Madonna: Icon of Postmodernity
Jock McGregor argues that Madonna is a contemporary icon of postmodernity
Madonna has become one of the most successful and notorious female singers the world has ever seen. The Times spoke in these terms in 1991:
Even the rather staid Sunday Telegraph recognized her as the 'female Icon of the age...'
She arrived in New York City in 1976 at the age of eighteen, with $35 in her pocket. Just eight years later she broke the box office record at the Radio City Music Hall in New York, with the fastest sellout of any concert ever - 17,622 tickets sold out in 34 minutes. The entire tour, promoting her album 'Like a Virgin' and covering 27 cities throughout the US, sold out in two hours.
She
has had nine number one singles, 26 top fives, and eight number one
albums. Her run of sixteen consecutive top fives in the American charts
broke the record held previously by the Beatles. She has sold over 85
million albums worldwide, more than any other female singer in history.
Her personal fortune is well over $70 million. She was paid $5 million
for a single advert by Pepsi. At present she is under contract to Time
Warner and the value of that contract is estimated at around $60 million.
It is true that her popularity has waned in the past few years, but
she dominated the eighties and the early part of the nineties and is
still very much around.
She
has recently been in the charts with her new number one album 'Ray
of Light,' completed a starring role in the movie of the musical
'Evita,' and of course made headlines around the world
by becoming a mother. Whatever you think of her, there can be no doubt
that she has become one of the most phenomenally successful megastars
of our time.
But Madonna has been as controversial as she has been successful. The
New York Post columnist Ray Kerrison said this about her:
Michael Ignatieff says this:
Cindy Crawford said:
Charles Brenner of The Times says she
And Dr Sam Jones of the New York Medical College said:
Her blatant use and abuse of Christian symbols, her constant exhibitionism and her frequent graphic depiction of extreme sexual permissiveness have offended many.
Her
video 'Like a Prayer' was considered blasphemous and
after the American Family Association condemned it many US television
companies refused to show it. Her 'Blond Ambition'
tour was opposed by the Vatican in Italy, and her video 'Justify
my Love' was so offensive that the BBC and even MTV in
the United States banned it (which is saying something!) Even those
that bent over backwards to see what one could appreciate in her material
were silenced by the publication of her book at Christmas 1992. Titled
'Sex' and launched with a massive media event,
it contains graphic depictions of some of the most degrading sexual
practices that one could imagine. The fact that Madonna could produce
and star in such a pornographic book put her beyond the pale for most.
Since this 'Erotica' phase she has softened her image somewhat with more romantic and sophisticated material and is now moving in a 'spiritual' direction, but there is little doubt that this period proved a turning point in her popularity.
So who is this remarkable woman, this controversial woman? She was born to an Italian immigrant family, Silvio and Madonna Ciccone, in Michigan. She took her name from her mother; it was not a stage name She was the eldest daughter and the tragic death of her mother when she was only six years old, was to have a profound effect on her life.
Madonna was thrown into an adult role of helping to keep the home and the family of eight. Her father remarried a few years later, and Madonna has admitted that she was bitterly resentful towards her stepmother, Joan. The family were very strict Catholics, the children attending church every day at the Catholic school they went to. Although as a little girl she was actually quite deeply religious, it was not surprising that she began to rebel against this background. Her ambitions to dance had been apparent from an early age, and after pressure her father relented and allowed her to take ballet classes.
Her talent was immediately recognized by her instructors and she went on to win a place at the University of Michigan. But she did not complete the course because New City beckoned, and with little more than a one way air ticket and $35 in her pocket she headed for the Big Apple with dreams of stardom. She found part-time work in a hamburger joint and did the circuit of the New York dance clubs where eventually she met up with a string of very talented and influential DJs and musicians and so her musical career took off.
However, I do not intend to analyze her music or her musical career. I am not really in a position to do so as I do not generally listen to her music and I would not call myself a fan. So I will not try to assess her artistic gifts or credibility. My interest stems from a survey I read a number of years ago which rated Madonna as the number one female hero amongst young people. And then a little while later I read another survey that asked young girls who they modeled themselves on. The two at the top of the list were Madonna and Princess Di - a remarkable contrast of images. This stirred my interest in this woman as a cultural icon; a product of our age and a symbol of our age. Icons represent that which we are devoted to, our highest ideals and values.
When Madonna put out her single 'Material Girl' in the mid-1990s, many commented on the fact that she was epitomizing the spirit of the decade the materialism of that time. Some now are saying that she has become 'Spiritual Girl', reflecting the eclectic spirituality of the 90's. But I actually think that Madonna is more representative even than that. She is certainly extreme, but I believe she nonetheless highlights something much more widespread. What I want to look at then are the major features of Madonna as cultural icon, and to show how they act as a mirror for our generation and for our culture.
The aspect of Madonna that strikes one most is her use of image. Martin Amis has said:
Madonna lives out the cliché that the medium is the message. Because of her success and because of her hard work, she has total control over her shows. She writes the songs, produces the music, choreographing and dancing herself, designs the stage sets and even does her own make up and costume design. She is obsessively controlling of all aspects of her show. And not just her shows, but all the things she does. Her films, her public appearances, even her private life - all reflect a calculated image. Richard Morrison, of the Times, says this:
Madonna's whole life revolves around the presentation of her image. In her tour documentary 'In bed with Madonna' (US - 'Truth or Dare',) one scene shows her going to a doctor to get her voice checked. The movie camera is there with her the whole time, documenting every aspect of what is going on. Warren Beatty, her boyfriend at the time, comments with real insight on the situation. When the doctor asks "Do you want to talk at all off camera?" and she declines, Beatty says:
In many ways Madonna is a victim of her own image. She lives totally within the artificially constructed reality of the image. She has become one with her Image. But she is not alone in that. This is central, not just to Madonna, but also to our culture. Think of the tremendous developments of our technological age and the impact of the media that has come with it; image is dominating more and more of our lives. And increasingly we see the blurring of image and reality, the fusing of the public and private persona, the dissolving of the differences, so that everything becomes image and reality disappears. In politics style replaces substance, in commerce packaging and promotion replace quality, in society how you look replaces who you are, form replaces content, the outer presentation replaces the inner reality.
So many people live out their lives vicariously, through the image world of the Media, through TV, through soap operas, through armchair sport. Many join various subcultures where they take on the image of that group or scene. Gangs like punks or skins are an extreme, but there are other kinds of sub-cultural scenes ravers, travelers, clubbers, skateboarders, cyberpunks, grunge, techno and so on - where the individual is submerged in the collective image. The things that you say and do are all external, but the real you is lost. Life becomes virtual. Like Madonna, you just live in the image.
But there is another important aspect to Madonna's use of image and that is the constant change. She is always changing her image, whether it is from the good girl gone bad to the virgin in white; from Marilyn Monroe to the 1920s gangster moll, from androgynous, cold robot to naked sex symbol; from glamour queen to cosmic spirit and finally to doting mother. Her ability to change images every couple of years has fascinated the world, and has been vital to her success. Jeffrey Katzenberg, late Chairman of Walt Disney Studios, had this to say:
And of course this again reflects our culture. We are always looking for the new, always moving from one image to the next, swapping one artificial world for another, changing to meet the pragmatic needs of the moment or discarding the old when it becomes boring, demanding or problematic.
Madonna's use of image is complicated in a further way, because whilst she lives in her images, she refuses to fully identify with them. She says:
This playfulness comes through in all that she does - the self-parody in her films and the double entendres in her lyrics, the different levels of meaning and ironies that she uses again and again. Whenever people accuse her of something she responds:
Defending her stage performance she once said:
On the other hand, however, she wants us to believe that the image is real - she says "What you see is what you get, I'm not hiding anything". So she makes the video 'In Bed With Madonna', a reveal-all documentary. The attitude is: 'Let the camera roll, I don't have anything to hide.'
Once again, this ambivalence, this playing with images, on the one hand living in an image world, but on the other hand never quite committing to it, is very reflective of our present culture. It is particularly so of what has come to be called postmodern society: where we have lost faith in objective truth and absolutes. We have lost our belief that there is any overarching story about life, any overarching meaning to life, which is true absolutely for all time, for all people. Instead everything is just a matter of subjective perspective, everything is relative, depending on where you stand. Everything revolves around the world we choose or create for ourselves. There is no reality; there are only images, different images. Now if there is no objective reality then we are in a sense trapped in this situation of only being able to live an image. We can only see the world from where we stand, from that context, that sub-culture, that language-game, that constructed reality, that image.
And so Madonna stands in one place, one image, and she cannot ever escape that image because there is no objective reality. But at the same time she can never commit to that place, that image, since she realizes that with time she will be standing in another place. So there is no commitment. And anyway, why commit to something you know is not real. This is her dilemma and this is the dilemma of postmodernity. The dilemma is that there is no one place we can all stand and say this is real, this is the real meaning, this is what is, this is who I am. Because you are always trapped in your subjectivity, you are always trapped in the images and because they are only images it would be foolish to commit to them. Why commit to something that is not absolute. So you have the ambivalence of Postmodernity.
Graham Cray has said perceptively:
This term, much used but rarely defined, relates to a loss of trust of the modern and of future progress, and a resulting search of the past and of other cultures for the basis of a new set of values and a pattern of life. One commentator on Madonna has said that Post-Modernism should better be called 'shopping' - 'the world and all of history is a vast supermarket, and you can just pick out the ingredients you like, and assemble them into your own version of something'.
Since there is no overarching truth, no single narrative, we are just people trapped in separate subcultures, in different image-worlds and anyone can simply come along and plunder them, pick out what they want and create their own. Cray continues:
Having abandoned absolutes, we have become lost in what someone has described as a 'playful indeterminacy'. It is indeterminate in the sense that no one really knows Truth, each is resigned to living in his or her own image subculture, but it remains nonetheless playful. But what a desperate, despairing sort of playfulness, what a laughing in the face of emptiness. Someone has rightly called it 'Nihilism with a smile'. This is the tragedy of Madonna and this is the tragedy of our postmodern culture.
Let me turn now to some of the implications of this as they are reflected in Madonna.
Firstly we note that she presents herself very much as a rebel and iconoclast, with a need to shock and shock again. She is always rebelling against any form of authority, whether it is her father, the church or middle class society. She describes herself as a sexual revolutionary. Here again you see the prevalence in our culture of the anti-hero. The Postmodern hero is always the rebel, always the anarchist, always the one tearing down the large framework, breaking it down, deconstructing it. In postmodern society any authority, any framework, any dogma, that claims a base in absolutes is automatically subject to ridicule and subversion.
Secondly, the tone for Madonna is always upbeat and fun-loving. Her music is dance music; it is energetic, vibrant. She excuses everything she does with "Hey, come on, don't get too serious about things, let's have fun." And why not, because you only have two choices when you get trapped in images: you either despair, which is what people did in the 60s and 70s as they looked at meaninglessness; or you say "well there is no absolute truth, no way out of the image trap, so why not relate and enjoy it. Pick an image, have fun in it, and then when it gets boring and it's not working for you anymore, jump into another image." All the while having fun - a desperate gaiety.
Thirdly, what flows also from this postmodernist perspective is a radical individualism. Though there is often much talk of being in community, in the final analysis you only have yourself, your own little world from which you can look. You do not have a reality out there, where you can find common ground with other people. It is all about your self and self-realization You create the image, you create your life and your world around you. By your choices and your effort you can succeed. Madonna has been phenomenally successful because of her tremendously ambitious drive. A complete workaholic, she works exhaustingly hard at everything she does. Building her life, building her image, building her career ... ambition and careerism taken to its ultimate. She has said:
But what other choice has she? There is only her chosen reality, there is no common reality 'out there' to become a part of. You just have your choices and the self that you create self-realization, individualism.
Fourthly, along with the individualism, one sees a number of obsessions in Madonna, which reflect obsessions we find in our culture. There is her physical obsession, partly reflective of her image orientation, because image is all about the externals. In many ways she is a good role model - she does not take drugs, she never drinks alcohol, she jogs five miles a day, she works extremely hard, she diets very carefully. In fact she is obsessed with keeping herself in tone. When she did her book 'Sex' she waited until her body was just right, so she could use herself as the model. This again reflects our culture. We are a physically obsessed culture. Think of the constant concerns for body-shape, for dieting, for aerobics, and then some of the unhealthy consequences like eating disorders. These things bubble up because people in our culture are obsessed with the physical image.
Madonna is sexually obsessed as well. She says:
Sex is a means to power and power is a means to self-realization It is an unashamed approach to sexual obsession, a kind of designer decadence. Not something that is hidden but something that is brazenly explored and exploited. Her only boundaries, when it comes to sex, are "rape is wrong" and "wear a condom". Otherwise, absolutely anything goes. This has been a constant theme through all her music, her films and everything else. Again, it represents our culture very effectively. Camille Paglia has said:
Finally, Madonna reveals a loss of identity. Behind all this drive, ambition, success, career, fame, she has lost herself. She is empty and lost. As she admits in her documentary, she surrounds herself with emotionally needy people:
The loss of her mother is significant here. She has said:
Elsewhere she says:
It's very moving when you look at this woman in all her decadence, in all her success and find beneath it all such a lost, sad and lonely person. That really reflects our culture. We see people lost in the images. Stridently, aggressively, demandingly using and abusing, pushing and shoving yet underneath ... they are lost.
What ties all these comments that I have made about Madonna and about our culture together, is postmodernity Having abandoned absolute truth, a sense of one narrative that gives meaning to all of life, we have become lost in the 'playful indeterminacy' of images. We are adrift in a sea of sub-cultural alternatives with no fixed point to guide us, no solid ground to stand on, no firm foundation on which to build our lives. We are a generation of floaters, of drifters. We have the world at our feet, but no place to rest our head.
No one has described this postmodern generation better than Douglas Coupland. It was he who, in his classic first book, termed us Generation X, the children of postmodernity, the first generation to grow up without any absolutes. Since then Generation X has become something of a buzz word, but this is not just an interesting cultural observation, a stimulating topic for dinner conversation. This is a terrible tragedy of lost and aimless lives. Coupland certainly recognizes that and in a later book, aptly called "Life After God," he is even so moved as to venture out of the safety of academic detachment and hint at a solution. Listen to what he says in his closing chapter:
For Coupland the solution to postmodernism must be a return to God. Where else can we find a source of absolutes? Where else can we find a fixed reference point? Who else can tell us what is True, Who else can tell us the meaning of Life, Who else can tell us who we are? If we look to ourselves we are lost in a sea of relativity. But if we look to God, the Creator of all things, we find the Rock of Truth, a firm foundation for our lives. If we look to God, we will find our place in this world, we will find ourselves. The Cosmos is not empty - there is a God. The Heavens are not silent - God has spoken. He has spoken a word of Truth, a word of Life.
Nietzsche said God is dead, we only have ourselves. The result has been the steady disintegration of Truth, the fragmentation of our Culture into the meaninglessness of postmodernism, and ultimately the loss of our very selves. But God is not dead. He is alive and he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. Christianity is not a Philosophy, a clever metaphysical framework designed by people to explain the unknown. Christianity is not even a Religion, an intricate system of rituals developed to give emotional comfort. Christianity is Historical Truth. In the Bible God has spoken an objective Word. In Jesus, God has entered history. A concrete event in Time and Space.
Postmodernism is about Images. Christianity is about Reality. The Reality of God. The Reality of his Word to us. The Reality of his Revelation in Jesus, and the Reality of His Love for us. We are a lost generation. Who can deliver us from the hollowness and emptiness of our Image culture? - Only God can. We have a choice in life. To remain adrift in the sea of Images or to plant our feet on the Rock of Reality. To pursue our endless journey of non-commitment or to find our destination in a commitment to Reality, to Truth, to God. The Foundation of Reality is the person of Jesus Christ, the full Revelation of God Himself. A commitment to him is a commitment to Truth, a commitment to Life. And we can commit to Him without fear because, in Jesus, God has first committed Himself to us. The choice is yours: Madonna, Icon of postmodernity or Jesus Christ, Foundation of Reality.
© 1997 Jock McGregor