How I (finally) found feminist inspiration in Madonna
How do you feel about Madonna?
Madonna then, Madonna now, Madonna in-between?
Our Lady of Pop inspires slavish devotion, admiration, disapproval (how dare she grow old so disgracefully!), dislike, dismissal. She is an icon that you simply must have a feeling about. Which is it? Which Madonna-reaction is yours?
Aged four, when this song came out, I didn’t have much opinion about her either way. She had some catchy tunes I liked to dance to, that was it.
As I edged into my teens, I developed a snobbery about music that made me judgmental of pop acts, so I hid my dislike of her under a banner of “this music is crap”. Or “that lady is being sexy and I don’t feel sexy so that’s not for me thank you” or “oh but she can’t sing” (she can sing).
I think something funny happens to us when we see women claiming the spotlight and not giving a shit. It invokes a lot of feelings for us. It can make us feel angry, worried, jealous, inspired, amused, confused. Often we would rather not sit with those emotions, so we make it feel ‘safer’ by telling ourselves she’s a pop act — a puppet controlled by the god-like male hands of producers and label bosses. Just like we make Lady Gaga safer by calling her a crackpot or weird. It gives us a nice safe fuzzy lens to view them through. Refracted through the male gaze. Diminished. Ah, look at the dancing singing ladies, we say. Let’s sing along to them in our car. How lovely and poppy and safe.
As I got older and became involved in performing music, Madonna took on a different sheen for me. Bravely putting herself out there, a figurehead on the bow of a pop galleon, ploughing through an inhospitable sea. I grew to respect her. I waved to her from my own very small island as she sailed past. “Hello Madonna, mind that kraken!”.
Then I got older still and rediscovered her music — the happy pop songs I danced to as an eighties child, the brooding nineties stuff, her noughties nightclub renaissance (the latter admittedly not wall-to-wall classics, but surely no-one can argue with ‘Ray of Light’?). I started to see that she was flattening the grass for the rest of us. We might not have felt the impact directly, but the ripple was and is real. Can you imagine if Madonna had never existed at all? Apart from anything else, the eighties would have been pretty fucking boring.
So these days, my Madonna-reaction is one of admiration. From the pop simplicity of this week’s track ‘Into The Groove’ to the expansiveness of ‘Like A Prayer’ (my personal favourite) to 21st century bangers ‘Music’ and ‘Hung Up On You’.
Madge, mate, you’ve shown us that the lyrics are true — you can dance for inspiration.
‘Into The Groove’ was UK number one for four weeks in August 1985. The song was originally recorded for the film ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’, but didn’t end up making it onto the soundtrack. It ended up being a huge commercial success and was named Billboard magazine’s top dance single of the eighties.
Madonna said the song was deeply connected to her roots as a dancer: “The freedom that I always feel when I’m dancing, that feeling of inhabiting your body, letting yourself go, expressing yourself through music. I always thought of it as a magical place.”
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I’m Penny, a freelance writer and content strategist. My #write52 theme is ‘number ones in this week’, which is proving to be partly restrictive and partly wonderful. You can listen to me talking about other stuff on Twitter here and on Instagram here.
