OUR LADY of PERPETUAL HYPE STRIKES AGAIN!
MADONNA
When in Rome ...
Flash Your Ass!
After flashing her nipple in Turkey the other day, Madonna continued to strip down on the latest stop of her body part peep show tour by showing off her 53-year-old, mother-of-four butt in Italy on Tuesday.
While performing her hit song "Human Nature" again, the Queen of Pop unzipped her pants and exposed her taut, lacy thong-clad 53-year-old backside to the crowd at Rome's Stadio Olimpico.
Does anyone find any “socially redeeming value” in this sort of exhibitionism?
Does anyone find it titillating?
Does anyone find it comical?
I suppose women in late middle age might find it inspiring, but I rather hope not. Grandmas running around looking –– and acting –– like hookers on the prowl would make a depressing, not-to-say unnerving, spectacle.
What does this say about the age in which we live? What does it imply?
She can’t sing worth a damn. She can’t dance. She’s not pretty. She’s certainly not beautiful. All she has, as far as I can see, is unmitigated gall.
Colossal effrontery is no substitute for genuine talent.
It bothers the hell out of me that, apparently, this tedious exhibitionism is enough to make a proudly-low-class floozy enduringly popular and many times a millionaire, while many truly beautiful, greatly gifted, well-trained, highly-skilled people are literally starving for work and lack of recognition.
I admit to being shocked, but only because I’m not shocked, if that makes any sense?
Does any of this matter to you?
~ FreeThinke
I'm not a fan of Madonna, but I wouldn't dismiss her musical contribution entirely. It's worth something, I'd say, more than "a damn", but less than the multi-milllions she has accrued. Life has a significant element of lottery to it. We know that capitalism does not distribute its rewards rationally. The more worthwhile businesses do tend to survive, but we are resigned to the fact that only lucky ones really triumph.
ReplyDeleteIf you think Madonna is worthless, or that the music she releases is trivial, then accept this challenge: make a dance record. Is it better than the immaculate collection?
But she herself would argue that her primary artistic medium is not music, a medium in which I, and I expect you, take far less interest. So it's not surprising that we don't understand her success.
Hello, Jez,
ReplyDeleteGlad you stopped by. The point at which I was driving was not so much a condemnation of Madonna, but rather a deep concern over the nature of a society capable of idolizing such a vulgar, militantly trivial creature.
While I have always been far more interested in singers like Elisabeh Schwarzkopf, Lisa Della Casa, Renata Tebaldi, Dietrich Fischer-Gwyneth Jones, Lesley Garrett, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Gerard Souzay, Elly Ameling, Bryn Terfel, Thomas Allen, Teresa Bergonza, Leontyne Price, Thomas Hampson, Rene Kollo, Frederica Von Stade, and Cecilia Bartoli, I appreciate also the work of jazz singers such as Alberta Hunter, Bricktop, Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Torme, Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, and cabaret song stylists like Mabel Mercer, Bobby Short, and Karen Akers -- to say nothing of brilliant, stylish theatrical greats like Noel Coward and our own Stephen Sondheim.
You know perfectly well from previous conversations where I draw the line -- a line that was firmly drawn long before the regrettable emergence of Madonna and the horrors of "Heavy Metal" and "Gangstah Rap."
To quote an unforgettable character named Bitch Cassidy, whom I encountered long ago in the infancy of my posting days at FrontPage Magazine, "You don't have to eat a pound of shit to know it don't taste good."
The modern abhorrence of making "value judgments," along with the currently fashionable penchant for absolute non-discrimination against anyone or anything no matter how manifestly vile has conditioned far too many to insist they love not only the smell, but the taste of shit –– and to worship the forces that produce it by the ton.
Sorry to be so recalcitrant and uncooperative with the Modern Ethos, but I am still not afraid to call a turd a turd. I refuse to become a coprophagiac just so I may fit in comfortably with the fatuous, post-modernist notions that currently hold sway. I have too much respect for the truth to sit still for that.
They'll find me soon.
__ I know they will.
____ I need to be alone.
Their nattering demands are shrill
__ They chill me to the bone.
Their pounding, whining, bawling drone ––
__ insistent raucous blast ––
Seeks each secret hiding place
__ shatters every caste.
The tyranny advances
__ enslaving each young mind ––
The peaceful luxury of Thought
__ precluded everywhere.
There is no need to regiment;
__ all are rendered blind
And deaf and dumb and impotent ––
__ immune to their despair ––
By sour, sibilant cynics
__ hissing in the Void
Transforming all that's human
__ into the humanoid.
They'll find me soon.
__ I know they will,
But till the end, I''ll fight ––
Eccentric, lost,
__ but steeled against
–––– the realm of
________ Endless Night.
~ by FreeThinke (c. 1968)
I look forward to hearing your dance record. :)
ReplyDelete"I look forward to hearing your dance record." :)
ReplyDeleteAHEM! That would be as absurd as my eagerly anticipating your performance as a gladiator in a new TV Reality Show called "The Circus Maximus Updated" -- complete with bloody corpses, cheering, salivating throngs, and the intoxicating stench of blood pouring out of fresh-killed meat.
Don't laugh. We're not all that far away from that as we'd like to think. We already have live sex shows all over the place, and war firmly established as a spectator sport thanks to television and the mentality it has spawned.
Madonna is only a symptom. The disease was brought on by the deliberately planned corruption, trivialization and degradation of our once-significant cultures –– yours and ours.
~ FT
I think Madonna is more than a symptom; she is part of the cause of our decline in culture. She may have a great voice, but she’s an immoral hedonist.
ReplyDeleteIn my view, the only good music that Madonna has ever brought forth from her vocal cords was in Evita.
ReplyDeleteI suppose women in late middle age might find it inspiring...
Hell, no!
Well, to be fair, I'm past late middle age. **wink**
And one more thing....
ReplyDeleteI RESENT the influence that Madonna has on the "dress code" of young girls, who view Madonna (or the like) as a role model. Ugh.
I'm sorry to contradict you, AOW, but you certainly are not past late middle age. You've barely entered it.
ReplyDeleteDon't you realize that Sixty Has Become The New Forty? ;-)
~ FT
Immoral hedonists have always been prominent in music, have they not? With that in mind, there's surely something a bit pitiful about taking a role-model from showbiz.
ReplyDeleteIt just occurred to me that music and dance are really ritualised sex anyway, even when the performers are less literal about it than Madonna.
"It just occurred to me that music and dance are really ritualised sex anyway ..."
ReplyDeleteAn interesting notion, Jez, but I think much too confining. What you say may be true in many instances such as Wagner's Tristan und isolde, Debussy's L'apres midi d'une faun , Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps, even Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" ballet, and certainly "The Spectre of the Rose" by Berlioz, or Charpentier's opera Louise and much of Puccini, although I would much prefer to say "evocative of sexual passion" or "idealized visions of erotic love" as opposed to "ritualized," which to me suggests rigidity and lack of spontaneity –– reduction to formula, if you will.
At any rate, you are omitting the vast areas of sacred music such as Bach's Mass in B-Minor, his settings of the Saint Matthew and St. John Passions, the great organ works, the Well-Tempered Clavier, and most of the works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms which tend always to transcend mere human emotion and give stimulating visions of Something far great that lies Above and Beyond every day mortal existence.
And there is the splendid Ceremonial Music written to accompany and give vibrancy and majesty to Coronations and State Funerals and such.
what do you think of Benjamin Britten's setting of W.H. Auden's poetry called On This Island? Some of it makes reference to sexual passion, to be sure, but the range is far broader. It evokes sympathy for the wretched beggar, pokes fun with satirical whimsy at the absurdities of modern commercialism, and gives such a thrilling, enthralling vision of life by the sea that one can almost smell the tang of salt water, hear the squealing of the gulls, feel the sea breeze cooling one's face while listening to "the pluck and knock of the tide." I get goose bumps just thinking about that song cycle and the poetry that inspired it.
No, there's a great deal more to music and dance than mere "ritualized sex," I'm afraid.
Contemplative, triumphant, exuberant, phantasmagorical, martial, patriotic, ceremonial, philosophical, supplicatory, whimsical, satirical –– you name it. It's all there.
Hope to see you here again soon.
~ FT
"I would much prefer to say "evocative of sexual passion" or "idealized visions of erotic love" as opposed to "ritualized," "
ReplyDeleteYes, that is much better.
"you are omitting the vast areas of sacred music such as Bach's Mass in B-Minor, [etc.]"
yes, I worried about the B-minor mass and similar as I submitted that remark. I don't really disagree with you, but I'm so fond of this particular sweeping, unsupported generalization that I'll flog the dying horse some more, and suggest some connection between orgasm and mourning via la petit mort.
"most of the works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms which tend always to transcend mere human emotion and give stimulating visions of Something far great that lies Above and Beyond every day mortal existence."
Hmm. May have to just disagree here, but only slightly: I'd claim that neither sophistication nor transcendence preclude eroticism.
"what do you think of Benjamin Britten's setting of W.H. Auden's poetry called On This Island?"
Listening now... I see what you mean about the sea-scape one.
Still think that the surface text is clothing for the erotic subtext.
Here's the thing: all music is based around the setting up of expectation, followed by either fulfilling or frustrating that expectation. Any sound which doesn't play with the listener's expectation is, I put it to you, not musical. So that's a working definition of music, and it happens to be kind of what sex is like.
But maybe I'm like the psychiatric subject in the joke who answers "sex" every time he is presented with a picture and asked what it reminds him of. "You're obsessed with sex," accuses the psychiatrist. "Well, you're the one drawing all the dirty pictures!"
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete