Purple Ruin

Whisper it quietly, but Madonna, the bane of the existence of anyone with ears and taste, may have finally destroyed her "career."

As anyone who pays attention to social media knows, Madge staged a tribute to Prince at the Billboard Music Awards.  It's typical of Madge to link herself to pop performers of considerable historic and/or artistic importance in an effort to grab some of their legitimacy for herself, and what's particularly galling are her very public and insufferably fawning tributes to them after they've died.  She exalted Michael Jackson, David Bowie and Prince when they all died . . . funny, though, how I never heard her make similar comments about Whitney Houston or Amy Winehouse.    

Concurrently, Madge has a penchant for identifying with black Americans, and one might remember that she was identifying as black long before anyone ever heard of Rachel Dolezal.  Bear in mind that when she released her first record in the early eighties, she let people think she was black, and she even hinted in early promotional material that she had been a member of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, an outright lie.  Since then she's tried to prove her blackness by collaborating with Missy Elliott, attending premieres of Spike Lee movies, etc.  

Well, her Prince tribute amplified three unavoidable facts about herself . . . she's not a significant artist, she's not black, and she can't . . . freakin' . . . sing.

Madge sang two Prince songs, "Nothing Compares 2 U" (her way of saying Sinead O'Connor couldn't take part in the tribute on account of being commercially irrelevant) and "Purple Rain," and her performance was widely panned for being soulless, devoid of imagination, ponderous, and a whole lot of other bad things.  She got some backup support - Stevie Wonder, how could you? - but to no avail.  By the end of the performance, Black Entertainment Television (BET), preparing its own Prince tribute for the immediate future, tweeted that, yes, Madge's awfulness was acknowledged, and they, BET, were going to do a much better job with their own tribute.  Madonna, as she does so often, lashed out at her detractors for being narrow-minded.  

Like any lie, Madonna's "musical" career was destined to be found out, and the fact that it was revealed as a result of her own self-aggrandizement in an effort to link herself to a superior performer is incredibly ironic . . . and proof that Entertainment Weekly was right in saying that Madonna is the only one who can destroy Madonna.  Knowing that she self-destructed before an audience of millions is the ultimate form of schadenfreude after being subjected to thirty-odd years of her insufferable noise.  

There's just one thing: It's already too late.  The irreparable damage I always feared Madonna would perpetrate against American popular music has long since been done.