Culture Watch: Immaterial Girl - Madonna, entertainer - Brief Article

National Review, August 20, 2001

Madonna, at age 42 older, but no wiser, embarked on her first tour in eight years. Tickets in Philadelphia and New York went for hundreds of dollars a pop, and that part of the world that pays attention to such things gaped at the spectacle.

It would be idle to pretend that Madonna has not had an impact on her time. What sort of an impact has it been? As she enters middle age, what are the lady's strengths and weaknesses?

The list of strengths is short. She can dance (she studied the techniques of Martha Graham). She has a knack for picking pop tunes with catchy hooks. Most important, she has a single-minded work ethic, amounting to a maniacal Nietzschean will to power. No copper baron ever cornered a market more zealously than she has pushed herself and her career.

Her weaknesses make a longer catalogue. She began with an annoying, tinny little voice, like the comic singing chipmunks of the Fifties; age has darkened it without making it interesting. She has no looks, which is no sin, but which should be a drawback in a pop star; the constant nudity and copulation have functioned as a compensation, rut substituting for allure. And then there is her blasphemous exploitation of her name: Madonna used the Virgin Mary as part of her act, a make-up change between waif and hooker.

Her worst failing is that she lies about sex. Her lie distorts a truth. The truth is that Eros is powerful, and can be all-consuming. Her lie is that it's okay to let it consume you. Bouncing from one fantasy to another, with the indestructibility of the Road Runner, she conveyed the impression that her fans could do likewise. After the movie stars, the basketball players, the lesbians, and even the Hispanic trainer, she got herself wed in a Scottish church and settled back on the cushion of her millions, an option that is open to few twelve-year-old girls.

Our only satisfaction comes from knowing that she is gone. The New York Observer, in an otherwise shrewd article, said that the success of her concerts has kept her away from New Year's Eve engagements at Caesar's in Las Vegas-the post-death limbo of former celebrities. But her life in Britain, her hubby, and her kilts, is her Las Vegas. She can still draw a crowd, but so can anyone in these days of reality entertainment and 24/7 yak. She is rich, but Forbes is full of lists of rich people. She came, she wrecked, she went.