40 Living to Tell: Madonna's Resurrection of the Fleshly (1991; Excerpt)
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40 Living to Tell: Madonna's Resurrection of the Fleshly (1991; excerpt) Susan McClary People have this idea that ifyou're sexual and beautiful and provocative, then there~ nothing else you could possibly o.ffir. People have always had that image about women. And while it might have seemed like I was behaving in a stereotypical way, at the same time, I was also masterminding it. I was in control ofeverything I was doing, and I think that when people realized that, it confused them. -Madonna,1987 What ifa little girl picked up a guitar and said, 'I wanna be a rock star. 'Nine times out often her parents would nev_er allow her to do it. We don't have so many lead guitar women, not because women don't have the ability to play the instrument but because they're kept locked up, taught to be something else. I don't appreciate that. -David Lee Roth Madonna is the most controversial figure in popular music of the last thirty years. She push es people's buttons: religion, abortion, and sexuality are just a few of the topics she has forced us to consider over the years. Many of these topics are gender related, and can perhaps best be understood within a historical context of women in music. In this chapter from her ground breaking book of feminist music criticism Feminine Endings ( 1991 ), Susan McClary provides that context, and shows how it has shaped Madonna's largely negative critical reception. McClary observes that Western music is historically a male domain. In opera, for example, men wrrte the words and music, stage the action, conduct the orchestra, and so forth. Women have a role-as spectacle on stage-but they must not step out of line. Powerful women in opera are usually doomed women. Madonr:ia rejects such control, and is thus potentially disturbing to men. Women have also been deterred in subtle ways from choosing music as a profession. For exam ple, David Lee Roth's suggestion that girls are discouraged from playing gurtar explains why we have 321 322 Susan McClary Living to Tell 323 so few rock gurtar heroines. Another restriction concerns public performance: it is one thing for a breathtaking. For example, John Fiske's complex and sympathetic discussion of the man to display his sexuality, quite another thing for a woman. (For this reason, women have in the struggle over meaning surrounding Madonna begins, "Most critics have nothing past been banned from the stage.) Madonna confronts and rejects these controls as well. good to say about her music, but they have a lot to say about her image."4 He then Because she openly flaunts her sexuality, Madonna is dismissed as a mindless media doll, but goes on to say a lot about her image, and he too has nothing whatsoever to say about in fact she composes and produces her music, and controls every aspect of her image. Critics the music. E. Ann Kaplan's detailed readings of Madonna's music videos likewise also dismiss her because she is commercially successful-evidence that she plays to the lowest push the music to the siqe and treat the videos strictly through the techniques of film common denominator (teen girls, for example). Or she is dismissed because she performs criticism.5 "mindless" dance music, that is, music that celebrates the body, not the mind. This essay will concentrate on Madonna, the musician. First, I will locate her with McClary answers each of these criticisms, portraying Madonna as a conscious and courageous artist. Of particular interest is McClary's observation concerning the strategies of Madonna's musi in a history of gender relationships in the music world: I hope to demonstrate that cal and visual constructions:''she evokes a whole range of conventional signifiers [codes] and then Madonna has served as a lightning rod to make only slightly more perceptible the causes them to rub up against each other in ways that are open to a variety of divergent readings, kinds of double binds always presented to a woman who attempts to enter Western many of them potentially empowering to girls and women." For example, in "Like A Virgin" music. Second, I will turn to her music and examine some of the ways she operates Madonna ironically acknowledges that childish vulnerability is what the patriarchal culture expects, within a persistently repressive discourse to create liberatory musical images. Finally and at the same time makes it clear that she is aware that the fantasy is ludicrous. Indeed, none of I will present a brief discussion of the music videos "Open Your Heart" and "Like a the fantasies she enacts in her videos is really successful as male fantasy. Prayer," in which I consider the interactions between musical and visual components. Finally. Madonna has been accused of setting the cause of feminism back, but McClary sug Throughout this ess~y, I will be writing of Madonna in a way that assigns con gests that this criticism comes largely from males; by contrast, "many girls and women ... per siderable credit and responsibility to her as a creator of texts. To be sure, the prod ceive her music and videos as articulating a whole new set of possible feminine subject ucts ascribed to Madonna are the result of complex collaborative processes involving positions.'' the input of co-writers, co-producers, studio musicians, video directors, technicians, marketing specialists, and so forth. As is the case in most pop, there is no single orig A great deal of ink has been spilled in the debate over pop star Madonna's visual inary genius for this music. image and the narratives she has enacted for music video. Almost every response Yet the testimonies of co-workers and interviewers indicate that Madonna is very in the spectrum has been registered, ranging from unambiguous characteriza much in control of almost every dimension of her media persona and her career. tions of her as "a porn queen in heat"1 or "the kind of woman who comes into your Even though certain components of songs or videos are contributed by other artists, 2 room at three a.m. and sucks your life out," to formulations that view her as a she has won and fiercely maintains the right to decide finally what will be released kind of organic feminist whose image "enables girls to see that the meanings of under her name. It may be that Madonna is best understood as head of a corpora feminine sexuality can be in their control, can be made in their interests, and tion that produces images of her self-representation, rather than as the spontaneous, that their subjectivities are not necessarily totally determined by the dominant "authentic" artist of rock mythology. But a puppet she's not. As she puts it: 3 patriarchy." • • • • What most reactions to Madonna share, however, 1s an automatic dismissal of People have this idea that if you're sexual and beautiful and provocative, then there's her music as irrelevant. The scorn with which her ostensible artistic focus has been nothing else you could possibly offer. People have always had that image about women. And while it might have seemed like I was behaving in a stereotypical way, at the same trivialized, treated as a conventional backdrop to her visual appearance, often is time, I was also masterminding it. I was in control of everything I was doing, and I think that when people realized that, it confused them.6 lJ. D. Considine, "That Girl: Madonna Rolls Across America," BuZZ 2, no. 11(September1987): "According to the I am stressing Madonna's agency in her own self-representation in part because PMRC's Susan Baker, in fact, Madonna taught little girls how to act 'like a porn queen in heat' (17). E. Ann Kaplan there is such a powerful tendency for her agency to be erased completely-for her to describes her image as a combination of bordello queen and bag lady. See Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, be seen as just a mindless doll fulfilling male fantasies of anonymous puppeteers. Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (New York: Methuen, 1987), 126. 2Milo Miles, music editor of Boston Phoenix, as quoted in Dave Marsh, "Girls Can't Do What the Guys Do: This particular strategy for dismissing Madonna has always seemed odd to me Madonna's Physical Attraction," The First Rock & Roll Confidential Report (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 161. Compare because the fantasies she enacts are not very successful at being male fantasies, if that the imagery in Considine, "That Girl": "By some accounts-particularly a notorious Rolling Stone profile-Madonna slept her way to the top, sucking her boyfriends dry, then moving on ~o the next influential m~le" (16). Both ~arsh and Considine refute this image, but it is a fascinating one that combines the predatory sexuality of the vampire and succubus with the servile masochism of the female character in Deep Throat. For a reasonably detailed (if positively 4Ibid., 270. 5 slanted) account of Madonna's early career, see Debbi Voller, Madonna: The Illustrated Biography (London: Omnibus See Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock, especially 115-27; and "Feminist Criticism and Television," Channels of Press, 1988). Discourse, 211-53. 3John Fiske, "British Cultural Studies and Television," Channels of Discourse, ed. Robert C. Allen (Chapel Hill: 6Mikal Gilmore, "The Madonna Mystique," Rolling Stone 508(September10, 1987): 87. I wish to thank Ann Dunn University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 297. for this citation. 324 Susan McClary Living to Tell 325 is their objective: they often inspire discomfort and anxiety among men who wish to 1 Toy." 7 And I am rather amused when men who are oth read her as a genuine "Boy Although there are some notable exceptions, women have traditionally been barred with feminist issues attack Madonna for setting erwise not conspicuously concerned from participating in Western music.