Madonna and Postmodernism with Explotation of Sexuality to Meet a Bottom Line - Coursework Example

Since the rise of rock & roll in the early 50s, no figure in popular music has been the subject of as much academic attention as Madonna. Upon her rise to prominence in her “Boy Toy” phase, she was singularly disregarded as possessing any staying power, much less as maintaining the interest necessary to inspire the voluminous amount of serious critical regard that has been published about her.Largely forgotten in the spotlight that has become the Madonna phenomenon is the fact that another young, blond singer with a high squeaky voice took the world by storm at the same time with her eye-catching videos and equally unusual wardrobe.

Although there was never any explicit competition between Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, the majority of critics at the time placed their bet on Lauper to enjoy the longer career; after all, Lauper had more going for her than Madonna. As Rettenmund writes Lauper’s faltering career “had confounded the critics who had always placed her head and shoulders above Madonna”(37). Lauper had a better voice. She did not use sex to inflate her stardom. She was coming to stardom a little older and wiser than Madonna.

And yet, Madonna’s career has amazingly never suffered so much as a slump, whereas Lauper disappeared almost as quickly as she gained notoriety.What was the difference? How has Madonna managed such a long career in a business notorious for short-lived careers even among its most popular stars? And more important, what is it about Madonna’s career that has resulted in her elevation as a subject of academic discourse above such highly regarded artists and groups as Elvis (Presley and Costello), The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen?

The question becomes even more complex when one considers that within that academic discourse, the actual music of Madonna seems rather to be of secondary importance to every other aspect of her career. While it would be almost impossible to imagine a paper written about the Beatles that didn’t reference lyrical content to a great degree, one might very well not even notice a lack of lyrical referencing in a paper about Madonna. 

Is Madonna truly a figure worthy of investigation because of her music, or in spite of her music? And if the answer is the latter, what does that say about her career? Madonna’s success as a pop culture icon certainly rests entirely upon her music career since her acting career has been less than overwhelming. It is most certainly true that the lyrics Madonna sings are probably the least interesting part of her career. However, one could argue that Bruce Springsteen sings far too often about girls and cars, that Dylan’s lyrics can not matter because his singing style makes them incomprehensible, and that Elvis Presley hardly achieved King-like status because of the lyrical depth of songs written for him to sing.

On the other hand, Elvis Costello is generally regarded as one of the finest songwriters of the past half-century, yet he has achieved neither the commercial popularity nor the academic interest that has greeted Madonna. One could argue that the attention given to Madonna is based upon her non-musical career. She has been a target of the tabloid press since her arrival upon the music scene. But can not one say the same of the two Elvises, the Beatles, Dylan and Springsteen? All these artists have experienced their share of scandal, and they have all presented themselves as images to be consumed in much the same way as Madonna.

And, though Elvis and the Beatles in particular have been granted the status of icons of their times, those times are stamped forever within the confines of a certain era and a certain image. The Beatles will never escape being an icon of the swinging, psychedelic 60s. Elvis will never escape being either the sexual threat of the 50s, or the sad, pathetic image of youth destroyed by time that he became in the 70s. Even Springsteen seems trapped in a 70s/80s time warp and Dylan and Costello, while possessing a certain timelessness, reached their respective peaks within the first decade of their first album and subsequent endeavors all reflect back upon those initial offerings.

On the contrary, Madonna has changed her image throughout her career. And perhaps this metamorphosis is the real crux of interest in Madonna. How has a woman of limited talent managed to maintain a career that has been almost entirely defined upon a rising plane of success that has not been built upon sustaining a singular image or persona? Despite the obvious sexual components of Madonna’s act through the years, a closer look at her videos—the most immediate visual connection to her artistry—reveals a singer who has actually had several big hits that were not helped by exploiting her physical charms in the accompanying videos.

Quite a bit has been written about Madonna’s construction of her image and how she has successfully reconstructed herself seemingly at will, often in the face of conventional wisdom, and probably to the consternation of her record company’s executives. The general consensus seems to be that by focusing upon the changing image, zeroing in especially on transforming the feminist undertones of explicit sexuality, Madonna has subverted the patriarchal grip of corporate America. Due to her affront to so-called decency, Madonna has been attacked from the political right with a fervor almost medieval in its zealousness.

Postmodernism claims irony as one of its defining aspects. Although Madonna may be the very model of a modern leftist in terms of social liberalism, in fact she is the very antithesis of conservative economic thought. It is not a stretch to say that Madonna and her career can be considered personifications of Louis Althusser’s conception of the machinery of capitalist ideology (294). As with most things postmodern, Althusserian ideology represents a relationship that is “real” only in a subjective sense.

For Althusser, ideology “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (294). The idea of classic Marxist false consciousness is stripped of existence by Althusser; falseness on the one hand presupposes truth and reality on the other.