Woman in the News: Madonna
By Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Published: April 25 2008 19:47 | Last updated: April 25 2008 19:47
This week Madonna became the first 49-year-old mother of three to top the British singles charts. Among female stars only Cher, at 52, has achieved the feat at an older age.
Her new single is also her 13th UK number one hit, the most by a woman. (It reached the top 10 in Billboard’s Hot 100 in the US.) In a neat twist, it occurs in the year marking the 25th anniversary of her first UK single, “Holiday”, which came out in the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s second electoral victory.
It does not require a numerologist versed in the mysteries of Madonna’s beloved Kabbalah to decipher the significance of these numbers. They illustrate the singer’s extraordinary longevity in an industry that worships youth and churns through talent mercilessly. To survive in pop music as long as she has is remarkable enough; to cling on to her crown as queen of pop is unparalleled.
An instructive comparison can be drawn with her two fellow titans of the 1980s, Michael Jackson and Prince, both of whom join her in turning 50 this summer. Jackson’s career lies in ruins. Prince was reduced to handing away his last album as a freebie with a British newspaper. In contrast, the eyes of the world are on Madonna as she prepares to release her new album, Hard Candy, next week.
Her drive has not diminished since her appearance in 1983 on the television chart show, American Bandstand, when she warned, only half-jokingly, that she wanted “to rule the world”. In spite of parenthood, middle age and an estimated personal fortune running into hundreds of millions of dollars, the same desire to succeed burns on.
“In an ideal world, I’d like to exercise for three hours a day,” she recently said: those forbidding cheekbones and that ultra-honed physique are workaholism made flesh. Last year she signalled her intention to keep going into her late 50s by signing an innovative 10-year deal with Live Nation, the concert promoter, for a rumoured $120m (€77m). It commits her to making three more albums and guarantees her a large proportion of any touring revenues. “The paradigm in the music business has shifted and as an artist and as a businesswoman, I have to move with that shift,” she grandly announced.
To her critics, Madonna Louise Ciccone is right to describe herself as a businesswoman but wrong to call herself an artist. They deride her thin voice and modest musical talent and damn her as a triumph of self-marketing. There is a degree of truth in the criticism – in 1990 Forbes magazine anointed her “America’s smartest businesswoman” – but it misses the point. Pop singers do not require the vocal technique of Maria Callas. Image-making and an instinct to connect with the public’s fantasies are more important. It is precisely because of Madonna’s commercial acumen that the “Material Girl” is one of the greatest pop stars, in fact, up there with Elvis Presley and The Beatles.
Constant reinvention is the secret of her success. The wannabe dancer who moved to New York from Michigan in 1978 with – so legend has it – $37 in her pocket has adopted numerous guises from the good-time girl of “Like a Virgin”; the conical bra-clad dominatrix of the “Blond Ambition” tour; the hippy spiritualist of “Ray of Light”; and so on up to her current, rather eccentric, incarnation as a horseriding English countrywoman with a taste for US hip-hop and leotards. Her image changes have launched countless fads and fuelled a boom in jargon-filled academic studies about her as a post-feminist chameleon. Not all these shifts worked – the Che Guevara beret and camouflage fatigues of her 2003 album were dispatched amid accusations of unpatriotism in wartime US – but her understanding of the possibilities and limits of the pop market invariably wins out.
She has made her name in a male-dominated industry. Her first US single was marketed as black dance music, to her annoyance, with a New York street scene replacing her face on the cover. She has fought to take control of her image, which explains the powerful brew of rebelliousness and commercial energy she brings to her music.
Her love of breaking taboos has left a trail of enraged social conservatives, railing against displays of blasphemy, lesbianism and bad language (Madonna, until her English gentry makeover, was infamously foul-mouthed). The singer’s assertion of her femininity has had a profound influence on generations of young women; yet she has been quick to profit from the ensuing controversies, as when she published Sex, a coffee-table book of erotica, in 1992, which sold more than 1m copies within days.
Madonna’s changing looks, fascination with the body and competitiveness mark her out as a Darwinian entrepreneur. She has a Thatcherite impatience with restrictions – she recently complained bitterly about the congestion charge for traffic in her adopted home of London – combined with a strangely old-fashioned attachment to family and marriage. “Ritchie” reads the doormat in her Los Angeles bolthole, in reference to her alter ego as Mrs Ritchie, wife of Guy Ritchie, the English film-maker.
She has been pragmatic in business. Endorsement deals and tours keep her among pop’s top earners. Quick to grasp the language of music videos in the 1980s, she also understood the worth of playing live, which has become one of the music industry’s chief sources of income. Madonna’s last tour netted $195m in 2006. In 1992, she set up her own record label, Maverick, which released one of the decade’s biggest-selling albums, Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. The only career blot is her woeful attempt to break into films, as the audience who lustily booed her directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, at this year’s Berlin film festival made clear.
She is said to be a cautious investor, valuing art and property over riskier ventures. A former manager recalled: “We had to fax her every cheque we wrote on a daily basis and she would call us to say if it was OK before we could send it out.” She ascribes her shrewdness to a working-class upbringing in a single-parent family, her mother having died when she was five.
Hard Candy ends with the sound of a tolling bell. It announces the end of her record contract with Warner Music, her label since 1982. It is not her best album – its thudding beats are as remorseless as her exercise regime – but it would be folly to bet against Madonna extending her tally of hits as she marches into her 50s. Cher has three more years to enjoy her record.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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