WEEKEND COLUMNISTS I remember with improbable precision the day I went off pop music. It was in October 1993. Until then, I had had plenty to challenge me, but managed to hang on to a passion that gripped me before I had even set foot in primary school. That’s what used to happen in the days when the Beatles and the Stones were pushing themselves to ever greater heights. In my teens, I saw a weird-looking bunch of guys from the US called The Ramones play a set that was utterly lacking in finesse, originality or indeed any musical ability whatsoever. It was a hot evening, and the crowd was intent on jumping vertically at high velocity and spitting at the stage. It was infernal; yet there was something winning about those early manifestations of punk rock, dumb and moving, like cave paintings.
In my 20s, it all became a bit too flash for my liking, but there was still an earnestness and benign intent in those lip-glossed boys from the Home Counties dressing like nautical miscreants. Girls were called Rio, worked as waitresses in cocktail bars and we were all off to Vienna. Did you really want to hurt him? Of course not. Pop had discovered its joie de vivre, and it felt like a happy time, although there were signs already of a dysfunction of mood between the ultimate three-minute art form flaunting its new-found hedonism, and the embattled body politic from which it sprang.
Then one weekend in October 1993, I went to a conference at the Tate Gallery, as it was, to report on a conference called “Deconstructing Madonna.” It was proudly labelled a symposium, and it featured many academics in a burgeoning field called Cultural Studies. The conference was tied to a book of the same name, and I had read a sentence in it that captivated me, for its startling opacity: “Clearly, Madonna’s voice is for the most part deeply implicated in the structures of meaning produced by and within orthodox language.”
I was curious, for I had read and encountered many philosophers who talked like that, and I had also danced like the Furies to Madonna’s first major hit “Holiday”, but had never dreamt of making any connection between the two. On we went. I still remember fragments of the discussion. Madonna had recently appeared in the execrable Dick Tracy with Warren Beatty, one of her many pitiful movie performances. The fact that the two stars had had an affair was “meta-textual information to bring into the reading of the film”, according to one excited participant.
Much more stuff and nonsense followed. What was almost chilling, putting aside the ridiculous language used, was the uncritical nature of the remarks. Because Madonna had played many roles in the various manifestations of her art, her true meaning was “endlessly deferred”, putting her far ahead of those who wished to put her down. She may have appeared in pornographic poses; but because she was in control, that inverted the patriarchal structure implicit in most such scenarios. Feminists drooled with admiration. “My pussy is the temple of learning,” she had memorably stated in her glossy, soft-porn book Sex, a remark that was taken entirely at face value by the assembled company, who, frankly, sounded like they had taken their degrees there.
Madonna could do no wrong: she was rich, famous, enjoyed toying with the media and loved to shock such ethically nuanced institutions as the Vatican and the Daily Mail. And here was a group of the thinking classes frothing over with pleasure at the sheer brilliance of it all. The infantile phenomenon known as “girl power” was around the corner. No-one talked of her music, her lyrics, her substantive worth as an artist. They were reckoned to be dispensable topics for discussion. From now on, pop music was primarily about power, control, image. And who could play those games best would reap the greatest reward.
Madonna is currently coming to the end of a world tour, and of course she is still playing those games, for her rewards have been monstrous. The tour is called “Confessions” (is there really anything left?) and, wouldn’t you know it, she appears on a crucifix and wears a crown of thorns. She allegedly disdains Christianity for its reluctance to question itself, which may come as a surprise to Thomas Aquinas and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but there you go. I have a grim fascination for her, for she is the same age and lives in the same city as me, and she is, no question about it, stupendously fit.
And pop music? It is generally drivel, not only failing to provide any instance of originality but celebrating its very dim- wittedness with retro styling and the puppet theatricality of The X Factor and the like. I don’t entirely blame Madonna. She made a very good album, Ray of Light, nearly a decade ago and remains a committed stage performer, if for a hefty fee. But those people who write about her! All those tiny minds, flaunting their half-baked understanding of Semiotics-Made-Simple, urging us to take seriously any personality that combines shrillness, reasonable looks and obdurate ambition. They ruined everything, on that Saturday afternoon at the Tate Gallery. It was, for me, the day the music died.
