‘She’s a bit too sexy’
Maya and Leila Crockski, twins, aged 10
Maya: The first time I heard Madonna was in the car. We were going on holiday so we were listening to the song Holiday. I thought it was … fine?
Leila: I remember hearing Holiday at the end of the film Trolls Holiday. My mum came in and said: “This is Madonna!”
Maya: Our mum is a Madonna superfan.
Leila: She’s too much of a Madonna superfan. She doesn’t play her as much as she wants to because our little sister is always playing her own music. But when she gets the chance, Madonna is all she will play.
Maya: She’s always playing Holiday and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Oh – that’s not Madonna? Whoops!
Leila: We’ve not seen her live but we’ve seen her in videos. She’s sassy.
Maya: She’s sexy. She’s always tipping her head back and running her arms across her face.
Leila: Her costumes are very cool and sexy.
Maya: If there’s anything we don’t like about her, it’s that she’s a bit too sexy.
Leila: Our friends have heard a few of her songs, but they’re not interested. We like her, though. She goes out there on stage and she’s only five years younger than our nanna! Good for her that she’s still got it!
‘Kissing Britney was tamer than dancing in a pink leotard’
Micha Frazer-Carroll, columnist, in her 20s
In the smokers’ area of a gay bar, it will be the solemn church organ of Like a Prayer that interrupts the conversation and makes your friends drag you back on to the dancefloor. In the buildup to the chorus, someone inevitably mentions that “I’m down on my knees, I wanna take you there” is actually double entendre – “did you know?” The combination of sexuality, high drama, over-the-top costuming, character transformation and provocative femininity that Madonna has become known for across her long career has always resonated with queer communities.
Think of the 1989 Jean Paul Gaultier cone bra, which took the corset – a garment associated with feminine restriction and regression – and made it spiky and weapon-like. Or three years later, when she wore a leather harness at Gaultier’s Aids fundraiser that revealed her completely bare breasts. Or the pink satin gloves and dripping diamonds in the Marilyn Monroe-inspired video for Material Girl, a ballad that simultaneously mocked commercialism and gave a wink to the undeniable allure of sacking it all in to be a gold-digger who’s treated like a princess.
My generation grew up with an incarnation of Madonna who presented an equally provocative and chaotic type of femininity. I’m just old enough to remember the infamous Madonna-Britney VMAs kiss, and the tabloid furore that trailed on for months. In hindsight, the queer element to it all feels a bit tame, with the potential exploitation of the two feeling like the most concerning factor. Two years later, she donned hot pink again in the video for Hung Up, and her choice to wear a leotard and dance around on the floor of a ballet studio felt unusual and boundary-pushing for the then 47-year-old.
Madonna’s ability to completely reinvent herself, in a Beatles-like fashion, is central to her ongoing relevance. But her ability to shapeshift, and to present new, surprising, unruly visions of womanhood, also connects with those of us who have always felt constrained by gendered expectations, and see gender and sexuality as a site of performance and play.
‘Breaking down barriers? Let’s not get carried away’
Shon Faye, author, in her 30s
It’s 1998. I’m 10 years old and watching the video for Frozen for the first time. A raven-haired, shape-shifting Madonna levitates over a desert wasteland as she intones the song, glaring like an uncanny enchantress. I am instantly obsessed. I tape the video so I can watch it again and again.
Since that moment, Madonna’s music has always been close by. Being a star with so many eras (Madonna pioneered the idea of pop artists having “eras”) some corner of her varied back catalogue always plays on the soundtrack to my life. In my teens, I learned the word “bourgeoisie” from the single Music (sorry, Karl Marx), and she thoughtfully released her last truly great album, Confessions on a Dance Floor, just before I came out and started frequenting gay clubs where its lead single, Hung Up, was always a staple. Frankly, you can’t spend as much time around gay men as I have and not have a prepared take on Madge ready to go when you’re (inevitably) asked.
Madonna revolutionised pop music by making it as much a visual experience as an aural one (a shift in the wider industry she both anticipated and expedited). Post-Madonna, being a pop artist was not just about the songs: it was about fashion, video, photography, live tours and televised performances. I dare anyone to watch the 1990 MTV Awards live performance of Vogue, in which Madonna and her dancers cavorted in costumes inspired by the court of Marie Antoinette, and not be gagged by how exciting it still seems in 2023. It was choreographed by Luis Camacho and Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza, both plucked straight from New York’s underground ballroom scene. Both appeared in the film Truth or Dare. When it comes to Madonna’s status as an LGBTQ+ icon, two things can be true at once: Truth or Dare, the first behind the scenes tour film of its kind, was groundbreaking for showing out gay men on screen, and she spoke about HIV and Aids when it was still controversial to do so. Yet some of those working-class Black and Puerto Rican gay men touring with her felt used and discarded by her after the tour ended.
Did Madonna break down barriers for women? Let’s not get carried away. As bell hooks argued, Madonna’s bold exhibition of her own sexuality always relied upon her being a white woman. The degree of control Madonna has exercised over her career says more about her slick opportunism and her ultra-thick skin than it does about women in pop more generally (Britney and Lady Gaga, both considered successors to Madonna, have been more palpably wounded by fame). Perhaps Madonna’s biggest transgression of all is one that continues to unfold: getting older and not demurely disappearing, as older women in culture are typically commanded to do.
‘She owns enough Tamara de Lempickas to fill a museum’
Emma Forrest, writer, in her 40s
If I had all the money in the world I’d buy my top five Gordon Parks photographs and Marilyn Monroe’s certificate of conversion to Judaism. I found the latter in the Christies catalogue entry for Monroe’s personal property, which includes first editions by Camus, Joyce, Ellison and Styron. Her personal taste was exceptional – as was that of the next motherless blonde star from a cruel upbringing, Madonna. Marinating in loneliness, it’s unsurprising such children can grow to be narcissists and gatherers. Of course they centre themselves and of course they collect art – paintings, first editions, historical homes – as talismans.
The famous agent Michael Ovitz, while admitting that he hadn’t succeeded in making Madonna a screen star, noted how cultured she was. There are said to be enough paintings by Tamara de Lempicka in Madonna’s collection for a museum. As for owning Frida Kahlo’s My Birth, she said: “If someone doesn’t like this painting, I know they can’t be my friend.” One might covet the waistlines of the born rich, got richer Kardashians, but their stuff? Both the homes and the contents are marble warehouses of emptiness. I am culturally interested in the Kardashians but they are not interested in culture. In the Michael Jackson documentary, the part that still haunts my nightmares is him taking Martin Bashir to a mall store full of faux antiques, where he trills “YOO HOO!” at the manager as he points out the terrible items he wishes to purchase. Madonna exposed the rarity of good taste co-existing with extreme wealth.
I think it’s because her mother died when she was six that Madonna’s “conversations” with female artists have been so important to her. Especially in love. With no mother to talk to, she re-created Lina Wertmüller for husband/director Guy Ritchie. She quoted Anne Sexton in a love-letter to her bodyguard. And in the Sex book, posing with boyfriend Tony Ward, she said she was referencing her admiration for Cindy Sherman.
Madonna was always a talent spotter, an eye like Isabella Blow – with whom she shared a lover on the way up in Basquiat. Even her backing dancer had cultural cachet: Debi Mazar, who would make a mark in Goodfellas. When Madonna wanted to meet Antonio Banderas it was because she loved Almodóvar movies. Though her films as director have been ill received, she gave Andrea Riseborough and Oscar Isaac lead roles a decade before anyone else.
She championed the pre-fame David Fincher over four extraordinary videos. Look on YouTube for Bad Girl, starring her and Christopher Walken, which grafts Looking For Mr Goodbar to Wings of Desire and is one of the greatest films Fincher ever made. Study 1:58 to 2.31 of Express Yourself for a dance masterclass in Martha Graham, with whom Madonna trained and excelled.
Her masterpiece is the Like a Prayer Album, which feels like all the female artists on her walls are watching her.
‘She told me she couldn’t get used to the Page 3 girl’
Miranda Sawyer, journalist, in her 50s
I interviewed Madonna in 2000 for The Face. She was heavily pregnant with Rocco and living in the UK. A lot of what we talked about was how odd she found living here. She couldn’t believe how expensive our houses were, how we all stopped working at 6pm and didn’t work weekends and went on holiday for a month in the summer. And our newspapers: “I can’t get used to the naked Page 3 girl,” she said. “You’re all a bunch of dirty wankers.” She sat on the floor, between the sofa and the coffee table, and ate crisps and olives.
We talked about her album Music. She was sharp, asking me: “Well, what do you think it’s about?” She noticed that my charm bracelet had a Star of David on it (I’m not Jewish), and we discussed religion; it was around her Kabbalah years. She talked about love: I remember her saying that she met a lot of high-up people, artists and writers and politicians, and she would think, “Interesting, interesting, interesting,” but no one stopped her in her tracks. She fell for Guy Ritchie because, “you know how people say, ‘He turned my head?’ My head spun around on my body.”
The oddest thing about the whole interview was how familiar she felt. Back then, pre-tweakments, I knew her face as well as my own: the hooded green eyes, the sharp chin, the gap in her teeth. I’d been looking at it for years, since she’d first appeared on Top of the Pops in 1984 singing Holiday. I’d cut out the poster of her with her tangly hair, her crop top, her bangles and rags from Smash Hits, and put it on my wall. And I’d watched as she’d moved from Like a Virgin to Like a Prayer and beyond, as she’d taken over the world. So to see her in real life was odd: a bit like seeing an old friend, a bit not. I’d been warned that she was “really, really difficult” and a “cold fish”, but she wasn’t like that at all. She was wry and a little impatient and careful about what she said because it would end up in the tabloids. She was much more beautiful than her pictures.
I’m of the generation of women for whom Madonna can do no wrong. I don’t care if she’s vulgar or embarrassing or pumps her face full of fillers or shows her bum in odd positions. Many of the people who criticise her are straight men, and despite her BOY TOY sexiness, she was never for them. Far too camp and knowing. She’s for clubbers, for women and gay people, who don’t care that she “can’t sing” or her music isn’t proper, or that she likes to dance and show off and surround herself with unserious people who are serious fun. I loved her before I met her. And I love her still.
‘She emerges from another chrysalis as a different gadfly’
Vivien Goldman, music writer, in her 70s
I did bristle and frown when I first heard Madonna, in her Material Girl moment. No doubt this was her intention. Her sensuous exultation in the switch from our gritty yet bold 1970s survivalism to the glossy, gold-plated “Me-terialism” of the awakening Reagan/Thatcher years seemed like an alert. A different sort of struggle was on, one in which our seething rebels of the punky underclass might no longer be the heroes, or even the anti-heroes. In the song’s video, Madonna exuberantly channelled tropes of 1950s sexuality – notably our sacrificial blonde, Marilyn Monroe, both brazen and demure as she huskily sang Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend. With Material Girl, Madonna was signalling, with a wink: “Who cares that Congress just rejected the Equal Rights Amendment! My old-school feminine wiles will always win!”
It was instructive for me to contrast the palette of Madonna – parrot-bright satin reds and sexy hot pinks – with that of her contemporary, beloved punk artiste Patti Smith. Around that time, Smith often wore a dark, oversize man’s jacket that looked like it was lifted from a scarecrow. (This was before Smith bonded with Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester, whose severe, angular designs could have come from an extremely stylish scarecrow.)
To her legions of fans, myself included (though I’m more the parrot satin type), the starkness of Smith’s look indicated a rugged asceticism. At last, it seemed to suggest, we could have an alternative anti-glamour free of the seemingly endless round of passive primping that is the fate of the sex symbol or trophy wife. They love it, but it is not for everywoman.
Madonna and Smith’s musical progressions chime in an interesting counterpoint, too. While Madonna restlessly seeks new sounds, new scenes, repeatedly wrapping herself in a fresh chrysalis and re-emerging as a different gadfly, Smith has consistently surrounded herself with the same stalwart sidemen since the start – guitarist Lenny Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty. The furthest she has strayed has been to perform with her late husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, fellow New Jersey-ite Bruce Springsteen and, latterly, her children.
But the great thing about both Smith and Madonna is that they’re both still at it. The Poet and the Pin-Up have given us two distinct poles on which to dance.
• Madonna’s Celebration tour begins at the O2, London, on 14 October.
