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Undeserved, Lofty, and Laughable Prose; - reviewers, etc., who heap praise on M
Topic Started: Dec 1 2005, 03:11 PM (2,036 Views)
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Rock Star From Mars

Sometimes, we see positive reviews of Madonna and her products.

Which is barfy, to be sure, but what really gets to me is when the reviewer/ critic / journalist writes extremely "flowery" or uplifting commentary or descriptions of the piece of cultural trash known as Madonna (and/or her performances or products).

Here's one example I spotted...

Source: Drowned Madonna, quoting "MTV asia - Artiste of the month."

The MTV Asia page is located Here

While this public relations tripe is understandably filled with many Madonna butt-kissing moments (e.g., "With Confessions, Madonna has returned to her dance-oriented material and brilliantly re-invented dance music for our time."), here's one line that really made me want to wretch (spelling? Maybe it's 'retch'?):
  • ... the yoga practitioner proved her tenacity and grit with a rousing performance that pushed the adrenalin of the crowd to new heights.
"... [A] rousing performance that pushed the adrenalin of the crowd to new heights?" - Oh puh-leeze. :gagme: :rolleyes2:

Also, in a nod to a theory that someone had here that Madonna's horse accident may have not been an accident at all (or if it was, it was hyped up) so that she could then say, "Why, I may be 47, but I'm tougher than most 27 yr olds,' or 'Nothing stops me ever' etc, this appeared in the above p.r. release at the MTV site, in the set up for the line I found so stupid:
  • The resilent performer might have suffered serious injuries from a horse-riding related accident in August this year, but that did not hinder the singer from opening the Europe Music Awards barely months after with her troupe of dancers. Performing her brand new single "Hung Up," the yoga practitioner proved her tenacity and grit with a rousing performance that pushed the adrenalin of the crowd to new heights.
Their side bar ("Why are we so hung up on Madonna?") on that page is filled with several oft-repeated, inaccurate or untrue observations, too.
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thatgillanwoman
Shanghi-ed Away
[ *  *  * ]
This was too delicious not to share

Plague of the pop tarts

By Julie Burchill

The biggest bullshitter in town, Madonna, is well into her stride with her latest "re-invention," and don't we Brits know it! It was bad enough having to live with these periodical spasms of self-regard when she lived in the U.S., but ever since she married the equally phoney Guy Ritchie - how did Mr Madonna get that tough-guy scar? Fell off his polo pony and landed on his silver spoon? - and came to live in dear old Blighty, it isn't just the pop-culture-icon who the cultural commentators are getting their knickers in a twist sucking up to anymore, it's "our" pop-culture-icon. The amount of forelock-tugging and bum-sucking that goes on from the media, you'd swear she was heir to the throne.

They fawn over everything and anything about her - her poor new record, her mothering skills, her scary thighs. The one thing they have any amount of skepticism whatsoever about is her belief in kabbala. And, uncharacteristically, it's hard for a me to know where I stand on this mockery, me being a full-on philo-Semite and all that. Should I applaud this press cynicism, kabbala seeming as it does to have about as much to do with Judaism proper as a blonde alcoholic Muslim show-jumper? Or should I be wary of it, being well aware of the anti-Semitism virus that lies just beneath the surface of almost every apparently polite society? After all, Madonna goes in for lots of other flagrant BS - Michael Moore, yoga, pretending one can "have fun" with Gwyneth Paltrow - and she doesn't get ridiculed for any of them.

It doesn't help that her fellow pop tart kabbala followers - Britney Spears and Victoria Beckham - both have reputations for being a few lines short of a gram, and for not being the types who would get involved in any proper religion lest it ask something outrageous of them such as charity, humility or modesty. Britney in particular, through her dabblings in the cult, seems to view God as a cross between a shrink and a bodyguard, who has helped her "clear all the negative energy and turn my life around" while the cute little red string bracelet will keep all the nasty player-haters at arm's length.

And the signs are she's getting dumber, not smarter; since finding her faith, she memorably commented to Allure magazine that Michael Jackson might become a better human being if he grew a moustache, went to a bar and got into a fight. Baptist, kabbalist - is Britney absolutely sure she wouldn?t be happier as a Satanist? And tellingly, the stunningly shallow Victoria Beckham − the girl with the size-zero soul - is reported to be "torn" between kabbala and Scientology, as she can't decide who she wants to suck up to more - Madonna or Tom Cruise.

No one is saying our pop culture icons need to be great theologians; Michelle Pfeiffer, a fine actress and lovely broad, is widely reported to have become involved with a sinister "metaphysical/vegetarian cult" in the early '80s, which she amusingly joined as she believed it would help keep her slender, and no one thinks any the less of her for it. But at least the appeal to vanity is out in the open here. In the case of Madonna, what one really objects to, even more than the pious anti-materialist rants of this most money-grubbing of entertainers, is the fact that she has claimed some familiarity, however peripheral, with the greatest religion the world has ever seen - and reduced it to something that cleared up her husbands verrucas.
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Rock Star From Mars

thatgillanwoman, since someone else already posted that same Julie Burchill article, I may move your post to their thread. :)
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Not exactly "lofty" praise - it sounds as though a college junior wrote this - but it does contain some laughable, definitely undeserved praise.

The reviewer also spends a long time discussing Gwen Stefani and how she is allegedly no match for Madonna.

The Madonna Method

Excerpts:
  • This is where Madonna the old-timer finally trumps Stefani the maverick. There’s a gravitas to even the fluffiest material on Confessions that Stefani hasn’t yet mustered, even in tunes as serious and emotionally potent as “Cool.” Some portion of this quality is a function of Madonna’s age, of course; she’s been around long enough—and been world-historical in stature for long enough—that what she says carries weight simply because we’re so used to listening to her. But to some degree, she was getting away with this way back in 1984, and she certainly was by 1989, when “Like a Prayer” and “Express Yourself” were redefining the role audacity should play in pop.

    Confessions on a Dance Floor doesn’t consciously push buttons like that earlier stuff did—or like Stefani’s stuff does at the moment—but in its way it’s just as audacious. In fact, the Madonna method on the album could almost be considered a sort of meta-method: she’s accomplished so much that the energy she’s best at absorbing right now is her own.
About this comment:

Some portion of this quality is a function of Madonna’s age, of course; she’s been around long enough—and been world-historical in stature for long enough—that what she says carries weight simply because we’re so used to listening to her.

Yes, exactly what I've been saying for a year or so now. Just by sheer fact of her age and years in show biz, some people automatically bestow Madonna with legitmacy and importance, and I think that's wrong.

I beg to differ with this defense of American Life:
  • On Life, Madonna took aim at the emptiness of American consumer culture, and her willing participation in it; detractors claimed the music was hollow, which was precisely the point.
No, Madonna made a mistake. She miscalculated. The music on that record sucked. She was not intentionally trying to make a hollow, musically terrible record.
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I do like Gwen's hair here:
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This has some insults, too:
Quote:
 
Here's a great Confessions On A Dance Floor album review from The Village Voice newspaper

Madge's House

The b***h is back, chirren, and this time you'd best believe she owns the whole domain

by Joan Morgan
December 12th, 2005 3:43 PM

Don't get me wrong when I say I am the last person to get excited about a new Madonna album. I think the b***h—and I use the term in the universal spirit of concession that dope women and gay men make to the finest females of our species—is beyond fierce. Any woman capable of catapulting herself to cultural icon, and then holding the public imagination for over two decades, deserves her due and then some. But this has never changed the fact that Madonna is a mediocre singer at best—her tinny, rangeless voice is an accessory to her formidable artistic vision rather than its focus—or that her tracks tend to be both plagued and blessed by the kind of mass-marketable vapidity that can zoom a song to the top of the pop charts and invade needed brain-space simultaneously.

But to me, Madonna's music has never been as significant as the sum of her iconic parts—roles that include tastemaker, sexual explorer, feminist, status quo agitator, consummate party girl, and business woman extraordinaire. Even in recent years, when Madonna seemed to be searching for her place in a shifting pop landscape—the stupid attention-seeking kiss with Britney, her dismal American Dream CD, the flop that was Swept Away, and her latest incarnations as kabbalah champion and children's-book author—she'd still made enough contributions to American popular culture to rest on her well-earned laurels. Bottom line: Madonna has always been bigger and better than her music. Until now.

With Confessions on a Dance Floor, Madonna at long last finds her musical footing. Easily dance record of the year, Confessions is an almost seamless tribute to the strobe-lit sensuality of the '80s New York club scene that gave Madge her roots, which she explores with compelling aplomb. Much credit to co-producer Stuart Price. His understanding of dance music's elementals—driving ebb and flow tempered by pulsating bass, the over-the-top drama of synthesized strings, and even scratchy LP transitions—places Madonna squarely mid-center in a genre that, at its very best, inspires the absence of thought, conjures the quest for abandon, promotes the blurring of boundaries, and eschews the cerebral for a pulsing carnality. This is clearly her domain. Call the chirren y'all. Madge is taking it to church.

"Hung Up," the CD's hit single and opening track, is a relentless onslaught of pure groove. Less an invitation to dance than a command, it is clear indication that at 47 Madonna has every intention of asserting her generational claim as one of the genre's prime progenitors. This may be a house now tended by Madge's musical spawn—Christina, Gwen, and (sigh) Britney—but the track's ass-shaking compulsion makes it clear that Madge wants us to recognize this is the house that she built. b***h.

The momentum builds rapidly with a seamless transition into the wicked alchemy of "Get Together," where Madge and Price offer up an irresistible manipulation of rather sweet vocals laced over thumping percussion, seductive synthesizers, and a few subtle soul-claps thrown in for good measure. The party continues admirably with the multilingual, kick-your-man-to-the-curb "Sorry." Things slow significantly, however, with the techno-driven tedium and spiritual ramblings of "Future Lovers," and stop altogether with "I Love New York," which from the triteness of the opening sirens to "I don't like cities but I like New York/Other places make me feel like a dork" makes her seem oddly removed from the pulse of the city she long claimed as her own. Forgive her. You need the break to go to the restroom and get a glass of water anyway, because from the confessionals of "Forbidden Love" to the Sting-inspired playfulness of "Push," things liquefy into one hot, sweaty, lovely mess.

What else really can I say? It's Madonna. b***h.

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Oh this is funny. This thing contains several pro-Madonna cliche's, and tosses in one about her being a "brainy blonde." Since when is having a lot of money (or awards) necessarily a measure of intellect (yes, those are the examples they cite to demonstrate that she's allegedly a "brainy blonde")?

What I'll do is present you with the actual text (scan of clipping is below), and then I'll write a more accurate version of this same caption.

The actual text reads,
  • "I'm a businesswoman," says Madonna, who despite changing hair colors like some people change socks, tops our list of brainy blondes, in her more than 20 years in the spotlight, the Material Mom, 47, has sold millions of records, won numerous awards, acted in over 20 films, launched her own record label, and authored best-selling books for both adults and children. The result? A fortune of an estimated $450 million. So what's left for the reigning pop diva? Madonna says she wants to "reconcile science and spirituality."
The more accurate version:
  • "I used to try to hide this from the public, but these days, I can't. It's obvious: I'm a businesswoman, or I want people to think I'm a savvy businesswoman, that I come by business genius naturally. I'm more interested in generating profit than in making great music for music's sake," says Madonna.

    The Material Mom, 47, has sold millions of records (but let's not forget her flop 2003 "American Life" record), won numerous awards that she didn't deserve - since she is overly-reliant on big-name album producers and rips off the personas and styles of other entertainers, acted poorly in over 20 films, launched her own record label which fared poorly and so she had to abandon it, and authored books for both adults and children (the adult book being the trashy "Sex" release of the early 1990s, and the children's books apparently selling well only because each fan bought more than one copy apiece).

    The result? A fortune of an estimated $450 million, which she uses for horrible plastic surgery, which results in an unnaturally looking high forehead.

    So what's left for the reigning pop diva? Madonna says she wants to "reconcile science and spirituality" as soon as she figures out how to unscrew the cap off one of her child-proof pill bottles in her medicine cabinet.
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:laugh:
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According to the Tribe, some people find the crap that comes out of Manny's mouth quote-worthy. I wonder if this collection includes the very cerebral "I find crucifixes sexy"? I mean, that's SO irreverent and ahead of its time...(I'm using "irreverent" in the same way pseudo-intellectuals praised John Lennon's "We're more popular than Jesus" comment, LOL.)
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I saw this thing last night at a book store. It's a tiny square book full of inane quotes, even much-less-regurgitated ones such as (ready for this?) "I believe in God." The "artsy" design of this thing (with the photos, positioning of fonts, and black-on-white) is so comical it has to be seen to be believed. The funniest part is, some of the photos featured are not even of Manny or anyone connected to her!
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According to the bottom of the web page, the following is written by an Annalee Newitz, who "is a graduate student in English at UC-Berkeley currently writing her dissertation on monsters and psychopaths in contemporary American mass culture"

I guess Madonna could be classified as a monster or psychopath :laugh:

This paper goes on and on and on. She put entirely too much thought into Madonna. Here's the link:

Madonna's Revenge
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Madonna is not a musician. Certainly, she achieved fame within the music industry, but perhaps it might be more accurate to say that she began to be famous within the music industry.

Quote:
 
But clearly, Madonna is history.

Quote:
 
...her fans have been juveniles...

I agree with the above statements, but she lost me before I even came across the word "irony". And I may have been only 11 or 12 at the time, but I'm pretty sure the intellectual community didn't go gaga over "Lucky Star" and "Borderline" like, "Oooh, what a clever woman - she's playing with gender and tradition!"
Gag.
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This person should have typed "HYPOCRITE" in caps, but I guess that would be too much truth about M for them to handle. Still, this is an interesting admission:
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Rock Star From Mars

Comments by me are below this:
Sirlin: Scene But Not Heard
  • The Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Washington, D.C.
    Author: Joe Brown
    Date: Dec 2, 1988

    "The designer's role is generally to create sort of a background," [Jerome Sirlin] says. "The playwright writes 90 minutes of words, which the actors come on and speak. And the set doesn't usually say anything."

    But Sirlin's settings - he's designed stages for artists from George Coates to Madonna - are anything but innocuous backgrounds. In fact, he describes his work for "1,000 Airplanes" as "a visual libretto," an analog to the script.

    .... When invited to design Madonna's "Who's That Girl" world tour, Sirlin says he decided arena audiences should have something to watch "besides blinking lights and a tiny dot on stage," and he worked closely with the Material Girl on visually expressing her songs.

    "For `Papa Don't Preach,' I thought, maybe we're talking about more than one papa here, the papas of the world - the Pope, Reagan - all these Great Fathers telling all the women of the world what to do with their bodies and their lives." So Sirlin's projections on the enormous stage swept Madonna from a tough neighborhood to the White House and the Vatican.
I don't think Madonna is capable of coming up with anything remotely intellectual on her own, yet many (especially stupid, post modern feminist professors, and Madonna supporters in the media) credit Madonna with making profound, brainy societal/ cultural statements.

I am willing to bet that such Manny fans (feminists / writers) assumed that Madonna was the one who came up with the idea to put images referring to the Pope, Reagan, etc. in her show when all along it was this set designer guy.

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You'll also see a lot of flowery language utilized in "academic" works on Madonna.

One of the first things I ripped on at the Anti Madonna site in 2003 was this kind of crap, the kind of crap (written by phDs, college students, etc) that attempts to find (or attribute) deep meaning to Madonna and/or her products:

Deconstructing Expressionism: Capitalist discourse in the works of Madonna

The dialectic paradigm of narrative, textual objectivism and feminism

Perhaps the funniest thing to me is that Madonna would not be able to comprehend either article listed above, as one would have to be able to read at college-level to do so. I don't think Madonna would know what terms that appear in both works (such as "dialectic discourse" or "patriarchialist") means. :roll:
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I am going to place other excerpts from this piece into another thread because at its core is the contention that Madonna (or her actions) have not really helped the homosexual community.

Madonna and Queer Theory - by Reena Mistry
  • ....(Whereas traditionally dancing has been used to display the female body to men, Madonna uses it to signify fun and self-indulgence. Hence the lyrics of Into the Groove: 'Only when I'm dancin' do I feel this free'. 'Free' implies freedom from the male gaze; further dance signifies power, energy and vitality, rather than passivity (Bradby 1994:85; Skeggs 1993:67)).
I thought Stephen Bray wrote most all of the Into the Groove song, so shouldn't these authors be analyzing Bray instead? :laugh:

And how, exactly, do you read into the lines "only when I'm dancing do I feel this free" that it has to do with "disrupting the male gaze?"
  • Madonna is also seen to appropriate 'masculine' power through her notoriety for having complete control over her career and image in a way that other female artists do not (Skeggs 1993:64; Robertson 1996:127).
That moldy, oldy chestnut. She's not the first woman to have total control over her career. Marilyn Monroe did it in the 1950s when she established her own production company, for instance.
  • The video reproduces the elements of blondness, sexuality and gold-digging, but 'parodies the gold-digger's self-commodification as a form of 1980s crass materialism: "The boy with the cold hard cash is always Mr. Right/ Cause we are living in a material world, and I am a material girl"' (Robertson 1996:126).
"Material Girl" was not written by Madonna.

It's funny that fans and such keep attributing thoughts and qualities to Madonna based on someone else's work.
  • By manipulating the femme fatale image, Madonna demonstrates its constructedness and performativity; further, simply by imitiating Monroe as one of a succession of images in her career, Madonna mocks femininity as a 'meta-masquerade'.
Really? Is that what Madonna was doing?

I don't think Madonna was 'mocking' feminity in that video; she was simply ripping off a dead celebrity.

People read stuff into Madonna's videos, movies, songs, etc. that just isn't there.
  • Madonna seems to be a willing 'queer' supporter: she has publicly aligned herself with gay politics being one of the first celebrities to perform in AIDS benefits; biographies refer constantly to her close friendship with her gay dance teacher Christopher Flynn; and she has jokingly refused to clarify he nature of her 'friendship' with Sandra Bernhard (Robertson 1996:130-1).
The key word there is "seems." Madonna is using you.
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I intended for this thread to be used as examples of lofty prose about Madonna, but I thought this blog page -which is kind of critical of the practice- would fit in too:

The Gutter Sniper: After the Madonna "Curve", we have the "Effect"
  • Apr 8, 2008

    Further proof that Madonna is not in fact just a muscian but rather a Very Serious Force In The World: she has her own "Effect".

    Ah yes, that's right. Last week we got to grips with the Madonna Curve, Nato's new model of "extreme makeover" (and not, apparently, an April Fools' Joke). Since then Vanity Fair has given us "Madonnarama" - although paired with a piece so inanely sycophantic that we're not sure it counts (sample quote: "the world is a series of rooms, which are arranged like concentric circles... and at the center of all those rooms Madonna sits alone, in a white dress, dreaming of Africa.")

    And now there's a third instalment in her rapidly-growing armoury of high-brow neologisms: she has an "Effect". Surprisingly, it has very little to do with the consequences of Spandex addiction and rather a lot to do with third world development.

    Yesterday said effect made headlines in the Daily Mail (where else?) after Liverpool University published a report into the effect of celebrities adopting from the third world; turns out Madge's custody battle with the Malawian authorities has had something of a knock-on effect:

    We found that parents in poor countries are now giving up their children in the belief that they will have a better life in the West with a more wealthy family. Some celebrities have unwittingly encouraged international adoption, yet it has been shown that 96 per cent of children in orphanages across Europe and probably across the globe are not true orphans and have at least one parent, often known to the local authorities.

    None of which bodes terribly well for her next adoption but (thankfully!) hasn't affected her record reviews.
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Another one. This is the kind of thing they use to write about Madonna and her videos, now they're doing it to Lady Gaga and her videos:

Deconstructing Lady Gaga's 'Born This Way' Video

I totally disagree with the first line here:
  • There's also definite visual homage to Madonna's "Express Yourself" video [in Gaga's video], which everybody needs to get over because Gaga just really loves Madge, okay? Also, they're both borrowing from Fritz Lang, anyway, so...wash.
I don't really see any Madonna influences in the Gaga video.

And this:
  • Even made up as a skeleton, Gagaloo manages to somehow look charming. She wears a suit in yet another "Express Yourself" nod, playing with the notion of gender and grabbing her crotch like Madonna, while rocking her famous high ponytail.
Those parts of her video were a Michael Jackson Thriller/Off the Wall rip off, not a Madonna rip off.

BTW, Michael Jackson was grabbing his crotch in his videos all the time before Madonna was. Everyone keeps acting like Madnna did it first: wrong.


The following link was cross posted to the "feminism" thread.
People used to write intellectual books, columns, and such about Madonna, which I always thought was absurd.

I am happy to see that academics and feminists are now directing their attention to
Gaga and are now writing intellectual drivel about her instead.

Here's an article where the author (the author is Ann Powers) over-analyzes Gaga and Gaga's impact on, and meaning to, society and women:

Lady Gaga's 'Born This Way' video: Making goddess culture accessible
  • Lady Gaga has every right -- and, you could even argue, a responsibility -- to fashion her own creation myth. The civil rights activism that serves as both gimmick and moral center in her art resonates more strongly if it’s backed by real political involvement; but since she’s an artist, after all, sometimes symbolic shows of solidarity are enough.

    Her new video for “Born This Way” is one such declaration of alliance. Though it’s freaky enough to convince the casual viewer that it’s totally original, the Nick Knight-directed clip simply updates radical feminist lore for the cyber-prosthetic age. In doing so, Gaga gives a slimy new sheen to the Second Wave catchphrase “goddesses in every woman.” Yet for all of the intensity of the scenes where Gaga updates the feminist practice of myth-remaking to make room for both sci-fi surrealism and machine goods, the video ultimately fails its own message -- and all for the glory of a bikini.

    While some have rejected the song “Born This Way” as a straight woman’s misguided attempt to claim queerness as her own, its instant cultural omnipresence proves that many fans accept and even revel in Gaga’s symbolic volunteer leadership. (For great queer analysis of Gaga’s work, I highly recommend the writing that J. Jack Halberstam and Tavia Nyong’o have been doing on the Bully Bloggers website.)

    “Born This Way” is the culmination of Gaga's informal campaign. Its housey beats and diva wails strut through the history of LGBT clubland, and the lyrics make explicit the elements of liberation more subtly driving Gaga’s earlier work: the self-determination in “Poker Face,” the determination to survive depicted in the video for “Paparazzi”; the victimization recast as empowerment in “Bad Romance”; the celebration of sensuality as a route to innocence in “Alejandro.” In one disco-fabulous fell swoop, “Born This Way” completes Gaga’s metamorphosis from dance floor-damaged freak baby to doyenne of the disenfranchised. She is post-gender, hear her roar.

    The video backs up this move with the oldest trick in the radical feminist book: reinventing Genesis. “In the infinite moment before time, the Goddess arose from chaos and gave birth to herself,” reads one creation myth, recorded not at the beginning of time but circa 1971. Feminist writers such as Jean Shinoda Bolen, Mary Daly, Starhawk and Riane Eisler gave women a way to view spirituality beyond the male-dominated religions of their youth; uncovering (or, sometimes, inventing) new myths was a key part of this process.

    The goddess movement certainly addressed sexuality, but it was not conventionally sexy -- like many whose lives were changed by Second Wave feminism, its adherents mostly rejected the trappings of lipstick-and-lace femininity, instead favoring flowing Wiccan skirts and fair-trade ethnic jewelry. Gaga, raised under the shadow of the Catholic cross but also at the makeup table in her mom’s boudoir, uses the “Born This Way” video to sprinkle some of her trademarked plastic glitter glamour on the goddess role.

    In a move typical of today’s vehemently anti-separatist, often apolitical “post-feminism,” Gaga makes goddess culture accessible by pairing its touchstones with images borrowed from fine art, cinema and cool subcultures (her partner in the vid’s Black Madonna sequences, for example, isn’t a boy god or a female consort but the ever-so-hip tattoo extremist Zombie Boy).

    Turning goddess culture dystopian and sexy -- and focusing not on the often militantly uncool women’s movement that (pun avoidable) birthed it, but on the queer community that, lately, has been making remarkable inroads in the Glee-ful mainstream -- Gaga has found a way to place female empowerment at the center of her vision without sacrificing the gains she makes by being a daddy’s girl or a “boy toy.”

    This, more than any sonic tie-in with Madonna’s songbook, is what makes Gaga most like the Material Girl. Madonna broke ground at a point in feminism’s history when the movement’s radicalism was beginning to feel strident to some, especially to younger women. Gaga has emerged at a similar moment. A new generation of feminist writers, artists and activists is taking charge, and these strong voices need partners in popular culture to reflect and magnify their challenges and their dreams. Gaga has been doing her best to fit that role.

    I wish, though, that Gaga could recognize the point where her crowd-embracing self-liberation begins to feel like the same old girlie show. The “Born This Way” video may include fascinating images of intergalactic birth (including one shot of Gaga pulling a gun from her lower regions that strangely echoes one of Second Wave feminism’s best known performance art works, “Interior Scroll” by Carolee Schneemann), but it also spends much time focusing on Gaga dancing in a scant bikini.

    The Matthew Barney-lite body prostheses Gaga wears during these sequences don’t make up for the fact that they’re just so much showgirl strutting. She and choreographer Laurieann Gibson don’t even come up with dance moves that register as distinct from what we’ve seen in Gaga's previous videos. It’s probably too much to ask, in a time when radical reconciliation with the mainstream is pretty much defining pop culture, that Gaga find some way beyond the marketplace’s demand for plain old female objectification. But as far as she’s gone -- to the last galaxy and back -- she hasn’t arrived there yet.
I know that is about Gaga, but again, that is the same kind of stuff one used to see about Madonna in the 1990s.
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Rock Star From Mars

Entirely too much thought went into this.

This resides somewhere between defending Madonna and not defending Madonna.

RAZER ON MADONNA: STILL A POWERFUL REMINDER OF EMPTINESS AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
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