Madonna Made Sense Most of the Time
Madonna Made Sense Most of the Time by Roxanne McDonald
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“Everyone has a right to my opinion,” she smirked. But despite her providing consistent shock value, Madonna brought [and continues to bring] covert encouragement and support in several ways. |
She dressed down for performances. She used props that rivaled those of The Exorcist and riled whole populations—burning crosses, African American saints, futuristic cone bras (as outerwear), boy toy belts. She pissed off everyone from political pundits to big name sponsors.
Pepsi cancelled Madonna’s Like a Prayer tour.
Cops came to arrest her on her Blonde Ambition tour.
She made Truth or Dare, and made us aware of sides of celebrity and star personality that we rarely (at that time) had much exposure to: the family frustrations, the loneliness, the exhaustion, and the behind-the-scenes Mama and her babies lectures and love-ins.
Madonna published Sex, and the public went nuts—in several ways, mostly contradictory.
She was married to bad boy Penn, then playing with bad boy Leon. She got pregnant as an unwed mother, sang songs about the rights to being an unwed mother.
She posed nude—and people continued to act as if she were the first to do so (harrumph, check great grandpa’s secret stash, folks). She staged a music video that implied (or that audiences interpreted) the tweenie watching her through a peep show window was her new lover. And, heaven forbid, she tongue-kissed fellow performers (female).
Her videos were banned; her images and music censored.
In Argentina, people protested her performance as a political figurehead. In Hindu circles, people bristled about her henna versus bared breasts appearance. In America she was pissing off the patriots; and in Malawi, human rights groups attempted to halt a swift adoption of a severely impoverished child.
But over these some twenty-five years, Madonna has also made efforts to help, heal, and even save—whether directly or indirectly, intended as saving grace or not.
One just need to consider the charitable work she has done (such as that in Malawi, where, before she considered adoption she was building an orphan care center under the auspices of her foundation, Raising Malawi).
Or one can just consider her all-encompassing approach to being a celebrity with the wits and grit that have positively influenced hundreds more than have negatively regarded the star:
“I stand for freedom of expression, doing what you believe in, and going after your dreams,” she once said. She once admitted, “I’m tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.”
She later spoke to what it is to be a thoughtful, caring human: “That consciousness is everything and that all things begin with a thought. That we are responsible for our own fate, we reap what we sow, we get what we give, we pull in what we put out. I know these things for sure.
And she also once said something I have taken with me into teaching, working with needful students, and setting up and maintaining a freelance writing business: “I’m in my dressing room sometimes and I think to myself, ‘Who do I think I am, trying to pull this off?’ …I can only allow myself to think it once in a while…because if I do, I’m gone.”
So what she does and what she says must be taken together—in and out of spite of content and context, however controversial…which, of course, depends upon the interpreter to begin with.
Celebrity Spider Madonna links
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