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Madonna, The Spectacle, Part II: who you calling queen?

Maybe you’ve heard that Madonna and Lady Gaga indulged in a little twittertiff a few weeks ago about the connection between Gaga’s song “Born This Way” and Madonna’s classic “Express Yourself.”  (Funny to think that bad-girl Madge is in the position of having a “classic,” isn’t it? In the same ironic vein as “Jumping Jack Flash” becoming supermarket muzak.)

I don’t know about you, but the first time I heard “Born This Way,” I thought it sounded a lot like Madonna’s song, no question asked.  So then it’s either the generous interpretation: Gaga’s homage to Madge.  Or less generously, Gaga’s unattributed borrowing from Madge.

Gaga says that the chords in her ditty are just the same chord progressions that have been part of disco music for the past fifty years.  Which jesus, disco has been around for fifty years? Wow.

Madonna, apparently, takes the less generous viewpoint, as she made clear in her Abu Dhabi show during a version of “Express Yourself” that featured cheerleaders, pompons, and a drum corps suspended on invisible wires from the rafters. (Can you imagine it? Good news! you’ve been chosen to join Madonna’s tour! Bad news! You’re going to hang twenty feet off the ground with your full drum kit playing an incredibly complicated rhythm line for about thirty minutes!)

This version of “Express Yourself” sampled “Born This Way” and as Madge paced the stage, she exclaimed: “She’s NOT me!” The audience roared its approval, and roared even louder when she said “I’m the Queen!”

I like Gaga’s tune, and a few others, although if I have to listen to my kids doing “p-p-p-p-p-poker face…” one more time, I’m going to make that woman eat her damn meat dress. And Madonna – well, Madonna is the soundtrack of my college years, of bombing around New York’s East Village in paisley leggings and black Chuck Taylors, of dancing sweatily into the night in apartments that looked much better in the dark.  So although her shock value has worn away, I can’t so easily shove her off the throne – those tunes are my youth.

But both Gagalina and Madge would do well to stop quarreling and bow to the American South, home of the woman who spawned them all, the first truly iconic one-word woman:

Dolly.

All of them – Madonna, Gaga, Britney, Beyonce – owe a debt to Dolly.  She used boobs and talent to force open doors that women weren’t supposed to open and gave us a woman unafraid to re-invent herself with the flip of a wig and the wave of a press-on nail.

From Nashville with Porter Wagoner, to 9 to 5 with Lily Tomlin, to Dollywood, to Kennedy Center Honors, and back around to the bluegrass music that was her first love, Dolly owns it all.  The wig, the eyelashes, the nails, the huge shoes…it’s all part of the show, as is her ability to laugh at herself, a talent that other divas might want to consider. At the Hollywood Bowl a few years ago, she even rapped about her amazing rack – and paid homage to Queen Latifah, also a breastally gifted woman.  Dolly has a long way to go as a rap star – Latifah won’t be losing that contest anytime soon, but can you imagine Gaga, or Madonna, or anyone else making fun of themselves like this:  She’s the queen of her own hood … but I’m the queen of Dollywood! I don’t hip and I don’t hop … I’d black both eyes with this big top.  I know the Queen has got ‘em too …  but she don’t work ‘em like I do!”  (to see the clip, from tmz.com, click here).

Gaga plays the piano, and Madge had a guitar with her for a few numbers the other night, but Dolly (even with those nails) plays guitar, banjo, authoharp, dulcimer – and even, occasionally, the drums. Which is to say that for all her self-proclaimed fakery, the lady is the real deal.

Here’s Dolly, back in the day, with what can only be described as a a literal beehive on her head. Amazing what could be done with just hairspray, y’all.  (source)

And here’s Dolly a few years back: pink, sequins, wig, face-lift, waist cinched, smiling. (source)

Gaga can wear all the meat she wants and Madge can pretend to kill people on stage, or break up with God, or whatever it is she wants to do. But when they’re alone in their lavish dressing rooms, they’d better pray that when they’re pushing seventy, they can be as cool as Dolly.

 

For Part I about the Madonna show, click here

 

 

 

 

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Read full story · Comments { 14 } on June 7, 2012 in Abu Dhabi, Feminism, pop culture

Madonna, The Spectacle, Part I: shock and … er …

 So Husband and I went to see Madonna at her first-ever performance in the Gulf region.  She played Abu Dhabi for two nights; the second stop on her world tour. Her first stop? Tel Aviv.

And yes, the Israeli-Arabic connection was deliberate on her part: she told her Israeli audience that they can’t be her fans if they don’t work for peace, in the Middle East and in the world.  She didn’t say that in Abu Dhabi, maybe because she realized there were very few Arabs in the audience. Or maybe there were Emiratis in the audience, secreted up in the skyboxes behind smoked glass, where they were shielded from the beer-drinking, skin-baring expat audience “sitting” (read: standing) in the general admission sections.

When Husband and I stopped at the t-shirt stall, I was looking for a shirt that said “I am here ironically,” but can you believe it, they didn’t have one.

The booth was sold out of the only shirt that was specific to Abu Dhabi, which a person might want for the curiosity factor.  A person probably wouldn’t want the shirt in this picture because one might not want Madonna’s perfect face stretched across one’s less-than-perfect torso. Spreading her mug across one’s muffintop seems wrong, somehow, like wearing Louboutins to pick up the kids at school.

But here’s the thing about the t-shirt: Madge, god bless her, is about 53 years old. She’s almost eligible for those early enrollment AARP cards. At 53, she can totally pull off the powerful, beautiful, Dietrich-esque look of the face in this image. But the ingenue-ish finger crooked in the corner of her mouth, as if to say “who me, sexy?” And the bed-head hair, tousled just so? Does she (or whomever took this picture) really think her faux-sexy-innocence is pushing some kind of envelope?  (And…er…did no one dare suggest to Her Madgesty that her pose here seems way more reminiscent of Mike Myers doing Dr. Evil than it is of Innocent Schoolgirl?) Continue Reading →

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Read full story · Comments { 72 } on June 5, 2012 in Abu Dhabi, Feminism, Politics, pop culture

wherein my son starts to ponder the lyrics

This happened two days ago, but in honor of the Grammys, it seems appropriate to post it now. As far as Liam and I are concerned, Adele should win all the prizes. I would also like someone to explain to me why Chris Brown can be all “Mr. Comeback” on the Grammys despite his habit of beating women, but Ellen Degeneres is a “bad role model” and shouldn’t be a spokesperson for JCPenneys.

Liam and I are driving home from soccer. I spend most of my life here driving to or from soccer, it seems, and yes, there is more than a smidge of irony in the fact that I had to move to the Middle East to become a true soccer mom.

So we’re driving and Liam asks me to play his new favorite Adele song, “Set Fire to the Rain.” He loves the entire album but this track is his new favorite.

“What do you think that means,” I ask, “set fire to the rain?”  I’m clutching at conversational straws with him a bit these days because contrary to my hopes from last week, he’s not swerved from his insistence that by switching schools we’ve destroyed any possible shot he has at happiness.

So maybe he’ll talk to me about Adele and we can avoid the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments has become his new way of ending the weekend.

“It’s like a paradox,” he says through a mouthful of cashews.

“Yes, but why? I mean, what’s she trying to say?”

Chewing sounds from the back seat. I persist. I wax nostalgic. “When I was your age, we had record albums. And they’d have the lyrics on them, maybe on the back, maybe on the inside sleeve, and we would read them and try to figure out what the songs meant.”

From the back seat: “What’s an album?”

I almost plow into the car ahead of me. “You’ve never seen a record?”

Long silence. “Um…in the movies, I think. Maybe.”

I explain the concept of “record album” to my child, although I leave out the part about how albums were incredibly useful when it came time to make those wacky cigarettes that mommy and her friends liked to share during intense debates about the meaning of this or that lyric on a Police album. (Hey. It was the early 80s. You want me maybe to be listening to Rush?)

We listen to Adele singing about her hands being strong but her knees being weak and Liam says “wait! pause it! I think I get it. She’s saying that she really loves him but he’s not very nice to her.” I push play and the song goes on to tell us about betrayal and anger and good-love-gone-bad. In the rearview mirror, I see Liam, listening intently.

“I see what she’s saying now — ” then there is what can only be described as a professorial pause. “It’s as Lady Gaga would say. It’s a bad romance.  Yep, that’s it. It’s Lady Gaga’s bad romance.”

My son has discovered intertextuality.  Maybe I should get him a record player.

me, Adele, and Lady Gaga are linking up with yeah write this week…I’ll bet there are some grammy-worthy posts up over there, so you should just sing along, click along, and come read!

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Read full story · Comments { 25 } on February 12, 2012 in Abu Dhabi, Children, Kids, pop culture

pre-teen hearing test

Scene: living room, homework time.

Me: That’s too loud.

Liam: oblivious

Me: Turn that down please.

Liam: oblivious

Me: Turn that DOWN.

Liam: But I’m wearing headphones  (tone: you unreasonable idiot)

Me:  Then you did hear me. Turn that music DOWN. You’re going to hurt your ears.

Liam: eyeroll and the sigh of long-suffering. Tinny drone diminishes infinitesmal notch.

It’s official: my son has become a pre-teen and I’ve become my mother.

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Read full story · Comments { 0 } on November 20, 2011 in Children, growing up, Kids

Big Voice, Good. Big Body? Not So Much

I can’t stop listening to Adele’s new album, “21.” It’s so good I almost forgive her for being so ridiculously talented when she’s practically not even out of diapers.

I listen to it when I’m cleaning the house and sing along, belting out the lyrics with terrific emotion (and absolutely no sense of tune. Pretty much I couldn’t carry a tune if you put it in a basket for me. One of my great life sorrows. Unfortunately for those around me–including my musically gifted husband–I love to sing).

The last few times I went to the gym, I got so caught up in the Muscle Shoals rhythms of Adele’s album that I actually got on a treadmill and began to run.  That’s how good she is: I hate to run but it was either pretend to sprint on the treadmill or start boogieing around the cardio room at the gym–and that would be even more embarrassing than seeing myself huff and puff on the treadhell.

The album has hit the pop charts; the first singles off the album are doing really well – and a few weeks ago, Adele got the ultimate pop music imprimatur: her song “Turning Tables” was covered on Glee.  One of the reasons I like Glee has to do with its general message of inclusiveness–gays, straights, fats, thins, browns, pinks–everyone comes together in Glee-land.  One of the ongoing plot lines this season, in fact, has had bad-boy sexy-pants Puckerman fall hard for the plus-sized, glasses-wearing Lauren, who is about the same size as Adele, actually. And therein we have the problem.

Adele’s a “big girl,” as they say. Not Mama Cass huge but not Katy Perry va-va-voom, either. If you look around the web, you can see image after image of Adele’s amazingly expressive face–huge eyes, voluptuous mouth, tumultuous hair–but to find a full-body shot, you have to dig a little bit. Did some publicist somewhere, some record-making maven, decide that Adele’s body needs to be kept under wraps? Literally–in photo after photo, she’s swathed in blankets, cloaks, capes. Maybe full-body shots were deemed off-limits so as to prevent the kind of comparison that happened in 2009, when Annie Leibovitz photoshopped Adele so profoundly that the singer looks like one of Jillian Michaels’ fembots.

Everywhere, it’s head shot after head shot after head shot. Even in the video for the album’s first single, “Rolling in the Deep,” we don’t see Adele’s body. She sits in chair –perhaps trapped by the weight of the truly hideous bouffant hairdo someone made her wear–for the entire video. She doesn’t move, except for the occasional hand gesture:

Are we yet again telling women that the body–the package–matters more than what’s inside the body?

Maybe not. I’m sure it was just a coincidence that when Adele’s song was covered in Glee, it was sung by Miss Skinny Britches herself, Gwyneth Paltrow. In an one-shouldered black dress on a stage with full orchestra, with the camera giving us repeated shots of her personally trained macrobiotic body. Who knows. Maybe Gwynnie though Adele’s fabulous ballad about love and vengeance was about turning the tables on meat and the restorative power of flaxseed (soy)milkshakes?  She’s certainly trying, is our Gwynnie, as you can see from this image: what she lacks for in vocal chops, she’s attempting to make up for in EMOTING.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see Adele in a lovely off-the-shoulder gown? Or tongue-wrangling with Mr Shuester? And while I’m not usually a fan of the whole sex-symbol thing, here’s my own table-turning experience: wouldn’t it be nice to let the fat girl be a sex symbol?

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Read full story · Comments { 4 } on May 2, 2011 in Feminism, pop culture