Bad girls don't cry - the demise of pop icon Madonna - Column

WHITHER Madonna? "April was a bad month for Madonna," said the Washington Post Style section, as the cruelest month drew to a close. "She used to be shocking. Now she's just low-class."

Meee-ow! The Style section's judgment carries considerable weight--as an arbiter of les affaires showbiz it ranks just below the Los Angeles Times's Calendar section and, of course, People. So when Style takes a feline swipe at, let's face it, one of the most boffo stars in the history of the universe, attention must be paid.

Anti-Madonna sentiment is everywhere, seeping through the popular culture like a contagion. A new book, The I Hate Madonna Handbook, has just hit the stores, compiled by a woman who identifies herself as "a former fan." Just as telling, Madonna was the subject of a revisionist etude in Entertainment Weekly, by that magazine's most scholarly critic-at-large. It was a devastating blow for a woman whom the magazine once regularly referred to as a "pop icon."

"Shockingly passe," said the headline. "Her once-exhilarating bravado and impudence have curdled into a sullen, crude rebelliousness," wrote Ken Tucker. "As a feminist culture hero, she can't muster a critique of sexism as cogent as the ones offered by the women in bands like the Breeders and Bikini Kill." Her rebelliousness--crude! Her critiques--uncogent! Bikini Kill musters better than Madonna! One can imagine the poor woman reading these hurtful words, raising dewy eyes to the handlers and sycophants who still surround her. "What's cogent mean?" she would ask, but the pain would be too deep for words. Madonna has a right to be hurt--puzzled, too. The proximate cause of her curdling seems to be a recent appearance with David Letterman. She gave Letterman a pair of panties on the air; she used the f-word 14 times, according to People's accountants; she bragged of urinating in the shower; she refused to leave when her time was up. Within days she was struggling vainly to recoup. She said her cursing, for example, "was a protest against censorship." Earlier she would have been honored for her gutsy resistance to Victorian repression. Earlier, in other words, Ken Tucker would have bought it. No longer. Times have turned against her.

To understand how odd this turning is, you must review Madonna's career. Her music videos were considered path-breaking because they showed her (as the quaint phrase went) in various stages of undress, crawling between the legs of men in sado-masochistic poses. Her documentary, Truth or Dare, was widely hailed for the moment when she exposed her breasts. Her book, Sex, consisting almost entirely of pictures of herself nude, sold 50,000 copies in a couple of days, at $50 a pop. In published interviews she discussed her favorite types of oral sex. She simulated--at least we all hoped it was simulated--masturbation during her stage shows.

And for doing so she saw her career thrive in the pages of Style and Entertainment Weekly and elsewhere. Now, mysteriously, she has gone too far. She must feel like Babe Ruth, who during a ballgame once ate a dozen hot dogs, four boxes of crackerjack, six pickles, and two cones of cotton candy, washed down with half a dozen beers. Before taking the field in the seventh inning he topped it off with an apple, and promptly passed out. When he came to, he said, "I guess I shouldn't have eaten that apple."

'THE REVOLUTION is like Saturn," wrote the poet Buchner about the death of Danton. "It eats its children." And smacks its lips, too. The Robespierres of the revolution that has transformed our pop culture over the last generation are a pitiless lot--and disingenuous, to boot. Only Style and its fellow arbiters seem to know when the appropriately "shocking" (masturbating on stage) descends into the inappropriately "low-class" (saying f-- on latenight TV). Madonna's real crime, I suspect, was longevity. She has been boffo for almost a decade, after all. The revolution craves novelty; it is rooted in the short attention span. And because its craving never slackens, it must create new icons and dismantle old ones with amazing speed. Madonna's decade of success is like a century when measured in the dog years of pop fame.

So icons come, icons go. And then, sometimes, they come again. Depending on how things turn out, we grow to miss them, in time grant them a reprieve, even--if their replacements prove unappealing--backon them to reclaim their former stature. Though it seems impossible today, there was a brief moment when Elvis was eclipsed by Bobby Darin, and Marilyn Monroe by Mamie Van Doren. Before long Elvis and MM returned in triumph, when their fans overcame their capriciousness. The same happy fate may await Madonna. Again I quote Style, from another article several months ago: "Hillary Clinton has replaced Madonna as our leading cult figure." This is very bad news for Mrs. Clinton. It is very good news for Madonna, who even now must be plotting to unseat this pretender to the throne, this Mamie Van Doren of the Nineties.

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