Madonna and Me (33 page)

Gigi brings me another drink before I can ask for it.

“Did you see Lady Gaga at the Grammys?” asks my hairdresser, Corinne, as she, in her words, “restores my natural blonde.”

“Naw,” I say. “I usually just look at all the dresses online the next day.” Also, I really hate making small talk into a mirror with a semi-stranger who’s touching my head. But, like having a genuine interest in awards shows and claiming with an exaggerated wink that I don’t color my hair, it’s expected of a woman my age.

“You’ve got to watch it on YouTube,” Corinne says, stabbing her paintbrush
toward my reflection for emphasis. “She was exactly like Madonna from the high-ponytail-and-cone-bra era! It was unbelievable.”

“Yeah, I keep hearing that the new song is a total Madonna rip-off.”

It’s true that I keep hearing it, but I don’t actually believe it. I suppose I might have an easier time criticizing Lady Gaga for being derivative to the brink of copyright violation if everyone could agree on which song she supposedly plagiarized for “Born This Way.” But in addition to “Express Yourself ” (the most common answer), I’ve heard “Vogue,” “Ray of Light,” “Like a Prayer,” and “Deeper and Deeper” mentioned—plus TLC’s “Waterfalls,” for that matter. Let me just throw a crazy idea out here: It’s possible that Madonna songs are not quite as distinctive as her most devoted fans seem to believe they are, yeah? Who’s with me?

As it is, I’m of the opinion that “Born This Way” does sound something like the Platonic ideal of a Madonna song, but not like an obvious retread of any particular one.

I mean, I don’t know.
Shrug.

“But you know what?” says Corinne. “They asked Madonna about it the next day, and she said it was all done with her blessing, and she thinks Lady Gaga is great.”

“Well, that was gracious of her,” I say.

What the fuck else was she going to say? I think.

This, how The Queen of Pop actually feels about an heiress apparent to her throne—one with a stronger voice and even more pronounced flair for the outrageous, no less—is something that interests me. So naturally, I’ll never find out. Madonna is nothing if not a smart businesswoman, and the smart business move for a living legend is to humbly accept credit for a modest influence on your young successor and gratefully characterize any imitation as homage—even if “humble” and “grateful” belong in air quotes, and everyone knows it.

If I could talk to Madonna off the record—and if I were the kind of person to whom she’d tell the truth—I’d like to ask her about that. I would also ask:

Madonna probably wouldn’t like me very much.

But those are the kinds of conversations that might make me like her—or at least hate her enough to write a witty anti-Madonna screed in half the time it’s taken me to get this far. I think I’d find her interesting as a person, but that’s exactly how I’ll never know her. And as a celebrity—i.e., a persona developed specifically to disguise everything human about her—she just doesn’t turn my crank. I don’t want to be her (I can’t sing, I’m terrible with children, and sacrificing the quiet comforts of anonymity so completely would be my worst nightmare), or fuck her (I’m straight), but neither do I want to destroy her. And aren’t those the basic options, when it comes to super-mega-giganto-stars?

What does it mean when we say we “love” or “hate” celebrities we’ve never met and never will? Either we identify so strongly with them that we imagine our own scarred and blemished skin glistening with reflected glory, or we decide that their very existence is such an assault on our values, the entire world would be improved by their absence. And the pedestal of superstardom is held precariously aloft
by those two pillars; being neither “loved” nor “hated” is what drops one into the nobody-space between them. Madonna’s career has survived nearly thirty years not just because she’s a beautiful, ambitious woman with a knack for creating absurdly catchy pop songs, but because she infuriated Christians with her blasphemy and atheists with her woo; conservatives with her out-of-wedlock firstborn and progressives with her sketchy transnational adoptions; homophobes with her embrace of the gay community and the gay community with her embrace of reportedly homophobic Guy Ritchie. Etcetera, etcetera. The lady has a real talent for pissing people off.

And still, my envy of her publishing career notwithstanding, I don’t hate her. Nor do I love her. The best explanation I can muster for my immunity to her provocations is that their cumulative effect reinforces how little I actually know about a woman who’s been a regular presence at the periphery of my life since I was eight years old. One side effect of frequent reinvention, after all, is that the original model grows increasingly unrecognizable relative to the current one. Perhaps that was Madonna’s goal all along, to erase any stray remnants of her genuine self that her public—loyal fans, passionate enemies, terrifying stalkers, and flattering admirers alike—might grab onto and greedily claim for their own.

I mean, I don’t know.
Shrug.

Erin Bradley