Now I know you’re mine
Given Madonna’s dogmatic pronouncements about spirituality lately, it’s nice to see that she’s still capable of self-questioning on some issues of true import:
When asked about her gay icon status, she admitted she “hopes” she is still the biggest gay icon of all time.
However, she also reveals that she agrees with Kylie Minogue’s summary of the Australian superstar being the princess, and Madonna the queen.
“That’s very good,” she says. “We like it that way.”
…
The former Material Girl [ %#$@*! –SRK] also hit back at criticisms from Boy George that her Kabbalah religion is homophobic.
“He’s just got a bee in his bonnet,” she says.
Oy. I can just hear her delivering that last sentence in her phony not-quite-plummy-so-let’s-call-it-pruny “English” accent.
The Kylie part is very sweet, though.
As far as whether she’s still a gay icon goes, if my corner of Tokyo is any indication, that’s a question that needn’t even be asked. The other night, a few of us ran into a guy who hadn’t heard the single yet, and before we could stop ourselves, we all stared at him as if he’d just landed from Mars.
Personally, my position is that, despite my uncritical devotion to Madonna, this album had better be good. Two years ago I paid money for an album with her posing as Che flippin’ Guevara on the cover, and the music did not compensate. Fool me twice, and all that.
I do like “Hung Up,” though IIRC, Erasure had the bright idea of doing a tweaked cover of “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” like, two decades ago. (They tweaked it by grafting a bit of “Money Money Money” onto the beginning. For all I know, they also grafted a bit of “I Do I Do I Do I Do I Do” onto the end; I’ve almost never been able to listen to an Erasure song all the way through.) Madonna usually isn’t the major trailblazer she seems to think she is, but she rarely leads off with concepts that are frankly tired. Then again, given her output over the last few years, we should be celebrating the fact that she’s seen fit to deliver a hook without burying it.
(Via Gay News)
I remember one very flaming gay man on Polk street in San Francisco being aghast that I didn’t particularly like Madonna.
Can you articulate what about her draws so many gay people? Is it the music (which is just average pop to my ear, but that’s not a genre I like anyway) or the personality?
Well, there really are plenty of gay guys who can’t stand Madonna and get tired of having it assumed that it’s their duty to love her.
I don’t really know that there’s a single quality, or a finite set of qualities, that make anyone a gay icon. The music does really help, Madonna being one of those technically undistinguished singers who have always known, intuitively, how to use their voices expressively anyway. Remember, too, that by the time she was starting out, no one else was really making good disco with pop appeal anymore.
I think another big part of it is the way she played with identity. It wasn’t the cheap, emotion-evading irony of a lot of the musicians beloved by college students–you know, like, I’m singing these totally depressive lyrics to a cheery tune, and it’s all, like subversive and stuff! Madonna always performed as if(and said in interviews that she believed that) the masks you choose to adopt say as much about you as whatever unmediated core of personality you may have floating around in there. And while I don’t think that most of us sit around consciously thinking about that when a Madonna video comes on, it’s something that’s very powerful to a lot of gay people just beneath the surface. Most of us grew up knowing, in an inchoate way, that there was something deep down that we were blocking and protecting and putting a smooth surface over, but it’s not as if we came out and then turned into totally different people. Some things you learn to affect can actually be good, or at least fun. And Madonna was never one to underestimate the value of artifice.
I think I’m starting to get it. Kylie seems genuine to me whereas Madonna seems fake in a purely manipulative way, but in another thirty years they could both be in the remake of “Whatever happened to baby Jane?” and Madonna would be Bette Davis, which actually makes Madonna slightly more iconic.
Ah, fungibility of identity and all that. Makes sense as far as any explanation for these things goes, I guess.
Well, I’ve always thought that Kylie was the sort of person I might actually like to know. I never, not for one moment since I became a fan of hers at twelve years old, harbored the same illusion about Madonna.
A friend’s gay co-worker once told me that Madonna concert tickets are “a tax on gay men.”
OMG, that’s great! That one needs a spew alert.
But you know, now that I think of it, I’ve never had the desire to see Madge live myself. It’s not that I’ve avoided the visual extravaganzas where the music seemed almost secondary (I went to Zoo TV and Peter Gabriel’s Us tour, though those were both way back). To me, Madonna is intimate headphone music, and while I’m sure the shows are exciting, they don’t play into the way I like her.