Time the material girl bowed out?

If you had to pick one thing which summed up the long career of Madonna, it would be the pointy Jean Paul Gaultier bra she wore on the 1990 Blonde Ambition tour. For Madonna has always been about ultra-style, aggressive femininity, an in-your-face sex appeal.

She was, arguably, the first woman in pop to take total control of her image and music, and that alone makes her an intriguing phenomenon.

But as she heads for Manchester with her tour dubbed Re-Invention (and aren’t we thoroughly sick of that word being coined in her regard) you wonder whether Madonna has already re-invented herself almost to the point of redundancy.

From cutting-edge New York music-maker to 45-year old mum of two on an English country estate, Madonna‘s life today is more Audrey fforbes-Hamilton than Andy Warhol.

She has tried every image change and expressed herself in every medium. She craves our attention and yet rewards us with never-ending smoke and mirrors. Will the real Madonna ever stand up?

There was the flouncing come-on of Like A Virgin, the Marilyn Monroe moment of Material Girl, the orgiastic fantasy of Justify My Love, the re-tread Evita and then an astounding new career as the queen of dance culture with Ray Of Light.

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Macrobiotic

Then there were the movies – many of them contenders for Golden Raspberry awards – the art/porn book of photos titled Sex, the children’s books, the fly-on-the-wall documentary and the high-profile lifestyle choices from macrobiotic diets to the Kabbalah religion. As Warren Beatty unkindly observed of Madonna: “She doesn’t want to live off camera, never mind talk.”

With a whole generation of Beyonces and Britneys snapping at her heels, what did Madonna do? Yet again, she tried to shock, snogging Ms Spears and Christina Aguilera at the MTV Awards in what was surely a desperate bid for yet more column inches.

But the world is less shockable than it was when Madonna began her two decades of reinvention. Nor does it need her any more as a standard-bearer for female empowerment. Girl power is everywhere.

So, as Madonna tours again – another suitcase, another hall – is she still the vital force she was? Perhaps there was a slight hint of the limit to her popularity in the 600 tickets still unsold on the Monday before the first of her two Manchester shows.

Knack

Sure, she can still do the moves, she can still scare up a visually exciting show and she still has the knack of working with the right producers at the right time.

Age is no longer a bar in rock and pop. Most of us now applaud artists who go on expressing themselves into middle and old age.

But it is more troublesome when the very thing you project is youthful vitality and sex appeal in a game of dress-up on a grand scale?

That is Madonna‘s stock-in-trade just as surely as Kylie’s unique selling point is the impossibly pert bottom of a woman who is 36 going on 18.

Madonna is not the fortysomething mum on stage, nor does she show any sign of acting her age. That generation gap can only grow wider.

With her 46th birthday looming on Monday, she is now at the start of the Cher and Tina Turner years, when we watch her in amazement and say: “Isn’t she great… for her age.”

Article by Paul Taylor, Manchester Online