As Madonna
prepares to release her new CD, Hard Candy,
four Advocate staffers share how
they became enthralled with the icon and what she's
meant to them ever since.
By Neal Broverman
When Madonna
barked at me to “Get up on the dance floor!” I
was 12 and lived in a town four years away from having
a juice bar. But I heeded her orders like any good
disciple and turned my kitchen into Danceteria,
voguing in Hanes socks and studying my reflection in the
door of my mother’s range.
Before the
Vogue era I knew of Madonna but hadn’t
paid much attention. Like a child, I judged her from other
people’s perceptions, which consisted of
“She’s a slut!” “She touches
herself!” “She’s a slut!” By 12,
I was ready to stomach her intoxicating mix of
glamour, allure, and self-confidence. She had boyfriends,
money, beauty, smarts; she went to nightclubs, lived
in Hollywood and New York. She was the girl everyone
talked about. I wanted it all and she said I could
have it.
As I matured, my
love for her didn’t wane but rather spiked at various
times; I found myself especially drawn to her when coming
upon her darker songs open to interpretation. Ray
of Light’s “Skin” was all
sex and drugs, two subjects I found eminently fascinating
in the late ‘90s. A few years later, the romantic
desperation of Music’s “Don’t
Tell Me” played to my first failed love affair.
I was intrigued -- and mystified -- by Madonna’s
anticonsumerism anthem, “Nobody Knows Me,” on
American Life.
Some can’t
reconcile Madonna’s wildly varying characteristics --
“How can she write a sex book and a
children’s book?” “How can she be on TV
but not watch TV?” “How can she be
nearly 50 and still like sex?” Yet her
contradictions only make my devotion grow deeper (and
deeper). She’s conflicted and complex, ever
morphing and growing, right often but wrong plenty.
She’s a Leo like me.
Her habit of
shedding skins has never seemed manipulative but rather the
natural growth process of an interesting person. I’ve
been a hippie, a raver, a rebel. And even if I
don’t wear Birkenstocks anymore, that time is
still part of me, as I’m sure all her
“personas” remain part of her.
While
she’s forever changing up her style and tastes,
through it all she’s always been around,
reassuring in her constancy. I mean, I still dance to
her music in my kitchen, only now I’m wearing better
socks.
Broverman is The Advocate’s associate editor.
###
By Michelle
Garcia
Being the
liberal, freethinking, power-to-the-people kind of folks my
mom and dad are, the most logical course of action
concerning my development was to put their oldest
daughter in Catholic school. For the first five years
of my academic career, I was taught mostly by disgruntled
old ladies who were able to hit you and make you feel
guilty for just about anything.
Each year at the
Immaculate Conception School, each teacher stood before
his or her class and gave detailed examples of sins not to
commit: "You may not use the words 'shit,' 'damn,' or
'ass,'" Sister Francis told our first-grade class. I
imagined Bishop Daily of the archdiocese of Brooklyn
and Queens distributed an official decree, sanctioned
by Pope John Paul II himself, to each teaching nun to allow
one day per year that she may use swear words, strictly for
instructional purposes.
"You also must
stay away from a musical artist named Madonna, the
name stolen from the Holy Virgin Mary," she said, making a
sign of the cross. "She is dirty and obsessed with
material that is not appropriate for young children."
At age 5, I was
only vaguely familiar with the Material Girl, but I felt
I had to know more in order to form my own opinions about
her. And besides, I could have been watching a
blood-filled soft-core porn movie, and my grandma, who
watched us after school, would not have lifted her
eyes from her latest Tom Clancy novel.
So that
afternoon, I left the safe waters of PBS and Nickelodeon to
turn on MTV back when it played music videos during
the day. "Vogue" eventually came on. Not only did I
wonder how the video was supposed to be harmful or
provocative, but I found her captivating and powerful.
Granted, I wasn’t watching “Human
Nature” or “Like a Prayer,” but I
wouldn’t have known any different.
It seems that
through my childhood and into adolescence, adults shunned
Madonna. I've been told to stay away from her more times
than I can count: Don't listen to her music, don't
read her book, don't wear dominatrix outfits, and so
on.
But as I watched
her vogue for the first time, sing passionately in front
of a burning cross, and wear a cone-shaped bra, I saw
Madonna for who she is, beyond the labels of sex and
rebellion: an artist who pushes boundaries and defies
the status quo. We need more people like her in the
world, at minimum to keep things less boring, but more
important, to keep us moving forward in thought and
artistic expression.
Garcia is The Advocate’s editorial assistant.
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