Posted November 12
I enjoyed. Reading this master’s thesis on Madonna turned into an essay, written feverishly and in admiration, but also in erudition and down-to-earth criticism, I found a new, rich and playful voice. It’s the fiery pen of a young author, who seemed almost surprised that I called him to tell him about his book, a new essayist who chose to talk about an old pop singer. And not at all from the work of the great era, on the contrary, he writes about that of recent years, to tell us in short: listen, see how great it is, again.
The book focuses on two relatively recent works of the kind that made conservative parents of young people of my own generation rather shudder 30 years ago, namely the tour MDNA of 2012 and the short film secretprojectrevolution of 2013. It was in those years, I remember, that we began to hear these speeches which said that the Madonna did not know how to grow old, that she clung on, that she refused to take a step back with grace.
It is to have everything wrong, if you read this book, that it would be wrong to open without having previously viewed at least the short film it deals with, offered free online.
If there is a defect in the work, it is this one: we should have included some QR codes to clearly highlight the link between the text, the images and the sounds that it analyzes, so much rich and bushy, but somewhat arid without YouTube turned on next to it.
References and contradictions
What happiness, nevertheless, to dig into the references sown here and there in this tour and this film of maturity of the singer! Sometimes Wagner, sometimes Dante, but also Martin Luther King and James Baldwin, whom she enjoys quoting, digesting, making her own. The feminist speeches on the singer are not left out, Despentes celebrating her, others denigrating her. And as a result of all this, as is well known, Madonna embraces the ideas of a pop version of the Jewish Kabbalah, moreover rejected by the more official supporters of the thing, by which in short she affirms not without flagrant contradiction wanting to erase as much as possible his ego from his life.
These contradictions are as big as your arm, but these tensions are what make it interesting, supported me the author at the end of the line, when I had the impression that he was pacing, talking to me energetically about the one that kept him busy at school until the start of the pandemic, when he submitted his dissertation. She is not without contradictions, she knows it, but at least she tries, like this moment in the short film where she indulges in a very awkward comparison of struggles, saying that feminist struggles are taken less seriously than racial struggles. We raise eyebrows while listening to it, we are forced to think in any case.
When I saw this book hit shelves this fall, I thought the “orchestrated decline” of its subtitle had a lot to say about the ageism of the star system.
If there is a decline, it is not in the reduction of Madonna’s importance, it is rather that she knows how to come down to people, to reality, to go down to hell if necessary, after that the rise would have been so spectacular.
“I would really like to write a Lady Gaga book at some point,” Prud’homme-Rheault told me. And we will read it carefully, to understand how the art of the quotation at the center of Madonna’s work became the quotation of the quotation in Lady Gaga, who by this process subverts the mistress to swallow the swallowed instead.
For those who would live under a rock like me: it is not the joy between the two singers, the godmother would not appreciate the recovery by the new elected, but for the researcher in popular culture, it is their symbolic confrontation which is interesting.
Moved, I dropped off my copy of the book on a Friday evening, leaning on the counter of a bar in the Centre-Sud at the gates of the Village in Montreal, after reading a long quote from Baldwin on the status of the artist that likes to cover Madonna. This is taken from a text titled The artist’s struggle for his integrity. Baldwin writes that “even if you spent 40 years raising this child, these children, none of it belongs to you. You can only have by giving up. You can only take if you are ready to give. And giving is not spending the day at the sales counter. It is risking everything, yourself, everything you think you are”.
As I took the book back into my hands, I thought of this young author, who is dedicating his book to his parents. He would speak to me a few times about their significance during our conversation two days later, and their influence on his interest in popular culture. And I say to myself: none of this belongs to them.
Madonna: orchestrated decline
Lucas Prud’homme-Rheault
Miscellaneous
174 pages