This changed my life - Madonna

 

Madonna changed my life.

The first time I saw the Like a Virgin video, I was shocked by two things. 

First, that she was wearing the stuff she was wearing and singing the lines she was singing and, second, that the video has passed the censors in the first place.

OK, I guess it's time to come clean.  I didn't grow up in England.  I lived there for many, many years, but I was born and raised in South Africa during the Apartheid years. 

Propaganda and censorship was the order of the day.

I remember watching Pop Shop - our weekly music programme on state-run television - and wondering why bands clearly spent so much money on music video production, only to not film enough to cover the three and a half minute song.  Why else would they lamely repeat portions of the video at certain points?

What I didn't know, of course, was that this was the censorship compromise.  Splice in inane bits of footage - sans boobies, sexual simulation, etc. - and so be able to actually show the video on our TV station.

When I first saw the full version of Duran Duran's Girls on Film video years later in England, I nearly fell off the sofa.

So you see how amazed I was that Madonna had squeezed through the puritanical hypocrisy of the Gereformeerde Kerk - back then South Africa's self-appointed moral compass.

But, boy, I was glad she had.

Madonna showed me what I wanted to be, what I could be, what I could dare to be.

I was never one of those girls who dressed up in big crosses, cut off gloves and fishnets like she did (I once saw a girl at a school disco dressed like her and berated myself for not coming up with the same idea).  No.  My bravery was restricted to my dreams and imagination.

But bravery it was.  New courage.  New hope. 

Hope of freedom from suburbia, from the grip of parental control, from the pressure to be an A student.  Hope of a life in a city with clubs and smoking and alcohol and fashion and sex and glamorous rebellion.

Imagine a good Catholic girl in an Apartheid regime seeing Madonna save a black Jesus in Like a Prayer?

Imagine a young suburban girl discovering her sexual urges hearing, in Papa Don't Preach, that not only does "the worst" happen but, when it does, you can rebel and say "I'm keeping my baby!"

Imagine a young woman, trying to find out if she can be pretty, seeing a previously grungy Madonna metamorphose into Marilyn Monroe in Material Girl?

For, you see, if she could do it, I could.

As Madonna evolved and transformed over the first 20 years, her fundamental iconic status for me remained untouched.

She was a strong woman, making it on her own. She was unashamedly sexually active, and sexually adventurous. She was creative, artistic, yet making money in that world. She questioned everything, thereby allowing me to do the same.

I once paid $350 a ticket to see her in Oakland.  We got lost among houses with burglar guards and next to what were clearly black windowed drug dealer cars and we were petrified.  But it was worth it.

I once flew to Paris to see her, with my BFF.  I was in a seat so far back she was just a little blot of shiny movement.  But it was worth it.

I went to see the Truth or Dare movie 7 times, each time noticing some new tiny detail I had missed before.  I had no money back then and it was luxury for me to go to the cinema.  But it was worth it.

As the years have passed, I have mostly stood by Madonna.

She still makes good music, even if it's very different to what she did back then.

But do I love her as much as I used to?

I'm not sure.

It's not about the religion, the adoptions or the divorce (I always thought Guy Ritchie was an asswipe). 

It's because she has failed me on the ultimate, the final, rebellion.

Madonna has refused to flip the bird at modern convention.

With the plastic surgery, she is telling all of us that it's not OK to grow old.  I don't want her to stop singing, or dancing, or horse-riding, or adopting.  

I just want her to have crows feet around her eyes and go on Oprah and say it's OK to not only be 50, but look it.

She is not growing old gracefully.

And for that, I find it hard to forgive her.

To read a wonderful take on Madonna and what she's meant to women over the years, see Emily Nussbaum's Justify My Love article from New York Magazine.