The Age Of Madonna: Touched for a Very Long Time

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Madonna: Cover Girl

The Material Girl has long been a cover girl, regularly gracing magazine covers for the last 25 years. See how she has changed her image over time with this sampling of covers spanning 1984 to the present.

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A Madonna song would come on ("Only when I'm dancin' can I feel this free/At night, I lock the door, where no one else can see") and half the people would stomp off the floor in a very defiant, music-snob form of protest.

Those of us who remained, remain.

"Though I have fears, I think truthfully I'm going to live to be a very old age. If what I've gone through hasn't killed me yet, nothing's going to. That's my [bleeping] opinion." -- Madonna, to Vogue, October 1996

Nobody believed Madonna would last. No story about her ever neglects to mention that fact, the improbability of her success, the enthralling triumph of complete mediocrity. In my house, we maintain a secret archive of magazines on which Madonna appeared on the cover. It's remarkable how many of them feature a headline to the effect of "the New Madonna" and "Madonna's New Look" and "Madonna Now."

I used to worry that Madonna would die, suddenly, and I have to write something fast and smart and obituary-like on deadline. Now, I believe Madonna will live to be 119, and there will be no one left to write about her when she dies, except somebody who edits an online journal of the terribly obscure.

Twenty years ago, feminist scholars went bananas trying to deconstruct her, interpret her as a text. The ivory tower vogued, as Madonna Studies showed the path to an endowed chair in the semiotics department at Whackadoodle U. Madonna, scholars theorized, was (is?) the great liberator, showing the way to sex as an irrelevancy, then sex as a relevancy, then sex as an altogether different weapon, ibid and op. cit. Dissertations piled up and died on academia's vine. Some were collected into a tome called "The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory," and on and on, until finally there was nothing more to say. It was just records, it was just concerts, it was just some lady from Michigan who hated Catholic school.

Then came the articles in Forbes, BusinessWeek, Fortune: Madonna as the extremely shrewd CEO of Herself Inc., calculations within calculations.

Then came Ladies' Home Journal, with the angle of Madonna and Child -- then another child, then off to Africa for another child. Madonna as human V-chip, shielding her children from, of all things, ice cream and popular culture: "We don't eat any dairy here, we're a TV- and dairy-free house," she told Ladies' Home Journal in 2005. If her children have behaved all week, they are allowed to watch a DVD on Sunday evenings. (If they have been really, really good, the movie is not "Who's That Girl?")

Since Kabbalah revamped her spiritual core at around age 40, Madonna became the sort of insufferably enlightened old lady who is only too happy to tell you what she's too good for. She's like those women you run into at play groups and the farmers market, only she is worth $600 million. We paid $200 to see Madonna in concert a few years ago. She came out and sang a lot of her hits -- "Vogue," "Like a Prayer." Then she sang "Imagine" by John Lennon, almost atonally. "Please listen to the words of this song," she ordered us. "We have to change the world." She said this as if the audience had never before heard "Imagine" or thought about the lyrics. When you give Madonna your money now, what you're buying is a thrilling opportunity to bask in her audacity:

You must listen to me.

We must change the planet, together, each one of us.

I have to get on my jet now.