It’s a lot of puffery for business as usual-so much that it’s tempting to give Madonna a pass for trying. Needless to say, these exercises are rarely illuminating even when the accompanying music is good. Later, she clarified: “I embody all of those people but then I also use those people to the extreme in the form of Madame X as a disguise to do my work.” Excepting the specific eccentricities here (such as referring to Madame X in the third person on Twitter and the fashion eye patch), the Madame X concept is the most recent example of a marketing trope in which divas use real nick- and middle names to thematically signal that they are revealing more sides of themselves than they previously allowed (see: Mariah Carey’s Mimi, Janet Jackson’s Damita Jo, and Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce). Hear her pining in the opening lines of Madame X’s first single, “Medellín”: “I took a pill and had a dream/I went back to my 17th year.”Īt the same time, Madame X is a secret agent, a dancer, a professor, a head of state, a nun, a housekeeper, and several other things, according to Madonna’s video announcement of the album. You can see why she yearns for a clean slate. In recent press, her wariness of public scrutiny after almost four decades of stardom is palpable: “I preferred life before phone,” she told Grigoriadis regarding the internet’s consistently shabby treatment of her.
“That was in the beginning of my career when I didn’t think about who I should be or what I should be,” Madonna told Billboard in May. “Madame X” was a nickname given to her at 19 by her dance instructor, the legendary Martha Graham. Convoluted in sound and concept, it is intended as a means for both dissociation and the reaffirmation of Madonna’s multitudes. Today, the question is what does a veteran who redefined pop stardom for decades do in her 60s?Įven she doesn’t seem sure on her muddled 14th album, Madame X. The magazine perhaps leaned too heavily into the age thing-the article, after all, was titled “Madonna at Sixty.” But of course Madonna’s age is relevant to her current story because it reminds us that her career path has always been one of uncharted territory. “It makes me feel raped,” wrote Madonna, echoing a contentious comment she made to Grigoriadis about her reaction to several Rebel Heart tracks leaking months before she had completed the album. This was never more evident than in her denouncement of a recent New York Times Magazine profile by journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis, who Madonna dragged in an Instagram post for focusing on “trivial and superficial matters” such as her age. It seems that Madonna, once queen of pop and enforcer of the regimentation that comes with that, is no longer controlling her narrative.
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