Incoming average white female: not awful, just ordinary
Madonna
It may seem somewhat hyperbolic to state that Madonna is solely responsible for the current drastic state of the music industry but we are nothing if not prone to exaggeration. Before Madonna, there existed a music industry filled with artists who wrote their own material, for whom the concept of “image” was condensed into a hurried five-minute conversation over a spliff in the back of a tour bus, who got into music precisely because they hated working 18-hour days and dealing with corporate suits. Then along came Madonna. She’s that KitKat ad come to life: she can’t sing, she can’t dance, she looks awful, she’ll go a long way. In fact that KitKat ad would never have aired if Madonna hadn’t been the prime inspiration at the time. She blatantly cannot sing, as evinced by her endless attempts at same, warbling her way incompetently through three chord pop tunes with the expression of a woman who is trying to perform open heart surgery, whilst simultaneously receiving a high colonic. She couldn’t carry a tune if it had handles, and when you think of Madonna singing live, the words “passion” and “heartfelt” are probably the last that come to mind. She is an average dancer, hoofing it around the stage with the grace of a bodybuilder. And as for beauty? She increasingly looks like Iggy Pop’s older, more strung-out sister, and we have yet to meet a man who names her as one of his top five all-time celebrity crushes. So how has she sustained a career that spans three decades? It seems that she has managed it because she is a saleswoman who just won’t take no for an answer. Apparently this is something that we are now rewarding in the music business. We laud Madonna and endow her with iconic status, purely for surviving in the music business and still releasing albums. Come on, does this not make her the musical virus of our time? And if her creative kiss of death weren’t hard enough to bear when applied to music, let’s not forget Shanghai Surprise or Swept Away. Enough is enough. Put the lycra-encased sweaty crotch away, stop bothering cash-poor credible music producers, and leave us all the fuck alone. The musical landscape would be a better place without Madonna. Case closed.
alexandra donald 11