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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Madonna: remaking American culture? « Previous | |Next »
February 4, 2012

Madonna was probably the first female pop star to have complete control of her music and image. According to some it is in her interpretation of the role and politics of images wherein lies her cultural significance.

Maddonnasex8.jpg Madonna, still from Sex

Sex is a coffee table book written by Madonna with photographs by Steven Meisel Studio and film frames taken from film shot by Fabien Baron. The book was edited by Glenn O'Brien. Sex was released on October 21, 1992 by Warner Books. The book was released by Madonna as an accompaniment to her fifth studio album Erotica, which was released a day earlier.

Sara Marcus in How Madonna liberated America at Salon.com says that Madonna's cultural significance was her assault on American prudery her revelatory spreading of sexual liberation to Middle America, which changed this country for the better. Marcus says that throughout the 1980s and into the ’90s, her protean personae and erotic gambits were consistently a step ahead of what Middle America was ready for. She dared us to catch up with her.

For instance:

In the early ’80s, when the Material Girl owned the dance floor at Manhattan nightclubs and reveled in the downtown scene’s polysexual utopia, the political advances of feminism and gay liberation had stalled out and were hurtling toward backlashville. By the end of that decade, when gay rights laws were being repealed in cities across the country, Madonna was bringing the ball culture of gay and transgender blacks and Latinos — the true voguers — to junior high school gymnasium dances worldwide, popularizing an ecstatic ethos of freedom, sexual and otherwise, sprung directly from big-city club scenes that millions of suburban kids might never get to experience firsthand.

The forces of censorship were no match for the marketing and dramaturgical genius of Madonna:
In an era when photographers and performance artists were being blasted in the halls of Congress and the courts of public opinion for using religious iconography or homoerotic images or referring to self-gratification, Madonna hit upon danceably glamorous versions of all of these things. She managed to smuggle the values of the sexually fluid, multiracial art underground into the dead center of American culture before the old-school guardians of moral rectitude could gather their forces to protest.

In this way Madonna remade American culture.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:22 PM |