Personality Parade
The name of Madonna’s latest tour, Re-Invention, states the obvious but poses a question. The singer is well-known for her multiple personas – but what exactly is her latest reinvention?
It’s been 22 years since Madonna released her first single, a lightweight dance tune called “Everybody“. Subsequently, she’s become a household name by taking on a dizzying number of roles, including pop superstar, fashion trendsetter, feminist icon, feminist enemy, music-industry powerhouse, sometime actress, and mother.
Click on Full Article to read the article from Newsdaily with Madonna on the cover
Madonna is touring at the same time as two other shape-shifting performers: David Bowie and Prince. Neither, however, has managed Madonna’s latest feat: an eight- night run in the New York City area, starting Wednesday, with six dates at Madison Square Garden and two at Continental Airlines Arena. Madonna’s tour will likely become the year’s highest grossing, expected to pull in about $120 million, according to Billboard magazine.
“What’s driving the train on this tour is that she announced she would do a career retrospective,” says Ray Waddell, senior touring editor at Billboard. “Her fans always perceive her as cutting-edge, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to go back and review her best moments.”
Lasting effect on pop culture
Madonna has plenty of moments to review, many of which had a lasting effect on popular culture. Initially, she seemed like little more than a pretty face, but her 1983 debut album, “Madonna“, yielded a string of Top 40 hits with “Holiday“, “Borderline” and “Lucky Star“.
The music was a simple mix of disco and pop, but there was another ingredient to Madonna’s success: MTV, then a 2-year-old cable network hungry for new music videos.
“She was one of the first artists who really saw the true value of video“, says Rick Krimm, an MTV executive from 1985 to 1994 and now vice president of music programming at VH1. “Even the old videos from the first record, which were nothing groundbreaking, really projected a strong image of who she was at the time.”
It was primarily Madonna’s wardrobe that grabbed viewers’ attention. Along with the teased hair and rubber bracelets came a couple of fashion shockers: a high-cut shirt showing off the midriff and a bare shoulder revealing a length of bra strap. That gave birth to an entire generation of imitators whom the press dubbed “Madonna wanna-bes“. Macy’s even opened shops called Madonnaland long before it became the norm for musicians to start their own clothing lines.
Defying convention
Madonna’s willfully slatternly outfits flew in the face of convention, recalls Nicole White, a 41-year-old Long Beach resident who was a fan during those early years. Particularly startling was that famous “Boy Toy” belt-buckle, she says. “It was, like, ‘You choose that?’ Up until then, girls didn’t really choose. You were labeled a slut if you did. And she sort of didn’t care. And that made it OK.”
Madonna’s next album, “Like a Virgin“, raised even more eyebrows. “In 1984, to sing ‘Like a virgin, touched for the very first time’ might not seem like a big deal now,” says Jeremy Rice, program director at WBLI/ 106.1 FM in Babylon. “But in the Reagan years,” when few mainstream artists were addressing sexuality so frankly, “it was totally controversial.”
For her performance on that year’s MTV Music Video Awards (the network’s first), Madonna wore a lingerie wedding gown while writhing around on the floor.
That set the tone for her 1985 tour, in which she gyrated suggestively with several male dancers. Like Michael Jackson, whose star was rising around the same time, Madonna packaged her music with stylish, sexualized dancing, setting a standard for teen-oriented pop acts and boy bands for years to come.
Madonna perform “Like a Virgin” at the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards
What followed was a Madonna media blitz that rarely let up over the next two decades. Throughout, Madonna lived through scandals (often of her own making) that would have ruined other stars but only served to boost her reputation, says Mark Bego, author of the biography “Madonna: Blonde Ambition“.
Penthouse magazine, for instance, published nude photos of Miss America Vanessa Williams in 1984, then ran similar pictures of Madonna a year later, Bego recalls.
The result: Williams had her crown taken away, but for Madonna, “it was like throwing gasoline on a fire.”
In her 1989 video for “Like a Prayer“, Madonna wore a black slip while dancing around in a church, prompting an outcry from fundamentalist Christians.
Pepsi, which had been using the song in commercials, dropped it as threats of a boycott mounted. Then came her 1992 book “Sex“, a collection of graphic photographs that delved into sexual taboos such as body piercings, homoeroticism and mild bondage. Reviewers considered “Sex” a grievous lapse in taste (one photo featured Madonna kneeling naked over a mirror), but the book sold a respectable 1.5 million copies. And the publicity was priceless.
Sparked feminist debate
What made Madonna more than just an oversexed entertainer was the debate she sparked among feminists, academics and parents: Was her overt sexuality empowering or exploitative? Was she a role model for young women or a bad influence? “Nobody got it then, and they still don’t get it,” says Debbie Stoller, editor of the feminist magazine Bust.
“Madonna takes the image of a sexy woman and invests it with some power, so it’s not just something to be consumed by people watching her“, she explains. “It’s always about how much she is in control.”
Madonna became more than just a successful entertainer – she also established herself as a businesswoman.
In 1992, she signed a reported $60 million deal with Time Warner Inc. to establish her own label, Maverick Records, which became one of the few vanity labels to produce a roster of successful artists, including Alanis Morissette and Michelle Branch. Though Warner now contends in a lawsuit that Maverick lost money, Madonna set an example for other female performers to take control of their careers and set up businesses beyond merely recording and touring.
Experience has made me rich and now they´re after me
The one place Madonna seemed to falter, however, was in Hollywood. Though she landed a Golden Globe for best actress (for a musical or comedy) for her title role in 1996’s “Evita,” her list of cinematic flops is a long one, including “Shanghai Surprise” (with then-husband Sean Penn), “Dick Tracy” (with then-boyfriend Warren Beatty) and, most recently, “Swept Away” (directed by husband Guy Ritchie).
The last fared so poorly that Columbia TriStar never even released it in England, Ritchie’s native country and Madonna’s new second home.
The failed films have a common factor, says Bego: They were made with or by powerful Hollywood men. “She has trouble being directed. She has a vision, and a very strong vision of what she ought to be doing.”
Madonna filming Evita
These days, Madonna’s vision seems a little fuzzy. In her video for the song “American Life“, she wore military fatigues and lobbed a grenade at a George W. Bush look- alike. It was one of the few times Madonna followed fashion rather than leading it: many designers already had developed military-style outfits by the time Madonna made her video.
And in a rare move to avoid controversy, she pulled the video from MTV. Radio also stayed away from the song, an uncomfortable mix of synth-pop and sociopolitical rapping.
“It was a total flop,” says Jeremy Rice, program director of WBLI/106.1 FM in Babylon. “When we put it on the air here, we got negative calls right away.”
Children’s book author
It may be that Madonna’s wildest years are behind her. Now a mother of two, she’s penned two hit children’s books, “The English Roses” and “Mr. Peabody’s Apples“.
A third, “Yakov and the Seven Thieves” will be released June 21. Two more books are also planned as well are a line of merchandise, including dolls, apparel and school supplies. (She may have even started yet another trend: Musician Billy Joel also is writing a children’s book.) And the woman whose videos once infuriated the Catholic church has discovered spirituality in the form of Kabbalah, a mystical Jewish philosophy.
Here, too, she’s been imitated: Celebrities such as Demi Moore, Paris Hilton and, yes, Spears all have dabbled in Kabbalah symbolism.
Giancarlo Stavro Santarosa, Madonna, Isabella Corona and Rodolfo Zanardi posing inside Gallimard’s gardens
Madonna’s triumphant tour may prove that she’s still writing pop-culture history. At 45, she’s making albums, dancing on stages and stirring almost as much publicity as ever. That’s unusual for an older female rocker, says Buchmann. “Madonna seems to be following in the footsteps of older male rock stars,” he says. “Look at the guys from Aerosmith, or Keith Richards and Jagger.
People make fun of their age, but everybody comes to Madison Square Garden to see them play. I’m not so sure most women could do that.”
Article by Rafer Guzmàn, Newsday