Throughout her four decades in the spotlight, Madonna has danced in front of burning crosses, simulated masturbation onstage, pissed off PepsiCo and the Vatican, released a coffee-table book of soft-core porn, debatably encouraged teen pregnancy, eroticized her own navel, crucified herself on tour, asked David Letterman to smell her underwear, had three music videos banned from MTV, made out with Drake, made out with Britney, worn grills, called COVID-19 “the great equalizer,†and been personally banned from Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda. One hundred minutes into her two-hour set at London’s O2 arena, she declared, “I think the most controversial thing I’ve ever done is to stick around,†pronouncing the word — con-tro-vers-see-al — like one of Hitchcock’s icy blondes.
It was the second night of the Celebration Tour, the first of Madonna’s 12 world tours to be framed around her greatest hits. It had been meant to kick off in Vancouver this July until a serious bacterial infection landed her in the ICU in June after she was found unconscious in her Upper East Side home. “I forgot five days of my life, or my death,†she’d said of the experience onstage at the O2 the night before. “​​I mean this on so many levels: How did I make it this far?†As the 65-year old in a prismatic catsuit floated above the crowd in a makeshift time machine, singing along to a jungle remix of “Ray of Light,†I let the thought sink in. Spend enough time in magazine archives and you’ll notice a shift near the turn of the century: For the first 20 years of Madonna’s career, no one talked about Madonna without talking about sex, and in the 20 years to follow, no one has talked about Madonna without talking about her age.
“Why are we so fascinated with this 40-ish midwestern divorcée?†Rolling Stone asked rhetorically in 2000, in the thick of the singer’s trip-hop and proto-Goop spirituality era. A Vanity Fair cover story from 2008 wondered, “Madonna made her fortune selling sex — what will she sell when the thought of sex with Madonna seems like a fetish?†(This was a few months before her 50th birthday, and before the launch of her Sticky & Sweet Tour, the highest-grossing tour by a female artist until the Eras Tour this year.) “I think you think about growing old too much,†she scolded the writer of a 2019 New York Times Magazine profile, whose headline was “Madonna at Sixty.†But it seemed like she did, too. Accepting the Woman of the Year award at Billboard’s Women in Music event in 2016, she spoke of her muse, David Bowie, who had taught her there were no rules. “But I was wrong,†she said gravely. “There are rules if you’re a girl.†She outlined a few: Don’t act too smart, make men uncomfortable or women jealous. “And finally, do not age,†she said. “Because to age is a sin. You will be criticized, you will be vilified, and you will definitely not be played on the radio.â€
No pop star of Madonna’s level — anyone who’s been, at one point or another, the most famous person on Earth — has inspired the kind of withering indifference that has greeted her for most of this century. Since the late 2000s, the naked ambition that characterized her early work has persisted in ways that accentuate certain elements of cringe: compulsive dabbling in rap and EDM which could, at best, be read as camp, usually reviewed with a sense of grim duty, if not outright pity. My consciousness of the singer had begun in the 2000s, having spent the ’90s preoccupied by the usual suspects: boy bands Svengali’d by Lou Pearlman or happy teenage blondes fluent in innuendo. Back then, I didn’t appreciate the twangy electronica of 2003’s Music or the banging nü-disco of 2006’s Confessions on a Dance Floor.
It took me until adulthood to recognize that she had invented the sexy, self-reflexive, empowered female pop star that had by then become the default, or that she’d masterminded “the era†decades before it was cool. Reading reviews from the ’80s and ’90s, you’d think sexuality was the only trick up her sleeve. It wasn’t, but even more interesting was that her sexuality never rested on the idea of being attractive. She inhaled soup in a shower cap in a scene in Truth or Dare, the 1991 documentary that chronicled her Blond Ambition tour, and blow-dried her damp armpits in Desperately Seeking Susan. The Gaultier cone bra poked fun at femininity; the “BOY TOY†belt she’d worn over a wedding dress did, too. The idea of Madonna as a megalomaniac — indifferent to love, obsessed by power — stemmed from her disinterest in performing the vulnerability men liked.
Even back then, people liked to speculate on what might happen when Madonna was old. “Her ability to titillate will wane with time,†the critic Lucy Sante wrote in 1990. “There is a certain age past which pop stars need to affect a serious demeanor or else find another line of work.†A version of this sentiment has been the party line since 2012, when her EDM divorce album, MDNA, landed like a midlife crisis. But Sante’s theory, as it turned out, wasn’t true. Madonna in her 60s is as provocative as ever; it’s just that what’s remained most shock-provoking is her face. In the era of so-called body positivity, the image is still jarring: a woman of a certain age indulging in vanity reserved for the young. (An appearance at this year’s Grammys prompted the New York Post headline: “Madonna’s new face is more than an eyesore, it’s a complete betrayal.â€) The elephant in the O2 Arena felt rude to mention, but dishonest not to: at some point in the past six months, Madonna had gotten the facelift to end all facelifts. Frankly, it looked incredible.
All around me at the arena were the grown-ups of Generation X, done up with floppy hair bows and lacy fingerless gloves, or greased with body glitter in tank tops bedazzled with “MOTHER.†They clapped politely when master of ceremonies Bob the Drag Queen emerged onstage at 9 p.m., hollering, “Madonna taught us how to dance, express ourselves, how to party, and how to FUCK!†A few minutes later, Madonna appeared in a black cloak and halo headpiece like a saint from a Giotto painting. “Is this the Sunday night crowd?†she purred in a girlish voice, unchanged since the ’80s, that sounds as if she’s always chewing bubblegum. “Are you gonna be prudish and conservative? Can I say bad words?†What a retro concept — that “bad words†would move the needle! Perhaps they did in the ’80s, the era in which the evening’s set began, with a joyful run-through of demos turned hits (“Everybody,†“Holidayâ€). The opening song, “Nothing Really Matters,†is a Buddhist-ish trip-hop number on the subject of transcending the self from 1998’s Ray of Light. Madonna was 39, a new mother and recent Kabbalah convert, countering TRL’s cresting wave of teenage vixens with cool downtempo electronica and a “be here now†mindset that predicted the tyranny of mystical white-lady wellness. (To be clear, I think it’s a masterpiece.) The dancers were done up like punky street urchins, the stage was set like the return of CBGB, and Madonna blended coolly into the mix, gesturing at throwback choreography rather than hitting each mark — impressive nonetheless for someone outfitted in a corset, combat boots, and heavy-duty knee brace. Beside her for a rendition of “Burning Up†perched a latex-masked figure: recognizably her doppelgänger, though young, androgynous, and strange.
The replica joined her again for a rendition of “Erotica,†the title track from the 1992 album which accompanied her Sex book. Stripped down to lingerie, Madonna took her place on a velvet bed, straddled by the masked figure, whose high ponytail looks familiar. It was a reprisal of the most divisive moment from 1990’s Blond Ambition tour, where a 32-year old Madonna pantomimed self-pleasure with such Catholic-adjacent relish it prompted Pope John Paul II to decree it “one of the most satanic shows in the history of humanity.†Thirty-three years later, it’s the replica whose hands work their way over a submissive Madonna before they fall onto the bed in a tired embrace. The sex scenes onstage no longer provoked, nor were they meant to: This was pure nostalgia, reminding the audience of friskier times in their lives. But it felt smart and self-aware, and maybe a little resigned — the young Madonna touching and the old Madonna being touched, a play on the unreconciled doubles of womanhood she’d been toying with all along. It seemed to gesture at her impossible situation, the folly of aging gracefully as the established symbol of female sex.
What choice did Madonna ever have but to age un-gracefully? She’d lived 20 years as an earthbound sex god at the nucleus of culture, and in the next 20, she’d have most of her defenses stripped away: her pre-internet remove from normal life, her unbothered air, her youthful beauty. But onstage that night, she was cool again: skipping into a recreated Paradise Garage, hitting each step of the line dance from the “Don’t Tell Me†video, playing a minute of “Bedtime Story,†her 1995 deep cut with Björk, strumming a plucky acoustic cover of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.†(“Did you think I’d lay down and die?†she sang, her voice clear and strong, flashing a look at the crowd. “Did you? Did you?â€) She was funny in her haughty, impish way, at one point cuing up a slideshow of former lovers: Tupac, Dennis Rodman, Warren Beatty, Michael Jackson. During “Live to Tell,†screens unfurled from the rafters on which beamed the faces of dozens, then thousands of victims of AIDS, many among them her friends. I’d arrived at the arena expecting a spectacle, and I’d gotten one, but the songs themselves struck me the most: Madonna’s voice was strong, and “Ray of Light†and “Like a Prayer†still felt like revelations.
But the best part of the show was “Vogue,†the stage set as a runway for a ballroom dance-off, where Madonna and guest judge FKA Twigs awarded 10s to her scene-stealing daughter Estere, the fiercest of the dancers at age 11. (Her eldest daughter, Lourdes, whose debut EP as Lolahol had channeled Ray of Light last year, sat in the judge’s seat the night before.) Her 17-year-old daughter Mercy had appeared earlier, stoically accompanying her mother on piano for “Bad Girl,†and 18-year-old son David emerged in cowboy drag for a guitar solo on “Mother and Father.†It was a family for whom art was a passion and a refuge. Screens unfurled to show black-and-white photos of two women: her mother, another Madonna Ciccone, who died when she was 6, and David’s mother, Marita Banda, who died in childbirth in Malawi. As the phases of Madonna’s life began to connect like constellations — losing family, finding it in friends, making one of your own — I was moved to tears. But how cliché of me: Madonna spent much of the show as a dominatrix, but the version I loved most was Madonna as mother.