Madonna's Never-ending Story: The Icon's Legacy Today

8:30 AM


This piece was my final project for my comparative literature class. I wrote it three hours before it was due. Being a scholar is hard work. 
Madonna.
When some people hear the name, images of the holy Virgin Mary appear in their head. According to most Christians, Mother Mary is the woman that every woman should aspire to be. Her purity, innocence and youthfulness are traits the ideal woman would possess. She’s often depicted with pale skin, dark brown hair and dressed a white gown and blue veil. Her conservative appearance hardly ever changes.  
For others, the word Madonna conjures an imagine that couldn’t be more different. Madonna is muscular, blonde, and hardly ever seen in the same outfit. She’s sexy, mature, and oozing with sensuality.
Just like The Beatles are bigger than Jesus, it seems as though the pop superstar Madonna is even more world-renowned than Madonna, Jesus’ mom. Since her 1982 debut, Madonna Louise Ciccone has been making waves across virtually every cultural sphere. Fashion, movies, television and, of course, music: there’s hardly a facet of contemporary American pop culture Madonna hasn’t laid a fingerless-gloved hand on.
It’s nearly impossible to escape her wrath. Her many greatest hits are always playing on the radio and the grocery store. Her movies like “Evita”, “Desperately Seeking Susan” and “A League of Their Own” are almost as renowned as her albums. Her influence on fashion continues today. An entire episode of Fox’s musical television show “Glee” was devoted to her music. Even 35 years after her emergence, Madonna is a cultural force to reckon with.
It’s only natural a seminal pop star with such undeniable lasting impact is going to inspire a copycat or two. Either directly or indirectly, countless contemporary musicians have borrowed a trick or two from Madonna’s book of secrets. The biggest and baddest contemporary pop stars from the last ten years each have Madonna to thank for some aspect of their art. From Beyonce to Taylor Swift, Madonna is seemingly everywhere with no sign of going away any time soon.
Madonna built a career on her sexual liberation. From Madonna’s “Like A Virgin” to Like A Prayer’s “Express Yourself”, her albums are riddled with sensual tracks. In 1992, she released her sexiest album yet. Titled “Erotica”, the album sang the praises of a woman’s sexual pleasure. Madonna owns her body and places explicitly concise demands on her lover. The album accompanied a coffee table photography book called “Sex”. The now-infamous book features photographs of the singer in erotic poses, putting her whole body on display for consumers. She was comfortable and confident in her body and sexuality, teaching her female listeners to take control of their own sexual pleasure.
Of course, Madonna wasn’t the first pop star to sing about sex. She certainly wasn’t the last, either. One contemporary parallel to Erotica is Beyoncé’s 2014 surprise album Beyoncé. Like Madonna before her, Queen Bey was no stranger to singing about sex or placing demands on men. The singer achieved fame as a member of Destiny’s Child, singing songs about bills, bills, bills and being a survivor.
Despite her previous releases, Beyoncé took singing about sex to a whole new extreme. Nearly every song on the album has a reference to sexual pleasure given to her by her husband, Jay-Z. On “Blow”, Bey delightfully sings about receiving cunnilingus, using quirky euphemisms like “lick my Skittles”. “Drunk In Love” is the album’s passionate, lustful signature song and most successful single. Beyoncé and Jay-Z sing to each other about their sexual prowess and love of each other’s bodies. “Partition” is about having sex in the backseat of a car. Beyonce sings about being so aroused, she’s unable to wait to get home to have sex. Even slow, sexually-political jams like “Jealous” describe Bey’s seduction attempts (like cooking while naked) and her rage when they aren’t appreciated. Even by today’s standards, the album was dirty.
Her sex-filled songs were frowned upon by critics, and so were her fashion choices. Madonna received almost instant backlash from the Catholic church when she donned rosaries as jewelry on the cover of “Like A Virgin”. She layered the sacred item on top of a corset, tutu skirt and a belt reading “BOY TOY”. Grandmas everywhere were appalled to see a pop star treat a rosary so recklessly. Even in spite of the apparent controversy, Madonna continued to wear rosaries around her neck along with other religious artifacts. She continued to invoke religious imagery in her fashion choices into the mid-90s, and she’s seen wearing religious jewelry in her concert documentary “Truth or Dare”.
In 2012, rapper Nicki Minaj angered quite a few people with a similarly sacrilegious spectacle. While performing her song “Roman Holiday” at the 2012 Grammy Awards, Minaj donned a pope-inspired gown along with pope stand in. Yep, Minaj brought an old, white man dressed as the pope along to the Grammys. Minaj was attempting to recreate The Exorcism of Emily Rose during her unholy performance, and pulled out every possible stop. Her stage set featured traditional church-like architecture, including stained glass and wooden stairs. Her backup dancers were dressed as altar boys in white hooded robes. Near the end of the performance, her backup singers began singing the traditional Christian hymn “Oh Come, All Ye Faithful” as Minaj levitated on stage surrounded by flames. The faux-priest began to perform an exorcism as Minaj shook uncontrollably.
After this performance, all hell broke loose.
The following morning, headlines everywhere called the performance sacrilegious and distasteful. An official representative from the Catholic Church released a press release expressing disgust towards the performance. Catholic League president Bill Donahue described Minaj as “fresh off looking like a fool with Madonna at the Super Bowl.” He even implies Minaj is actually possessed and shames the Recording Academy to allow the offensive performance. The performance is considered one of Minaj’s greatest, but the controversy often overshadows her art.
Another headline from The Hollywood Reporter read, “Lady Gaga had to have been laughing at the Rapper’s imitation (sorry, homage) to one of her (or Madonna’s) performances.” Gaga has received more comparisons to Madonna than anyone. From her raw meat dress to her Kermit the Frog ensemble, Gaga certainly doesn’t hold back when it comes to fashion. Like Madonna, Gaga seems to intentionally present herself as outlandish and extreme. This seems to be a concept Madonna invented, as no pop star before her seemed to intentionally go out of their way to shock (or offend) their fans or observers. Gaga also creates music that isn’t terribly far-off from Madonna’s, especially compared to many contemporary pop stars. Her range is similar to Madonna’s, and her pop ballads are beloved.
A second way Gaga invokes Madge influence is her prominence in the LGBT+ community. Though nearly everyone mentioned in this article is a gay icon of sorts, Lady Gaga is easily the most widely adored and accepted pop music figure in the gay community. Madonna once said she would not have achieved such a great degree of success without the help and love of the gay community. In the 1980s and 1990s, she was a vocal advocate for AIDS and safe-sex awareness. Today, Lady Gaga is a similar advocate of acceptance, using tracks like “Born This Way” to express her love of individuality and freedom of expression. Milwaukee dance clubs often host “Lady Gaga vs. Madonna” theme nights to honor each woman’s iconic work and lasting legacy.
A lot of Madonna’s ties with the gay community are very personal. In the 1991 documentary Truth Or Dare, viewers are introduced many of Madonna’s background dancers. Most of the men are gay and suffering from AIDS themselves. Various scenes throughout the film show the dancers participating in AIDS-based activism and reflecting on their place as gay men in America. The film was a revolutionary concert documentary, shot completely black and white. It painted an intimate picture of Madonna and her crew, showing moments that huge fans would only dream of seeing. In spite of the rawness, some critics say Madonna’s role in the film was ingenuine. It’s a well-known secret that Madonna is fiercely protective of her image, and even the candid shots in the film are supposedly posed.
In 2012, Katy Perry released Katy Perry: Part Of Me, a concert-documentary inspired by Madonna’s very own rock doc. Just like “Truth or Dare”, the documentary featured up close and personal Perry performances along with personal revelations about Perry’s divorce. One standout scene is Perry having a breakdown about losing her then-husband Russell Brand. The scene shows Perry in tears, putting on a bright, fake smile as she rises to the stage level and begins her performance.
Like Lady Gaga, Perry invokes a Madonna-like aesthetic. Though the singer changed her style often, for the first 10 or 15 years of her career, she often reflected styles of years past. Her makeup was often similar to film stars of the 1930s and 1940s. Her light eyeshadow, thick eyeliner, red lips and blonde ringlets drew comparisons to Marilyn Monroe and other screen sirens. Madonna even copied the Marilyn Monroe movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for her “Material Girl” music video, making the comparisons even more obvious. Though Perry isn’t blonde, she’s certainly a bombshell. Her dark, wavy hair, thick bangs, red lips and similar makeup to Madonna channel similar ‘50s stars like Bettie Page. She’s also worn some outlandish outfits not unlike Madonna and Lady Gaga.
Major pop stars like Madonna often can’t escape the media frenzy that comes with celebrity territory. Sometimes, they can’t escape other celebrities. Madonna and Elton John nurtured a feud for years, and the “he said/she said” situation still continues to intrigue fans of each artist. Cultural consumers of a certain age will never forget “Imma let you finish…”, Kanye West’s now-iconic interruption of Taylor Swift at the 2009 VMAs. When Swift beat out Beyonce for “Video of the Year”, West simply could not help but interject. He lit a fire inside of Swift that, to this day, has yet to be put out. Their back and forth is easily the most infamous celebrity feud of the 21st century, not unlike Madonna and John’s high-profile catfight fiasco.

The greatest cultural figures are remembered long after their deaths, thanks in part to both their art and their legacy. Though Madonna is younger than most celebrities of a similar fame level, it’s safe to say she will be remembered long after she passes. Her legacy will live on through current and future artists who aspire to express themselves and make Madonna proud. 

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