American Strife

So who's going to win Super Bowl XLVI tomorrow? Guess what - I don't give a twit. The Super Bowl is a vulgar display of excess, grandiosity, spectacle, and crudity. In that sense, it's a latter-day Roman Coliseum, and a sorry reflection of who we are as Americans. The Super Bowl is so mired in cheap showmanship that the game no longer matters.

So it seems all too appropriate that Madonna is performing in the halftime show.

I have long regarded Madonna as the musical equivalent of the Iraq War. By that, I mean she's a crime against civilization that America must someday be punished for, but nothing that's my fault. It just completely nauseates me that a novelty-act disco singer with a cheap gimmick - a churlishly slutty image that deliberately contradicts her name - could somehow become a pop icon. In the past thirty years, she has completely destroyed American popular music; her influence has led it to become more style than substance, where spectacles in musical performances count for more than the music itself.

Her relentless emphasis on music videos as an art form rather than as the commercials they are led many record companies to push promotional videos rather than spend money on tours that are so vital to the growth of young bands and solo performers. Madge's music is itself all sizzle and no steak - mindless drum machine beats driving insipid melodies played on cold synthesizers, all topped by her tinny, whiny vocal styles that sound like breaking glass scratching a blackboard. She is the reason for talentless phonies like Britney Spears and walking disasters like Lady Gaga. Her use of rap lyrics has also helped popularize hip-hop, easily the worst musical form ever conceived. She may be the only pop performer who has had fans eagerly awaiting her next outrageous publicity stunt more than her next record. She's a very big reason you don't hear traditional rock and roll so much anymore; a whole generation of performers has tried to emulate her lamebrained disco/hip-hop style, and our popular culture is all the more unbearable for it.

And yet, despite her obvious lack of taste, despite her equally obvious attitude toward music as just a vehicle to achieve fame and fortune with, despite all of that, she has the nerve to insist that her career has always been about the music.

If I sound cynical, perhaps you should bear in mind that every move Madge has made in the past three decades - from dating a record producer to trying to break into movies - has been coldly calculated. For example, she let listeners of her early records think she was black by keeping a low profile and by saying in early promotional material that she danced in the Alvin Ailey company, a dance troupe not known for its affirmative-action outreach programs for Caucasians. Every time I hear her 1986 single "La Isla Bonita" - not often, of course, but always unwillingly - it sounds like Madge woke up one morning, read over breakfast that Hispanics were the fastest-growing population segment in the United States, and decided to craft herself a Latin ballad to pander to an increasingly important demographic. She's recorded a song for every possible radio format except rock and country, two formats that aren't exactly thriving right now, thanks to her own influence.

What's worse is that she's inescapable. And not just for this weekend, when she's promoting her upcoming record and the new movie she directed - yes, directed. I've always agreed with the notion that if you don't like some kind of music, you simply shouldn't listen to it. It makes sense, until you go into a restaurant or a store and suddenly her one of Madge's songs leap out of the radio or piped-in music system on the premises. I can't tell you how many times her tinny voice and her smug emoting ruined my lunch or my shopping experience. I go into a store, I hear her - well, I hesitate to call it music - and even if I need something in the store, I just walk right out and wait out in the freezing cold or the blistering heat for at least five minutes. Every one of Madge's songs seems to be five minutes long. Sometimes they seem longer.

I publish this Madonna-bashing post knowing I'll get a lot nasty comments for daring to be critical of her. Because her fans are even nastier than they are; if you so much as mildly criticizes her records, her fans accuse you of being a sick, hateful person with a snobbish attitude toward popular music. I don't find many people agreeing with my mindset in the pop press either; critics are always defending her as a daring courageous artist for "pushing people's buttons," and the veteran pop critic Dave Marsh even accused white male music fans of being prejudiced against her for being a female performer with a large black and Hispanic audience. Madge loves all of it. She likes to say, "I hate people who hate." What she really means is, "I hate people who hate me."

I admit, it's rather difficult to express a negative opinion of Madonna when the only person who agrees with you is Rick Santorum.

It turns out that a lot of people find her a hateful person. I've heard stories of Michael Jackson having been put off by her nastiness, and she's been known to even treat her own fans with contempt. When two young girls one approached her for her autograph, Madge told them that she singed autographs for them she'd have to sign autographs for every fan who approached her. "Who are you?" she told them. "You're nothing."

Oh yeah, a security officer at an airport once asked her for an autograph. She wrote on a piece of paper and handed it to him before moving on. The paper scrap bore the following words: "F--- you." And the press finds stories like this amusing.

I was hoping that the bias against elders in America and particularly against women over 50 would finally bring her down. I've seen far more competent singers and actresses see their careers end at 40, and so I looked forward to the day Madge would be cast aside by misogynistic ageism. Wouldn't you know it - there's an exception to the rule . . . and she's it!

She is pure evil.

Personally, I think the damage Madonna has wrought on American popular culture in general and American popular music in particular - it's become so tawdry, vulgar and irredeemable - has been so great that we Americans won't be able to set things right until enough of us admit that something went horribly wrong on December 16, 1984, the day "Like a Virgin" began its six-week run on the top of the pop singles chart. That's not likely to happen. Madge has returned with a vengeance, and her Super Bowl appearance is just the beginning of a manufactured media onslaught tied around her new LP, her movie (about a frustrated Manhattanite who identifies with Wallis Simpson, or something like that) that no one will be able to deny, ignore or resist. And enough of us will be taken in by her pretentious aspirations to "artistry" to make her latest endeavors huge hits. And we Americans will get the popular culture we deserve.

Just like we're going to get the Super Bowl.