Madonna Speaks Out, Again

Well, Charlie, it sounds too easy to say that this is a Madonna like we’ve never heard her before, but in this case it’s really true. She talks about herself, her career, her family, and her past with a whole new attitude.
— Cynthia McFadden, Good Morning America (18 June 2004)

Well, I mean, what are my options? I’m not voting for George Bush.
— Madonna, 20/20 (18 June 2004)

The ritual is entrenched and increasingly tedious, yet it continues to draw viewers. The primetime celebrity interview, undertaken for the network magazine show, tends toward self-exposure, self-explanation, and, if said celebrity is lucky, a bit of profitable self-inflation as well. From Whitney and Britney to Bennifer to O.J., recent versions of the ordeal have been seen by millions and presaged by loads of promotion, in the form of pithy, juicy-bit commercials and extended, juicy-bit “previews” on the morning shows affiliated with the nighttime shows. By the time you actually see the interview, it’s hard to be surprised by anything. (Except, maybe, the instantly notorious assertion by Ms. Houston: “Crack is whack.”)

Madonna’s latest much-publicized one-on-one with ABC’s Cynthia McFadden was pitched for a week or so, with the usual sorts of soundbites, primary among them her admission, on being pressed by the intrepid McFadden, that her recently selected Hebrew name is, indeed, “Esther.” Fans and casual viewers alike no doubt waited with baited breath regarding this non-newsflash. Will logos and billboards need to be changed for upcoming public appearances? Will she release an album under the “new name”? Is now “the artist formerly known as Madonna”? (This particular formulation was old the moment it escaped from a journalist’s lips, including Charlie Gibson’s. Sadly, it escaped from the lips of many.) And what does it mean for her famously sad relationship with her own mother, also named “Madonna”?

Though 20/20 included some of that requisite Truth or Dare footage of black-and-white Madonna visiting her mom’s grave, the name change hasn’t really changed much on that or assorted public fronts. According to Madonna, the name is not a change per se or even a decision that affects her public life. It’s about her continuing spiritual journey — the Kabbalah study, the yoga, the red string bracelet she wears on her left wrist beneath her watchband, because, she says, she doesn’t want her ongoing education to be a matter of public concern. Britney wears one too, and so does Demi Moore.

The New York Times weighs in on this fad an opinion by Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, an Orthodox rabbi and chairman of Jewish law and ethics at L.A.’s Loyola Law School: “The infatuation with [the Kabbalah] is L.A. at its worst,” he says. “The tendency to want it now, to want it without effort and to want it by right rather than doing the hard work” (Joseph Berger, “A Jewish Madonna? Is That a Mystery?”, 18 June 2004). Madonna doesn’t speak to these concerns (and she’s not asked about them here). She asserts that her study is serious, that she wants to be a “better person.” She does briefly elucidate her affection for the name, as it belonged to a queen who “helped save the Jews from annihilation,” but other than that, the adoption of the name is what it is, inconsequential for the rest of us.

As the Esther story is a yawny nonstarter, you might imagine something else came up during her 20 minutes or so on camera (20/20 that night included a story on the war in Iraq and John Stossel’s “Gimme a Break” segment, this night on Super Size Me versus McDonald’s). But no. McFadden doesn’t ask about the recent run-in with Warners over the Maverick label; as of 15 June, she sold her shares for something over $10 million, choosing to cease fighting, to attend to other matters.

So too, McFadden, who focuses the interview on Madonna’s more visible undertakings. Namely, she’s got a new children’s book, her third, called Yakov and the Seven Thieves (drawn from her studies), that hits shelves 21 June (she’s also got more kids’ stuff in the works: dolls, clothes, and school supplies). She’s happily married to Guy, her kids — Lola and four-year-old Rocco — are fine. The governing “philosophy” at home is “pick up your shit” (this last bleeped out, because, it seems Madonna can’t help herself; she must say something in need of bleeping, for old times’ sake if nothing else).

The 20/20 “package,” intercut into the interview under McFadden’s helpful voiceover, includes the usual references to Madonna’s button-pushing past: she made the Sex book, she made the “Erotica” video, she inspired legions of wannabes to wear crucifixes, plastic bracelets, and bras as external apparel. (Reminded that concertgoers the previous evening are still dressing like her, she says curtly, “I’m not flattered by that so much anymore.”) She also spent a lengthy period (“at least a decade”) making public, attention-getting trouble. Though she always had a sense of the politics at stake, the resistance to gender, race, and generational norms, the shaking up she meant to do, media coverage tended to the obvious sensationalism of her performances: Madonna hitchhiking naked, Madonna posed with Big Daddy Kane, Madonna with Sandra Bernhard.

For Madonna, it’s in the past. Saying she is “a person now awake,” the 45-year-old artist recalls that she was “taking my clothes off and being photographed, saying bad words on TV and that sort of thing… I don’t regret it, but… I mean, everybody takes their clothes off now. And then what? You know? And then what?” It’s unanswerable, the most profound question of the interview.

While McFadden endeavors to shape this apparent revelation into a sort of maturation or, worse, conformity, Madonna accepts (or skips past) that reading but moves on. Asked what she “wants,” Madonna says the right thing: “I want to be more liberated from my ego. Less concerned with what people think of me.” Oh my, McFadden almost blanches. Being such a flamboyant, self-proclaimed “rebel,” how can she care what anyone thinks of her? Madonna knows, as do her fans, that being a rebel is as conformist as anything else. It is an “American way,” after all. Does she worry what her daughter thinks? Did Lola see her kiss Britney and Christina, Madonna looks almost surprised — for half a second — at the utter inanity of the question. Lourdes kisses her friends on their mouths too. Kids don’t worry about those things. Duh.

If Maddy’s current activities aren’t so exciting, what about her past, all that salacious and promiscuous sex? She did, after all, go through what McFadden calls a “conga line” of men, including the usually trotted out picture assembly: Sean Penn, Dennis Rodman, and Warren Beatty, all, incidentally, apparently healthy and settled into their own current lives, much as she is. “I just ripped through relationships, in a willy-nilly, completely selfish, what’s in it for me?” says Madonna. Nowadays, she’s all about compromise. “Step number one to a successful marriage,” Madonna smiles, “is learn to apologize, right?” Plus, she’s on friendly terms with Lola’s dad, Carlos Leon. Not much drama there either.

So here’s a possibility: Madonna is touring again. The show is called, rather obviously, “Re-Invention.” Though she was vaguely prickly about the way the term has been used in the past (“I felt that it trivialized what I did. People would say, ‘Oh, she’s just reinvented herself. She’s, you know, oh, she’s done it again.’ And, by the way, it’s not that easy. It requires investigation. It requires work”), the use of the name for the tour doesn’t exactly seem a clap back. It’s just a name, for what she does. That she does it as well as anyone else (the names Bowie and Prince inevitably come up in this context) and, so far anyway, she hasn’t cancelled for lack of sales (or for knee surgery, or strained vocal chords), only makes reinvention seem routine for Madonna. This year, she’s wearing a kilt again, she’s singing old favorites, she’s keeping up with her exceptionally athletic young dancers. And she doesn’t even have a new album to promote.

Why tour without something to sell? Aside from the so-called “career retrospective”? McFadden gets to the point at last, when she inquires about the tour’s inclusion of dancers in military-looking gear and imagery from the “American Life” music video that Madonna pulled before the war against Iraq commenced last year. The concert is, according to McFadden, “partly an anti-war protest.” She asks Madonna to explain the “meaning” of the last image of that re-outfitted video, in which a President Bush look-alike kisses a Saddam Hussein look-alike on the cheek. Horrors. Sayeth Madonna:

They both have very, equally narrow views about how to solve problems, and it is all about power, a struggle for oil, and the struggle for world domination… I don’t want to equate George Bush with Saddam Hussein. I believe that George Bush and Saddam Hussein are both behaving in an irresponsible manner. So, in that respect, they’re alike.

McFadden has it now, the “controversy.” She wonders whether Madonna recalls the Dixie Chicks’ public trauma. Isn’t she worried that she’ll be hung out to dry by Clear Station radio stations or Fox News commentators? Madonna is unperturbed. “I don’t think,” she observes matter-of-factly, “You’re going to find many people who think the war in Iraq, at this point, was a good idea.”

True, she spends most of her time in the UK, where most folks actually don’t think the war was a “good idea.” And it might be true that even those U.S. citizens who admire Bush’s tenacity, think he has God on his side or believe in the Bush Doctrine, might have doubts concerning the catastrophes that have characterized the war and the occupation. Maybe Madonna’s right. Maybe no one cares what she says anymore. Either way, the world is looking increasingly odd, sad, and weary.