MADONNA
FROM HAUTE TO HACK
Dancing as fast as she can

Humanities professor and social critic Camille Paglia, the first intellectual to take Madonna seriously, brutally trashes her new album in this essay from Salon:

Even allowing for the fact that she must strenuously maintain her hipness for a busy husband 10 years her junior, Madonna is starting to morph into the mature Joan Crawford of "Torch Song," still ferociously dancing but with her fascist willpower signaled by brute, staring eyes and fixed jawline. In cannibalizing her disco diva days, Madonna runs the risk of turning into a pasty powdered crumpet like the aging Bette Davis in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" Will she become a whooping Charo shaking her geriatric hoochie-coochie hips on TV talk shows? Or should we expect a sudden, grisly collapse from glowing beauty to dust, like Ursula Andress as the 2000-year-old femme fatale in "She"? Too hungry to connect to the youth market, Madonna goes on childishly using naughty words and flipping the finger (as onstage at Live 8 last summer). Marlene Dietrich, her supreme precursor, knew how to preserve her dignity and glamour.

Click here for the rest (you'll have to sit through a brief ad first, but it's well worth it).

It's funny. Back during the early 90s, just as Camille Paglia was starting to get some press attention for holding up Madonna as some sort of brilliant artistic expression of Paglia's concept of "sexual persona," I was starting, myself, to lose interest in the gyrating pop star.

This is no big secret: from the first moment I saw Madonna writhing around on the ground in her video for the song "Burning Up" on MTV back when I was fifteen or sixteen, I was smitten. Of course, Madonna was hot, and I have absolutely no doubt that her sexual appeal played no small part in my interest, but it was also a great song. There was obviously something more to her than that early sex kitten oriented image might superficially suggest. A few months after that, Madonna was writhing all around on a big wedding cake while singing "Like a Virgin" for the MTV music awards. Suddenly, she was a superstar, and the rest is history.

God, I loved Madonna. I saw her play live twice. I collected her posters, hanging dozens of them on my walls. I bought all her albums, and was thrilled with each new musical style she attempted, each new image she adopted. It was a fun ride through the 80s, being a Madonna fan. But as the 90s dawned, she started sounding stale and contrived to me. I'm not sure what it was. Maybe the scene in her documentary film Truth or Dare where she coldly brushes off an old friend from childhood made me think she was a bitch. Maybe the pretentious sterility of her softcore coffee table book Sex grossed me out. Or perhaps all the pseudo-intellectual accolades being lavished upon her by snotty pseudo-intellectuals destroyed all the fun she appeared to be having; maybe she started taking herself too seriously. Or maybe I was just growing up and finally started seeing her for what she was, a highly derivitave hack dressed like a stripper.

At any rate, by 1993 or 94, I'd had it with Madonna. Granted, I still liked some of her singles here and there--"Ray of Light" was pretty cool, I thought, and so was that song for Austin Powers. But, on the whole, Madonna became like a party I was relieved about not being invited to. Sure, all the Manhattan dance club hipsters still loved her, but that only revealed them to be vacuous and superficial idiots. Lately, I've had much more fun stroking my catty side and slinging mud at her.

It's nice to see that Camille Paglia finally understands what's been going on all these years.

Haute



Hack



$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$