And yet, we don’t really talk about love that way. We talk about it in relationship to a man and a woman coming together in the sacrament of marriage. Much like everything fun and cool in life, namely sex and affection, Christianity has managed to put its own buzz-kill spin on it.
In the song “Like a Prayer,” Madonna offers this: “Life is a mystery /Everyone must stand alone/I hear you call my name/And it feels
like home.” It is the first line of the song and repeated as the refrain therein, and Madonna’s voice begins bare and choral. It’s an incantation in the same vein as the Song of Solomon, a church song
:
“When you call my name/It’s like a little prayer/I’m down on my knees/I want to take you there.”
Granted, it’s a little more direct than “For your love is better than wine,” but it’s the Madonna version of guileless affection.
In the video for “Like a Prayer,” the narrative element supersedes the biblical allusion. The setting is a church, as well as a field where Madonna sings among burning crosses. A black man is unjustly charged of a crime, and his image is also similar to a statue of Jesus, which Madonna kisses, bringing it to life. One may argue that the images used to convey the song’s themes are a bit heavy-handed, thus losing the message in the medium, but the essence is conveyed. We all want a human connection to our God. It is right and sweet to want to show affection to the divine. It is the human reaction, and our form of grace.
As a fan of her music and of her womanhood, I have always felt a kinship with Madonna. We both came from a Catholic upbringing where sexuality was oppressed, where women came into adulthood with a confused, shameful sense of their relationship to their bodies and sex. Of course, my experience was different, because I had Madonna to show me the way.
She may not have been chased by lions in Rome (though there was that one in the Venice castle) and she may not have sacrificed her life to service, animals, or helping people find their keys, but as we evolve as a society, maybe our concept of sainthood should evolve as well. Maybe we need our saints to understand sin as well as the divine; to be a little Mary Magdalene and a little Mary, Mother of God; to know the grace in the sweat and sweetness of the human condition. And to dance like someone who knows God is watching and just doesn’t give a damn. Amen.
The Black Madonna
J. Victoria Sanders
IN A 1989 interview with
Rolling Stone
magazine, Madonna was asked if she ever felt African American. Her response: “Oh, yes, all the time . . . When I was a little girl, I wished I was black. All my girlfriends were black . . . If being black is synonymous with having soul, then yes, I feel that I am.”
Somehow I knew that Madonna had a thing for black folks even before I read that passage. Her soulful presence connected me to her more than any other white female star of the 1980s and 1990s. She was down without trying to be. She was a sister in white-girl skin. More than her music, her movies, the
Sex
book, or her love life (except for the Sean Penn part, which I overtly envied), she kept my attention because of her interactions with people of color in her videos and concerts. Aside from the Run DMC “Walk This Way” collaboration, Madonna was the first non-black artist of my generation to really place herself in the center of blackness and black art without
mocking it or trying to supplant it. She even moved a little like a sister, maybe because of her Alvin Ailey training.
In the video for “Like a Prayer,” Madonna kisses the feet of a black saint who is imprisoned behind bars as she dances to a black choir with a circle of black children dressed in white. Even now, about twenty years later, watching the video moves me in a way that few other music videos have. Madonna had power and clout to spare, and she chose to subvert the idea that blackness was something white women should stay as far away from as possible.
Also, as far as I could tell from “Like a Prayer,” she was either a former Catholic or someone who didn’t like Catholics all that much. This was a no-no in my Catholic house, so naturally I wanted to find out more about her.
I eyed Madonna obsessively from around age eight until I turned eighteen—roughly from
True Blue
in 1986 until she told her
Bedtime Stories
in 1994. But I never quite understood what made her so compelling until I became a woman myself. Part of what endeared her to me was the way she wielded power in business, on stage, and in her own life as a badass bitch (in the best sense of the word). But it was also her connection to black women I admired. It made sense that Madonna signed one of my favorite artists of all time, the beautiful bisexual black woman Meshell Ndegeocello, to her Maverick record label. Another thing that made sense: The only other multiplatform female mogul in her league, business-wise, was Oprah. These two have a lot in common: a dramatic rise to fame, shrewd business tactics, and the ability to flip the world off just by basking in their own extreme success.
And they are both unlikely trendsetters. Oprah became an almost accidental arbiter of literary taste while Madonna made adopting African children chic for hot celebrity white women. She shook those brown-then-blonde curls and licked at the gap between her teeth like she was devouring life itself. Madonna offered little girls and young women swagger without all the testosterone-infused bravado.
This was big stuff to me, and it set the stage for this self-help geek to become mesmerized by a woman who helped herself to living vividly and unapologetically, no matter what the haters had to say. Her position in my world as a powerful pop culture figure was almost entirely separate from the quality of her music, which was never really my thing. I loved her because to me she signaled elements of who and what I could become if I dropped my doubt and self-consciousness.
That self-consciousness wasn’t necessarily about race—I knew I was never going to be white, and I didn’t want to be. I didn’t see Madonna and cry Pecola Breedlove-of-
The Bluest Eye
tears, though I did grow up Catholic with my reference for Madonna, the mother of God, as a white woman. I believed, for a time, that white women had more heavenly DNA than black women, the same way I believed Mary heard me when I prayed her name using borrowed rosaries. But in the communities of color where I grew up, the most prized beauties had brown skin. Being affirmed culturally seemed separate from whether a woman was angelic, pure, or godly.
Religious life, like most things I experienced as a little girl, was a segregated sphere. White families, a la the ones on
Family Ties
and
Small Wonder,
existed on one side, with the black families of
The Cosby Show, A Different World,
and
Family Matters
existing on another. At Catholic Mass, Mom and I were usually one of the only black families in attendance.
And in the early 1980s, my music world was also segregated. The physical world around me was largely black and Latino, and it competed with the media I consumed. And media was everything to me—being poor meant not having money to travel, see a Broadway show, or do anything that wasn’t free or requiring a “suggested donation.” Music, movies, and TV were free, or pretty damn close, so they encapsulated my whole idea of culture.
“White” music was rock. Phil Collins, George Michael, and Taylor Dayne made up the fare I was exposed to via my mother’s affinity for
the soft-rock radio station on our alarm clock. “Black” music was what spoke to my heart. We claimed Michael Jackson, even when he started to look less like us and more like someone beyond racial classification; Whitney Houston, Prince, Tina Turner, and Marvin Gaye were other favorites.
As a rule, I was not a fan of white-girl music. Cyndi Lauper was okay, but I needed an image of someone like me—someone with brown skin. I got lucky that Whitney did some Cyndi-like punky stuff with her hair and her voice in the video for “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” If I weren’t made to sing her song “The Greatest Love of All” repeatedly throughout elementary school, which made me sort of sick of her, I might have put Whitney on the virtual pedestal Madonna took up. As it was, Whitney was the sweet girl next door. Skinny, brown like me, with a wild wig and a big voice, and a breath capacity that I could only dream of. She was having fun—the daughter of a gospel singer with a “safe” image for singing ballads about love and broken hearts. Madonna was bigger, riskier, and it seemed like she had less to lose as she wore corsets while singing about sex and seduction.
In the absence of anyone else like her, Madonna became my standard for female sexuality, despite the fact that different rules apply to black women in the public sphere. Janet Jackson would come into her own later, but even her iconography was tamer. Her lewd expressions were more memorable for their suggestiveness (“That’s the Way Love Goes”) and for the unscripted Hottentot Venus-like performance (the Super Bowl flash) than for any purposeful expression of her sexuality. (See: “Let’s Wait Awhile,” “Velvet Rope,” and “Anytime, Anyplace.”) And Tina Turner was rugged and raw, tough and able, gritty and beautiful in her strength. But she was not saucy. She was not compelling. She was not scandalous.
I loved Madonna because she spoke to the part of me that didn’t quite fit any of the sexual, racial, or religious scripts from which I was supposed to take my cues. It might have been the soul of feminism I
was gravitating toward, though I didn’t know any feminists in my Bronx hometown or in the shelters where we sometimes lived. There was a race- and class-neutral part of me that wanted to do whatever the fuck I wanted. I knew nice girls weren’t supposed to curse and that, at least in my house, they were supposed to go to Mass once a week and confess their sins. But the way Madonna sang, the way she had fun, and the fact that she kept on keeping on even as she was derided for it, has always inspired a different part of me.
I can’t say for sure how big this part of me was, really, but it was significant enough that at age ten I pulled a Punky Brewster. For no reason at all, I cut three pairs of holes in the thighs of my jeans and laced fluorescent green shoelaces through them. To her credit, my mother did not tamp down these horrid attempts at defining my own style. Thankfully, she also didn’t take many pictures.
With that one homemade attempt to change my physical image, I was trying to be free of definitions of womanhood that I wasn’t even fully aware of yet. Madonna circumvented those definitions. Despite the fact that she couldn’t sing that well and wasn’t that strong of a dancer, she seemed ultimately cool to me because she was disavowing herself of all the things I’d thought white women were supposed to do and be. She was outside all the pre-existing scripts—she hung out with hot Latino and black gay boys, mostly. She made “vogueing,” the popular practice in which predominantly African American and Latino gay men dressed in drag and froze in model-like poses, a worldwide sensation (even though it was made moderately famous by the documentary “Paris Is Burning” a year before her song came out). And she wore, well, hardly anything.
Her skimpy outfits (or lack of them) stood out to me as I slowly, painfully grew out of being a tomboy. At that age, my awareness of my body and other women’s bodies became more like an obsession. I wanted breasts, but I was flat-chested. I had no curves to speak of. I could sing, but I couldn’t dance. I was better at reading, writing, and school than just about anything else I’d attempted.
These days, the list of black women artists who have Madonna-esque elements is long: Lil’ Kim, Eve, and Nicki Minaj are just a few who embody the essence of her swagger. As a white artist who was unafraid to express her affinity for black culture in a time before it was cool, Madonna set the stage for a new generation of women—celebrities and regular folks alike—to express themselves outside of racial classifications. What was then taboo turned out to be just one more way that Madonna was a visionary, embracing the best parts of black culture before our generation caught up and followed her lead.
Mad Mensch
Wendy Shanker
AFTER HALF A century on this planet, Madonna has creative expression and power, intellectual curiosity, beautiful children, financial security (and then some), and a team of friends and colleagues who she can love and trust. Only one thing is missing.
Madonna needs a mensch. A good man, a stand-up guy with means and influence. “Mensch” is a Yiddish word meaning “a person of integrity and honor.” Yiddish lexicologist Leo Rosten says a mensch is “someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character. The key to being a real mensch is nothing less than a sense of what is right, responsible, decorous.”
I’m thinking that since Madonna got such a life-affirming boost from Kabbalah, maybe she would be equally inspired by a Jewish connection in her love life.
She may have gotten fleeting pleasure from guys like A-Rod (emphasis on the
rod
) and 22-year old Brazilian DJ Jesus Luz, but they can’t match her cerebral and artistic maturity. I know she’s drawn to
Latino men. I know she is attracted to fiery figures. I know she’s got a libido that made her ex-boyfriend Warren Beatty look like a prude. But clearly this kind of Renaissance woman requires more than orgasms and mix tapes to fulfill her romantic needs.
Sean Penn may have been a soul mate, but he was not a mensch. Mensches don’t ball up their Versace suits and leave them on the floor. Mensches don’t tie their wives to chairs (without asking nicely first).
Warren Beatty may have been a Lothario, but he was not a mensch. Mensches don’t sleep with more than one woman at the same time. Mensches don’t worry about their younger girlfriends stealing their spotlight.
Carlos Leon may have been a good sperminator, but he was not a mensch. You’d never confuse a mensch with a personal trainer.