Behold the hideousness of Madonna

Everything that is twisted and dark about our culture, embodied in one old lady

Well, the first two weeks of 2023 are in the past, and as we hurtle toward whatever future awaits us in this period of monumental but as yet unannounced change, I find that some things are coming into clearer focus for me. 

In December, I wrote about how arresting I found the Fifth Generation Warfare concept and my interest in it has only grown since then. It seamlessly blends together my two enduring interests: war and conflict between states and people, and high-low culture’s influence on our lives. Until I read about 5GW, I thought these were two separate things. Now I realise they are not. 

I grew up in the 1980’s and 1990’s, which, looking back, now seems like a golden age for pop culture — and also the era in which is rooted our current cultural decay. If you allow me to overwork a metaphor: the seeds of this rot were planted in the 1960’s, and the roots became infected in the ’80’s-’90’s. The rot was there, but we couldn’t see it yet. It was under the surface.

Now, it’s ugly, diseased fruit has burst, and I see it in almost every piece of new pop that I come across.

No one embodies this hideous transformation more than Madonna. She blasted onto the scene when I was a girl of 7 or 8. Before that, I had seen something of the original punk culture — my dad liked to hang out in a bar called Grassroots Tavern on St Mark’s Place in the East Village, and he took me along with him sometimes. One of my earliest memories is of that dark, smelly bar and the scary-looking punks with their spiky hair and pins in their faces. I couldn’t have been more than 5 years old, and I did not like it.

So Madonna’s much more aesthetically pleasing and softer version of punk removed all the ugliness and danger, and kept the the newness, the edge, the sense that you were seeing something a little bit transgressive, but firmly bounded within beauty norms. Fun, not frightening. Watch her 1983 video Borderline and tell me you aren’t charmed. Madonna had a mesmerising, Old-World beauty and a very American, urban, modern aesthetic. The combination was pretty intoxicating. And most of all, she was young. Her sexy insouciance fit the season of life she was in, and gave me — two decades her junior — a sense of thrilling anticipation of the power that awaited me, when it would be my turn to be a young, sexy woman out in the world. I still have enormous affection for that sweet season of my girlhood and the role Madonna’s songs and videos played in it.

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Today, Madonna looks like a beast from the pits of hell. And I am a middle aged woman who can’t help but see the horror that has come from our wholesale abandonment of traditional female life stages, from maiden to crone, and a total debasement of natural female beauty. 

You might think - ‘the horror?? That’s a bit of an exaggeration!’ But that’s my genuine feeling when I look upon her swollen face, her cat-stretched eyes, her cheap-looking fake hair, and her seemingly misshapen body. I feel revulsion watching this old woman writhe and grind and stick her tongue into the mouth of a much younger woman.  It upsets me on some deep, primal level that I have trouble finding the words for.

It all just seems like a sinister fairy tale. There is something archetypal about a woman refusing to cede her youth despite all the evidence of the material, physical reality of ageing. Dressed in a long, black, flowing cape and surrounded by scantily clad dancers wearing devil horns, she falls off the stage in 2015. In 2019, there was the truly demonic Eurovision performance wearing a diamond tiara and an eye patch. (The Illuminati watchers must have had a field day with that one.) She managed to stay upright, but her vocals were shockingly bad. Her Instagram is so grim and ugly and joylessly sexualised one person commented: “Satan is waiting for you, grandma.” Ouch.

In fact, her Instagram is full of people who share my horror. Under a post of her shaking her corseted old ass, one wrote:  “OUR Madonna is gone. Now it’s just this disaster over and over again. 💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔 It has nothing to do with her age, (sometimes she looks really good even without photoshop) it’s how she’s acting, her “photo shoots”, her public appearances are now all cringe worthy, she’s saying nothing interesting anymore and when she does it’s all slurred or missed cues, not to mention the plastic surgeries. Our queen is dead. Long live the Queen💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔”

Another person commented under the same post: “Madonna, 64, has taken very little notice of the fans who have been begging her to stop making 'weird reels: Yes I am a true fan since 1983. What about the dedicated for years, what about us who really and truly do not want to see this from our beloved hero.”

So is she seeing sense and hanging up her riding crop and fishnets? Perhaps buying a horse farm in Montana or a vineyard in the south of France? Er no. She’s going on a world tour, to inflict more of her grotesqueries on us. 

In the decades between my innocent child adulation of Madonna and her current act as a ancient succubus, she managed to piss off conservatives over and over with her use of Catholic imagery and her racy creative output. So it’s not a surprise at all that she’s turned out the way she has. I’m sure many, many people predicted it. But I, in my youthful lack of wisdom, would have scoffed at criticism of her back in the day. I was of the firm opinion that just because she transgressed for show and for fame and for “art”, it didn’t mean she was a grotesque demon who feasted on the young. I thought she because she seemed smart and savvy and fierce, she could be transgressive and still be wise, still be dignified.

Clearly, as it pertains to Madonna, I was wrong. But I’m starting to suspect that is not true for anyone. It seems very obvious — thanks to celebrities ageing badly — that in order to keep our psyches intact, we must adhere to the turning of the seasons in our lives and put away the childish things and the youthful obsessions. Our cultural elites seem desperate to convince us not to. Culture tries to fill our heads with garbage notions, like the only beauty in ageing comes from deforming plastic surgery and old ladies licking teenagers. 

Part of me is let down that she has proven all us smug liberals wrong and the conservatives right. A bigger part of me is grateful that by making such a spectacle of herself she is showing me right from wrong. She’s not just telling on herself, she’s telling on our culture — and that is useful information.

But goddamn, from the children she took from Mawali to that video of her dry humping kids barely out of their teens to how she made her once-beautiful face hideous, it’s very hard to watch. I’m not saying that such a dark turn in culture has never happened before. But it has never happened in my lifetime.  

You cannot hold onto youth when it goes. You must let it pass. Endless plastic surgery and the purchasing — sorry, adopting — of additional children will not keep you in your dewey female prime. If anything, it does the opposite. It turns you into a ravenous monster. A vampire.

Madonna is not just a faded pop star. She is large part of a complex economy whose currency is a mix of lust, lies, fakery and cold hard cash. Millions of people have grown up swayed in one way or another by her extremely valuable image, sold for huge sums of money in that economy. 

Now, she’s playing an even more important role: she’s a warning to us all. The awfulness of her persona is showing us how rotten the top layer of our cultural elites have become. So we may proceed accordingly.

Since I’ve burned your eyeballs with the horror of contemporary Madonna, here’s the antidote — the absolute polar opposite.

Enjoy the weekend, y’all!