recently did a feature on a prolific (and dedicated) IG user. What’s the big deal?

Part of it seems to be the temporal nature of the app; it captures moments within a certain frame of time, with  filters reflecting users’ moods and visual ideas around events. It’s temporal, with a leaning toward the personal, taking the best bits of social media and putting them within a visual interface. Thus, it’s become a beautiful complement to reporters’ toolkits. For evidence, check out WSJ’s impressive collection of Occupy Wall Street Instagram shots. Photojournalist Richard Koci Hernandez sees it as a game-changer. It was used for New York Fashion Week. Plenty of people – journalists and non-journalists alike – use it as a kind of blogging shorthand for what they see around them. Plenty don’t, however, and in a neat twist of irony, they’ve used other social media outlets (particularly Twitter) to air their displeasure. Is Instagram a threat to traditional photojournalists? To journalists overall?

The line between reporting and art feels perilously thin when considering the  potential of the app. I happen to like it for on-the-go shots of my daily life, though I’m careful to avoid the “this is what I ate  for breakfast” mundanity that seems to dominate so much social media photo-sharing. As a former photographer who worked in (and occasionally misses) film, I find Instagram’s range of “vintage” filters more amusing than annoying. Still, there’s something to be said for the tactile, and more than once, I’ve found myself drawing (or wanting to draw) some of the shots I come across on my daily Instagram look-throughs. Perhaps that’s the basic beauty of the app: it embraces the sharp, thorny terrain of the present, while snuggling with the soft, messy sheets of yesteryear. It’s Now, and Then, and Maybe, all at once.

Awful Funny

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On May 7, 2012

In opera

This past week, I posted the cover of the New York Post on my Facebook wall. I shared it from another friend’s wall, a journalist friend in New York, who’d come across the “toasty” cover and, presumably, found it too horrible -and horribly amusing -not to share.

While the cover didn’t get too much reaction on my journo-friend’s wall, it lit a bonfire on mine. Some people howled at the hilarious awfulness, others howled in derision at the aggressive cruelty. It was interesting to note not only the nationalistic splits (Canadians, you really are a nice bunch, mostly) but the fact that some people reacted in such a personal manner. The incident forced reflection on my recent love of mean humor, something I never used to indulge in, perhaps out of guilt, anxiety, or a caustic mix of both.

Now, I’ve sat through some rough stand-up material involving the most blatant, stomach-churning sort of chauvinism; I’ve sat beside people I had deemed intelligent as they haw-haw-haw’d at sexual and racial cliches being exhaustively exploited. That sort of humor isn’t mean; it’s lazy. And the Post isn’t much different in its laziness – but the difference is, it’s agonizingly clever. That cleverness that makes urban smarty-pants types like me (who poo-poo the Post, rolling eyes and making yucky faces) feel ashamed at the vicarious thrill to be gained from enjoying the notoriously bad taste of the News Corp tabloid in their quest to outdo themselves each day with the clever-meets-queasy quotient of their covers. My journo-friend admitted the cover was “tame for (the Post).” Too true.

Dark humor is more prevalent in some cultures than others. Living in Ireland taught me how often it’s been used as a survival tactic, meant to provoke and polarize; that’s a big part of its effectiveness. At the moment, I’m reading Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy (Riverhead), a book that’s chalk-a-block with dark humor, revolving around… the Holocaust, and what happens when the main character finds that a grown Anne Frank is living in his attic. Auslander mercilessly mocks -and shamelessly milks -a persistent, pernicious victim mentality as personified in both his main character as well as his mother. Upon the book’s release, author A.L. Kennedy observed that the book “will make very many people angry. It will also make very many people happy.”

Hope: A Tragedy makes me laugh, even as I gasp and feel slight pangs of guilt. Good, dark humor, when it’s done well, finds our weak spots and exploits them, as it should. The Post is not nearly as deep as this book, not by a long shot, but it is a cultural by-product of a human yearning (conscious or not) to be poked and prodded. Macabre humor isn’t only accepted but welcomed, especially by those of us who, having been bullied, beaten, and mocked, have emerged at the other end, with a ready smirk, triumphant, no longer victimized, but defiantly, vividly alive. At the end of the day, that is humor’s highest compliment, and its greatest achievement.

Jay-Eee-El-El-Oh!

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On May 5, 2012

In audio, video

 

From the Facebook page of WNYC’s excellent music program Soundcheck:

Weird, yet fascinating prototype in which users cook and shape their own jelly … and make music with it. Believe it or not, neither Jell-O nor pitchman Bill Cosby are involved with this. It comes from, yes, France.

Bien sur! C’est génial, non? Page Flickrl est ici.

Excellent Super Good

By

On May 2, 2012

In opera

 

Love electrorock? Hiphop? Electronica? Um… dancing? Check out early 80s New York band ESG.

They were so heavily sampled that they actually titled an EP, Sample Credits Don’t Pay Our Bills.

They opened for The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and their work’s been sampled by acts like TLC, The Beastie Boys, Tricky, and Wu-Tang Clan. Pretty impressive for a group of sisters from the Bronx.

I love them because of their blend of old-school and new-school approach; they use traditional instruments (bongos, guitars, bass) to produce a futuristic, near-electronic sound that reminds me of Krautrockers like Can and Kraftwerk. ESG were able to produce some very atmospheric sounds with a mix of minimal melodics and maximum rhythm, capturing the magical madness of New York City like so many before and after.

ESG play their final gig in June at Le Poisson Rouge.

Go if you can. Thank me later.

Then And Now

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On May 1, 2012

In Uncategorized

It was an interesting experience, to sit on the stage of Markham Theatre today, eating lunch with various town luminaries and performers, learning about its 2012-2013 season and noting who was using a smartphone and who wasn’t. I couldn’t help but take pictures. Each table boasted a flag representing the nationality of upcoming performers; ironically or not, I’d been seated at the table boasting the American flag. The moment was a strange fusion of old and new loves.

I last performed on that stage in 1997, in Carol Shields’ Departures And Arrivals, donning a variety of roles and costumes. Though drama was an absolute passion back then (nay, a career path), I clearly remember that dreaded gremlin, stage fright, taking a firm icy grip during a monologue I had toward the end of the play on opening night. For a few awful seconds, I blanked out. It was mortifying.

Today, I looked down at the seats family and friends had occupied that night, and a flood of gratitude and relief washed over me. Gratitude at the patience of good people, and relief at changing my career trajectory after many bumps and false starts. Sometimes, it’s good to step out of the spotlight.

This desire for privacy coincides with a dawning reluctance over the past months at revealing too much personal information on here, and on other online spots. That may be owing to the fact that I’m moving deeper into the professional journo-world, and don’t care to splash around personal details, or it may be a distaste for over-sharing, a trend that doesn’t seem likely to wane in internet culture, where “heels and meals,” as a recent interviewee put it, rule the day. I don’t hate the trend; I just don’t happen to think I fit into it – and truth be told, don’t want to. I’d rather people get a small taste of me through my writing (and choice of coverage), but enjoy a full meal when they meet me in-person. I’m an unabashed sensualist at the end of the day, and I’d sooner meet someone over a glass of wine, if it’s possible; I’m fully cognizant that isn’t always possible, but when I’m out in the world, there’s always a new person to meet, always a new conversation to be had. I don’t want to miss those moments.

Right now I’m reconsidering the purpose of this blog, and am thinking of making it a space more for short, punchy observations – artistic, political, social, cultural – and for inviting more active commentary and feedback. Yes, I’m still going to keep my newsy (/sassy) Tumblr blog, and I’m active on Twitter and Facebook too – but really, I want readers to go to Digital Journal to read my formal work. I hope that isn’t too much to ask. It’s time for me to step off the proverbial stage of personal blogging, and move into the backstage realm, and, we hope, on to after-party to mix and mingle. The diva has exited the stage; she’s still around, though, if you want to look for her.

Twenty Zoo

By

On March 25, 2012

In art, music, Non-Classical Writing, popular culture

The desire to be accurate with anniversaries and remembrances grows over the years. When you don’t have kids or a partner to mark time for you with loose teeth and grey hairs, odd drawings and fancy diplomas, you have to choose other markers.

Twenty years ago I trundled off to Maple Leaf Gardens, then a rattling old hockey arena for a hard-scrabble team, for a rock concert. There were cars hanging from the ceiling. And screens. Lots of them.
 
I’d been leafing through Orwell, gawking at Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, sitting googie-eyed at the movies of Marlene Dietrich, and enchanted by the music of the Weimar republic. I’d been letting Ziggy Stardust and Kraftwerk lull me to sleep and jotting down strange thoughts and abstract shapes in journals spread across wooden floors alongside plates of half-eaten baguette and unfinished essays.
It’s okay if you don’t have a computer, the teacher had said, not everyone does. Just print neatly and it’ll be fine.
I trudged up the stairs of the Carlton subway stop to be confronted with a choir of rosy-cheeked faces.
‘Tickets! Anyone selling? Anyone? Please?’
I walked through the masses, hands stuffed in deep, smooth winter pockets.
‘You selling?!’ a swarthy, balding, wild-eyed man asked me as I reached the top of the stairs.
No way, I told him.
‘Come on. Give you a hundred bucks.’
No.
I hadn’t even seen the band inside, but something in me said… go.
The lines for the loos were ridiculous. The lines for a bottle of water were ridiculous. Four dollars? Ridiculous. I was used to the concert hall, Lincoln Center, Roy Thompson Hall, Jesus, why was everyone pushing and shouting?
Settling in, I noted my side-view of the stage. The myriad of screens and cars and metallic pieces of spaced-out junk, poked out hither and thither, at all angles, like Picasso came to life via Flash Gordon. Oh. Was this supposed to be art? MOMA did it better.
The Pixies took the stage. I made a face. Who is this? God, that guy’s ugly. I thought about Pavarotti and Ziggy Stardust and the essay I was writing for Classics defending Clytemnestra. Really, she was the victim of historical sexism, and I had to set things straight, between bites of brie and glances at Ginsberg.
The Pixies left, I sighed with relief, my seatmate got popcorn. I doodled in my chip-faced journal. Time passed. I jotted down potential screenplay ideas, and put the journal in my backpack, where a copy of Naked Lunch was tucked away. It made no sense, but it made the clang-clang-clang of the subway easier.
My seatmate and I munched the popcorn, laughed at people’s hairdos, picking our teeth and gossiping, trading ideas and avoiding the yawning reality of graduation. He crumpled up the empty bucket and whipped it under his chair, ever-polite with a jaunty whistle and a bright-eyed grin.
I looked at the stage, and noted a small man wandering onto it. He wore dark over-large sunglasses, tight black leathers. He was looking around, curious, head cocked and smirking. A few people shrieked. Then a few more. I cocked my head back at him. Such a big head he had. Such big dark hair. And such big glasses. The arena was in an uproar. Oh? The show’s starting now?
It’s Jesus, I whispered sarcastically to my companion. He’s gonna save us all.
For the next two hours, I was witness to a marriage of words, music, ideas, art, sound, performance, and sheer theater such as I had never seen before. The snarling menace of “The Fly,” the shimmering sex of “Mysterious Ways,” the barking outrage of “Bullet The Blue Sky,” the shiny grandiosity of “Desire” … it was hard to verbalize what I was seeing… feeling… it was hard to take in, all at once, in one go. Jesus staggered along the outer rim of where the glass would be placed for hockey games, holding hand after hand after hand for support, a tiny smile spread across his lips. He reminded me of Dennis the Menace.
If you twist and turn away…
If you tear yourself in two again…
He was ridiculous -utterly ridiculous – but a very magnetic, theatrical presence. I was transfixed.
In 1992, I had no idea who Jenny Holzer was, or Mark Wojnarowicz, or the Emergency Broadcast Network. I’d vaguely heard of televangelists and had seen pieces of Apocalypse Now. I was months away from graduating high school and had a creative writing teacher who took students outside to a nearby cemetery for inspiration. I’d been to New York a dozen times and had hit all the major museums. I’d seen Pavarotti sing live in a few operas and eaten at top restaurants. But I’d never seen anything like this. Jesus was thrusting around in a silver suit, throwing money at the fawning crowd. Good grief.
ZOO-TV was a sexy, scintillating, stimulating soupcon of pop culture references both contemporary and classical, one that licked the brain cells even as it caressed the heart muscles in a winking, wide, over-friendly love embrace. I felt drawn to a life and way of thinking I’d only glimpsed at in all my trips to New York and Europe: it was full of arts, smarts, sauce, spice, and ever-present sex, wafting and floating above all things, its power only heightened by the intense, naughty mambo it held with a force equally as strong: love. Love for music, art, living, performing, the being-there-ness of the moment. All that stuff I’d been touching on in my Orwell-Burroughs-Kerouac-Ziggy-artsy-fartsy explorations. Authenticity as way of life. Authenticity as mask. Know who the hell you are… then play with it. Fuck up the mainstream.
It’s said this tour re-defined what big bands are, what they could do, who they could be, and how far they could reach. And that’s all true, but such an assessment misses the profound personal connotations. For me, ZOO-TV will always be a bigger thing than a tour, a band, a t-shirt, tons of gear, clever sayings, or flashy effects. It remains a marker, a compass, a talisman, a confusing pregnancy and messy birth, a shocking awakening to a wider world both without and within. It was grand opera and the intimate whisper ever. It was the absolute end of one phase, and the start of something much greater, far wider, unimaginably deeper, and vastly more frightening. And maybe, possibly, more thrilling. Welcome to your life; it’s all up to you now.
I go to encounter for the million time
the reality of experience
and to forge, in the smith of my soul,
To all involved in ZOO-TV, directly and not: thank you, from the bottom of my heart, now and forever more. I remember, I smile, I dance.
I’m dancing barefoot
Heading for a spin
Some strange music drags me in
makes me come up

 

(Quotes: James Joyce; Patti Smith)

 

I Get So Emotional, Baby

By

On February 11, 2012

In voice

 

The news of Whitney Houston’s passing went around on Facebook like wildfire, probably mere moments after the first murmurs of her demise began circulating on Twitter. Whitney became famous before the advent of social media, but it seems as if her debut album was issued to every household in 1985. Tonight everyone’s sharing a memory of their younger selves: seeing one of her videos, dancing in their bedrooms, running to buy her record at the local mall. I’m pouring over my own memories too. Whitney was the first female pop star I outright adored.
At the time it wasn’t totally cool -at least in my super-Wonderbread neighborhood -to admit you liked Whitney’s music, so I’d covertly hide my cassette tapes in coat pockets and big bags. There weren’t too many twelve-year-old girls in the ‘burbs who loved opera, Abba, Johnny Cash and Whitney Houston with equal passion. I remember so many snowy days, sluggishly making my way to school, bright red wool cowl around my head, pointy-toed winter boots on my feet, sunglasses in place, making my way along the grey dull suburban streets, with Whitney sweetly singing through the headphones of my Sony Walkman: how will I know if he really loves me? how will I know? Whitney’s music inspired me to investigate gospel. Eventually the LPs of Mahalia Jackson, Etta James, and Aretha Franklin appeared next to the Duran Duran ones. Whitney Houston was my gateway drug to soul and Motown – and to brighter visions of a better, more exciting life, one where being loud, bold, brilliant, and female were rewarded and celebrated and encouraged. I’ve found the greatest love of all…
When 1987’s Whitney came out, I immediately gravitated to the dramatic stuff, with “So Emotional” becoming my mantra, though I had no one to sing it to except the fantasy boys in my head. But Whitney’s vocal urgency, her drama, her sense of excitement, and enjoyment, and sheer joy of singing, were and remain astonishing to listen to. To paraphrase the saucy title character from Bizet’s Carmen, “I’m singing for myself, and there’s no law against it!” Still, as Maura Johnston of The Village Voice notes, “Houston’s voice was criticized by some for being too much—too strong, too showy, an exemplar of the excess that epitomized pop music in the ’80s.” My mother used to crinkle her brow whenever she heard her music pumping out of my bedroom: “That isn’t singing -it’s shrieking!” Her cover of a beloved Dolly Parton classic grated, and the movie it came from, though a massive success, was horrendously bad, a soppy, maudlin embodiment of the gigantic music industry- machine she seemed to never quite fit in with.
As the years passed, she became simultaneously less interested and more desperate to fit in to that world. It was painful to witness. Marriage, addiction, bizarre interviews, bad live dates, frightening photos – it was like a laundry list of public humiliation, made all the more horrifying because of Whitney’s refusal to never, ever play the role of the simpering, whimpering victim, even when she was clearly suffering. There were highs, lows, exposures, embarrassments, headaches, heartaches. It couldn’t have been easy trying to dim your light around a man clearly threatened by your success, or attempting to throw a determined monkey off your back amidst the snide smirks of a public who once worshipped you awaiting your next fall with claws and fangs exposed. I think few knew or understood the nasty nature of fame and the “industry” side of the music industry the way Whitney Houston did.
There have been many, many candidates for the throne of Ultimate Soul Diva. But might look it, but they’ll never be it. Whitney poured her whole life into that voice, sounding sweet one minute, steely the next; she was as confident with the saccharine balladry of “The Greatest Love,” as she was with the survivor sass of “It’s Not Right (But It’s Okay).” It would be too easy to assume she’d made some Faustian deal in order to have a voice like that, but she did have demons. Regardless of who put them there or why they stayed is no matter. Her demons were hers. Right up to the end she seemed determined to remind us of that. We were blessed to have had her voice in our midst, serenading us through all of life’s moments big and small, leading us through the snowbanks and into a place less dull, more bright, more beautiful and big and exciting, where being female didn’t mean being soft, quiet, meek or comforting. Dear Whitney, make you shake the heavens the way you shook this earth. Make thee a joyous noise.

ELL. YOU. VEE.

By

On February 5, 2012

In music, Non-Classical Writing, popular culture

Today is the Super Bowl. Along with the inherent drama of watching grown men crash into each other as they engage in a kind of life-size version of a chess match and the fact that the New York Giants are involved (go Giants!), I’ll be watching because this year’s Halftime Show looks amazing. None other than Madonna herself is set to perform, along with LMFAO, Nicki Minaj and M.I.A.. Oh, and Cirque du Soleil are involved. If that isn’t entertainment with a capital “e,” I don’t know what is.

When the whispers of her appearance began circulating a few months ago, there were the predictable snickers and groans. What’s the Queen of Pop doing hopping around, glamorous and a-glitter, amidst the quarterbacks? But the Super Bowl isn’t strictly about sports, and you can’t get a more entertaining live performer than Madonna. I was schooled in this many years ago when I, full of cynicism and disliking both her image and canon, was dragged to her Girlie Show tour. Not being Catholic, I couldn’t understand her obsession over the religion (probably why Blond Ambition didn’t appeal to me, or much of her early work) but being in the very new, very scary-meets-cool world of university (ie artsy lectures, cute professors, pub nights, and my own car) meant I was interested in notions of female independence, and what that meant to the wider cultural world. Where did I fit in? Madonna’s hilariously arch, if brutally honest album Erotica, and her photography book Sex, did a lot in terms of helping me figure out that place. Sexual being? Thinking being? Feeling being? All of the above. Next.
Through the years, I’ve developed an enormous amount of respect for Madonna. I love that she’s never been cowed by those snickers and groans, even as she fearlessly integrates so many different aspects of her interests and personality with such single-minded ferocity. Even when she showed us her (fantastically fit) naked body in Sex, paraded down a Gaultier runway topless, referenced Hindu imagery in dance numbers (or Judaism in music videos), Madonna never seems to give a fig about the outrage over her choices. It makes me wonder at her resilience, and about how she’s handling the mean-spirited criticism that’s cropped up the last few years around her face -more specifically, the work on her face. The entertainment industry hates, despises, loathes and abhors ageing. All the praise for Betty White conveniently cloaks the ugly if basic fact that she’d never be cast in a sexual role, that if you’re in the business and plan to age au naturel, you must be sweet, docile, and most of all, dumb (or be really, really good at playing dumb, and have a publicist who can work that angle relentlessly). You must be non-threatening and totally lovable. It goes without saying Madonna is none of these things, and has no interest in pursuing or cultivating those qualities.
The comments on Madonna’s face -and her ageing (she is fifty-three) -range from the catty to the downright nasty. Many have a nasty sexual vulgarity to them, and others are sniping and mean, implying there’s something awfully, terribly wrong with a successful woman over fifty climbing into bed with a twenty-something man. I find this kind of immaturity discouraging, but it’s also inevitable, the result of a relentlessly youth-oriented culture where only those under twenty-five are deemed sexually desirable. Annie Lennox pondered this dilemma, but Madonna is less interested in examination than in entertainment, and really, you can’t blame her. Like it or lump it, that entertainment demands an eternal esthetic of youthfulness. Her video for “Hollywood” from the 2003 album American Life underlined this awareness, offering a scary, freakish depiction of the demands of fame, and of a society where youth (especially female youth) is deemed more important than brains, ability, even talent.
She continues to play with our notions around entertainment, fantasy, and ageing in her latest video, “Gimme All Your Luvin’,” a cheeky little dance number with a pulsing electronic beat and the lady’s deceptively wispy vocals. (Don’t kid yourself: there’s steel behind that sound.) As Madonna, in full Bardot-esque makeup, shakes her big blonde mane (hilariously outlandish extensions or glamorous tresses? who cares?) or walks sideways along a wall with a team of faceless muscular football players supporting her, or walks coolly be-shaded with a pram, or has a (clearly thrilled) Nicki Minaj and (too-cool-for-school) M.I.A. bounce around as her cheerleaders, she isn’t trying to compete with the Gagas, the Britneys, the Katys, or any other would-be pop princesses. She doesn’t need to. She’s competing with the long-held ideas -ours -of how a famous person (famous woman, make that) should look, should move, should sound. The demand to “Act/Look your age!” are just plain boring, in the same vein as the accusations of her affecting an “accent” at the Golden Globes. “You’re from Detroit,” sniffed an online poster. Those attitudes don’t faze her. Like any good pop diva, Madonna seems dead embarrassed by her roots, and fully conscious of her vanity. Why should she act like “one of us” (or put on an act of faux-humility, as so, so many in Hollywood are so good at doing) when she clearly doesn’t move in our world anyway? Those offended by her lack of humility find her pretentious; those inspired by her steely-eyed confidence find her fascinating. There is no middle ground.
Still, Madonna wants to remind us: there’s an album, there’s a movie, expect a tour. This is how it’s done. She’s reminding potential viewers at tonight’s Super Bowl (the football fans, her fans, fans of pop culture itself) that she’s still a force. Does she need to? Yes. Amidst American Idol and America’s Got Talent and The Voice and Glee, Madonna is saying in her iron-hand-in-velvet-glove way: I was here first and I still do it better than all of you. Past this hardness lies the plain truth: she loves doing it – loves the performing, the entertaining, the singing-dancing-sashaying-hopping-bopping singy-songy madness that is pop. Don’t you?
Refusing to be defined (or limited) by her age, by her family, by her motherhood, by her charity efforts or even by her poptastic past, Madonna is defiantly, definitively present in the harsh here and nowness of 2012 Pop Music. While we applaud sixty-two year-old Bruce Springsteen’s latest opus with nary a word about his appearance, we snark over the face of a fifty-three year-old woman, ignoring the euphoric rush of joy her beats bring us, the heady fantasy that the artifice of the pop world presents. It isn’t fair in the real world. But the pop world isn’t the real world; like its namesake in the art world, it’s all about glamour, fantasy, superficiality, and a perpetual youth. We experience those things vicariously whenever we listen, causing a little dance across the kitchen or a tap of the fingers on the steering wheel or a wiggle in our office chairs. We become that young smooth being again, carefree, fierce, uninhibited, curious, and open to everything, investigating the limits (and dizzying non-limits) of our own potential and the joyous exhilaration of true independence, ever-mindful of what being a woman means, for good and bad and everything in-between. Maybe, just maybe, amidst the bleeps and bloops of that ditty, we could take a little holiday. It would be so nice.

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