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10/23/09
Madonna Synergizes with Glee, Possibly Own Demise
Glee: it’s 2009’s TV juggernaut and the gayest thing to happen, ever. Madonna: she’s 2009’s person who wore bunny ears in public and the gayest thing to happen, ever, prior to Glee. Seems like a match made in heaven, no?
The dog-vexing and glass-breaking whirr you heard all day today was the sound of the entire gay universe squeeing simultaneously because Madonna has licensed her entire catalog—yes, her catalog, not just a couple junky jams like "Die Another Day" or the entire Hard Candy album, but effing everything, even, like, "Who’s That Girl"—for use on Fox’s cute little comedy about gay wheelchair-bound singing misfits or something ([latimesblogs.latimes.com]). Exciting! But in true Carrie Bradshaw manner—eyes glancing over top of laptop screen, straw of Au Bon Pain soda in lips, unfettered self-regard numbing brain—we couldn’t help but wonder: will this serve to newly make relevant the Queen of Pop, or be the final nail in her relevance coffin?
Full disclosure: we are slavering, stammering, maniacal Madonna fans. We think her current incarnation is just this side of sad, and seriously wish she’d get over her issues with her age, and Hard Candy is garbage, and her last tour was kinda, like, you know, meh, and seriously why is that Brazilian model in every Dolce & Gabbana ad, but fine. We still love her.
But here’s the thing: nobody under the age of, say, 26 (and that’s being generous) really cares about ol’ Madge. And the really young youngs—your high school and college kids that are obsessed with, like, Twilight or whatever we don’t even know or care—don’t even register her on their radar. The gays-in-training have Madonna 2.0 (Lady Guh-GAH and her clandestine penis that further highlights her ascendancy as Madonna 2.0 since it never occurred even to the likes of Madonna to drum up a hermaphrodite publicity hoax). The rest of the youngs just don’t get her. Here’s an example:
Us, last summer: Her whole mid-life crisis thing is so unbecoming, because it runs counter to everything she supposedly stands for.
Intern: What exactly DOES she stand for, anyway?
But can you blame the intern and her ilk? These Kids Today that form a large swath of Glee’s core demo and who we’d like to slap in their insouciant faces have little personal context in which to fit Madge. By the time they were cognizant of pop culture, she was in her sex-obsessed (and, we feel, undeserved) Erotica decline. Like-a’s Prayer and Virgin were both over and done with before these children were even conceived, and it’s likely their first Madonna memory was, like, what? Ray of Light? Music? God save us all, Evita? Who knows? It all likely sailed over their heads, is the point, leaving them to wonder why anyone cares, the way 30-year-olds like us used to wonder why our parents cared about Carly Simon. (Though in her defense, Carly Simon is AWESOME, if only for her theme song to Working Girl. Truth.) It makes a body wonder whether a Glee-ified "Holiday" would register as anything more than a zippy episode where the show dipped into the oldies.
Of course the other half of Glee’s core—30-something homosexuals and the late-20-something girls who love them, or something—will implode, explode, and then die as soon as Lea Michele appears in a cone bra flanked by a shirtless Corey Monteith and That Guy Who Plays Puck to re-enact Madonna’s cover of "Fever" from the Girlie Show. The program itself will come away from this experiment with ratings gold, without question.
But what of Madge herself? The simple fact of the matter is, the old girl’s become a bit tiresome, even to those that didn’t already hate her to begin with. By fighting tooth and nail to maintain an image—both physical and cultural—of Pretty Young Thing With Her Finger on the Pulse by utilizing facelifts, crotch-baring, and singing backup on Justin Timberlake songs and then using them as her lead single, she’s served only to advertise her own discomfort with her inexorable slide toward the twilight years and draw just the sort of ageist and sexist ire she’s ostensibly trying to avoid—and her work has suffered. As has her image: Men haven’t wanted to bed her in nigh on two decades—first because of being too aggressive (an admittedly sexist reasoning) and now because of looking like her face was reconstituted using injection-molded plastic—and women generally don’t look for fashion tips in women who wear bunny ears to the Met Costume Ball in an effort to gain attention, even if they’re Vuitton, because they are nakedly attention-seeking and also look asinine. That’s just, you know, the order of the universe.
Given all that, it’s hard to say if Glee will finally give Madonna the bump amongst the youngs that she so desperately wants (but absolutely does not actually need, but, you know, human nature and wanting what you can’t have and the like) or further along her relegation to the nostalgia act she seems unwittingly bent on becoming. Most likely neither—the youngs will get a momentary kick out of it and then go back to not caring, the olds will kick up their heels and call it the best night of their lives since that time they conned Chrissy’s dad into taking them to the Blond Ambition Tour and he got SO MAD when Madonna started simulating masturbation, and the world will keep spinning on its axis etc. blah and so on. But it does beg the question: if a pop idol makes a new splash and nobody under the age of 30 much cares, did the splash ever even happen?
#openmicnights
10/23/09
#openmicnights
10/23/09
It was very nice, but then "begs the question" came a-knockin'.
#openmicnights