By Brandon Sanchez
In 2007, Stuart Hall, who helped found an academic field called cultural studies, was over it. “I really cannot read another cultural-studies analysis of Madonna or The Sopranos,” he said. It was a half-serious jab, but he had a point: There was an unbelievable amount of scholarship on the woman who remains, 40 years after her debut, the foremother of the present-day pop star.
Hall spent his life publishing work that asked people to take stock of their relationships to pop culture; he’d thought a lot about how to write social-minded criticism. Despite his exhaustion, Madonna’s career and Hall’s vision of a radical cultural-studies field were tightly related. They emerged around the same time, and their collision not only changed academia but took on a vaster life of its own, forging a new ambivalent vocabulary for fans (and armies of internet-culture writers) to think about pop.
Almost as soon as she began releasing music in the early 1980s, Madonna became a target, an inspiration, and a hinge point for cultural criticism, burdened with overwhelming symbolic weight. An entire generation of scholars viewed her as the contradictory embodiment of a distinctly postwar mass culture: inflammatory and traditional, outside and inside, preternaturally mutable, a familiar American protagonist — Horatio Alger, if he slayed — who nevertheless posed a threat to the status quo.
As she celebrates her 65th birthday this year, and approaches a capstone tour scheduled to start in October, she keeps toying with her superfans and winding up her critics. While Marxist, feminist, queer, racial, ethnic, and religious readings of her work multiplied in the ’80s and ’90s, Madonna practiced, in some fashion, the criticism that she herself was subjected to, recontextualizing popular imagery and symbols, like Marilyn Monroe. Academics argued that she went on to change pop music in part by construing the self as episodic and ruthlessly, unendingly malleable. Politically, the trope cuts both ways: To make oneself has meant to hew to the acceptable and to chafe against it by imagining a different way of life.
This is all very easy to say now that the trench warfare in the Battle of PoptimismA form of discourse that advocates for pop music to be taken as seriously as rock. Pop won, and we’re living with the consequences, good and bad. is over. But in the ’80s, stanning and scholarship were still counterposed. Detractors within and outside the academy resisted the transition, poking fun at scholars for self-indulgence and a perceived lack of rigor.
The best writing about Madonna concedes that she’s impossible to resolve. Recently, I cracked open the 30-year-old magnum opus of academic deep dives on her, The Madonna Connection. Published in 1993, it reads like a guidebook to the next three decades of celebrity culture, full of political inkblot tests, limber meaning-making, and histrionic interpretive leaps. It’s a fun book, even if at times I felt like I could hear a chorus of phantom ’90s scholarly detractors, in their moth-bitten tweed and Coke-bottle glasses, rising to admonish, “Why are you reading this?” In part, I’m interested because Madonna is my first memory, a kind of heritage, an introduction to sensory experience: I’d ride in the back seat of my mom’s car and listen to “Holiday” on repeat, those bright ’80s vocals recalling the merry chirps of Eisenhower-era bubblegum. To know Madge in the aughts and 2010s was to hear Britney Spears, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, and Katy Perry trace a genealogy back to her, the Queen of Pop. I wanted to understand how a person becomes an ideogram.
A 1978 portrait of Madonna. Photo: Michael McDonnell/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
From the beginning, Madonna inspired copycats. When the Virgin Tour stopped in New York City on June 6, 1985, she’d already been famous for well over a year, having told Dick Clark in January 1984 that her New Year’s resolution was “to rule the world” and, in September of that year, during a performance of “Like a Virgin” at the first-annual MTV Video Music Awards, having flashed the TV audience in her canonized diaphanous wedding gown. Ahead of the New York concert, Macy’s erected a pop-up shop: Madonna Land, the site of a look-alike contest in honor of its namesake. Teenagers in fingerless gloves, leggings, teased side-ponys, and slouchy, off-the-shoulder tops descended on Herald Square in the piss-afflicted summer heat. Over 100 tristate-area girls competed; Andy Warhol served on the judges panel. The winner of two tickets to the Radio City Music Hall concert was an astonished 16-year-old, JeanAnn Difranco (or maybe Gina Difranco; local-news segments used both) of Queens: “I’m very shocked. I’m still in shock. I don’t believe it!”
Madonna “is the only one we can look up to nowadays,” said another fan at Macy’s, a pair of Wayfarers on her nose, a ragged scrunchie lost in her unyielding mound of auburn hair. “She doesn’t condemn femininity.”
Earlier that spring, she played a flighty, resourceful drifter in Desperately Seeking Susan opposite Rosanna Arquette. “Material Girl” dominated the charts, supplemented by a music video in which Madonna cosplayed as Monroe in pink peau d’ange and diamonds. Her lacy, layered outfits; dye job; and mystical air of Crucifixion–on–the–Lower East SideStyled by Maripol. encouraged imitators like those who entered the look-alike contest at Macy’s Herald Square. In a May 27, 1985, cover story for Time magazine, the journalist John Skow observed, “Such getups somehow suggest the ’50s, now conceived on the evidence of old Marilyn Monroe movies to have been a quaint and fascinating though slightly tacky time, rich in flirtatious, pre-feminist sexuality.” Her art would only get bolder and more confrontational.
That Time cover — the imperial arbiter of American monoculture for much of the 20th century — is now a footnote to a footnote in her life. Madonna would become one of the most-studied, most-written-about figures in U.S. cultural history. The press called her ’80s and ’90s interlocutors “Madonnologists” and their flowering discipline “Madonna studies.” They wrote books and journal articles like “Living to Tell: Madonna’s Resurrection of the Fleshly,” “Justify My Ideology: Madonna and Traditional Values,” and “The Making of Matriarchy: A Comparison of Madonna and Margaret Thatcher.” There were academic conferences about Madonna’s place in gender studies and media studies and a paper sketching out “a psychoanalytic view on Madonna’s music videos” at the University of Leipzig.
Today, it’s uncontroversial to position the pop star as a coatrack for American mythmaking, racial and gender politics, identity, and occasionally even the history of capitalism. UC Berkeley has an upcoming lecture course on Minaj, subtitled “The Black Barbie Femmecee & Hip-Hop Feminisms.” In 2010, the University of Virginia offered “GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender, and Identity.” A 2022 class at New York University looked at girlhood, prodigies, entrepreneurship, and whiteness vis-à-vis Taylor Swift’s career.
We can follow that trend back to Madonna. Her reception coincided with and was amplified by a sea change at American and British universities in the Reagan-Thatcher ’80s that made her a perfect case study. A certain triangular relationship between entertainment, the media, and the academy was forming, marked by one defining question: What’s the point of pop?
