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Madonna Interviews
Arena Magazine Interview |
On a Sunday afternoon in October Madonna leaves her apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side and stands in the street. It is unseasonably warm - T-shirt weather in fall - and she has, she thinks, never been happier than the day before when she celebrated her daughter's second birthday by holding a party at which a group of teenage Indian girls performed traditional dance.She approves of dance as an element in her daughter's development; it encourages her to be creative, expressive, free. Anyway, to cut a long story short, she has lent her car to the Indian girls to get the to the airport. She wants them to be taken care of.Which is why she is standing in the street trying to hail a cab. The minutes tick by and she looks at her watch. She doesn't like being late for appointments, she's inssistent on that: act professionally, do your job, even the bits you don't especially like. Cabs come by, but only with passengers in the back. Even if you're Madonna, and everyone knows your face as well as you do yourself, sometimes a beacon of yellow light just doesn't come over the horizon. Imagine! The Most Famous Woman In The World, The Last Pop Giant On Earth, forlornly standing at the kirb waiting for her luck to change. The minutes tick by and, goddamit, there's no cab in sight. The warm weather means there are a lot of people on the street an - Ohmygod! isn't that Madonna?! - her famous person's disguise of black sunglasses wears thin. She's rumbled. In the quarter-hour she's on the street she is accosted by maybe 20 people. She loses count. Still no cab, She'd like to run. She's been running all her life, these days mostly from what she calles her "demons".For years she ran from a middle-class, Middle-American up bringing in search of fame, chased it relentlessly and now, aged 40, she can't get away, it defines her, possesses her. But she hatches plots and schemes to escape its clutches, to operate in a private space, finds ways to work some much needed freedom. She is, if nothing else, her own woman.The cavalry arrives. She jumps in and the car takes off down town. Maybe the driver recognises her, maybe he doesn't, this woman who has engineered herself so intensely through constant, purposeful intervention. But it hardly matters, she is a person that we all think we know so intimatley, so excessively - nakedly even that we think that maybe there's nothing else to know for further familiarity. Madonna knows better than this, she knows that we hardly know her at all.
"I ran to the lakes/ And up
to the hill/ I ran and I ran/ I'm looking there still/
And I smelt her burning
flesh.../ Her decay/ I ran and I ran/ I'm
still running today" from "Mer Girl"
by Madonna
Madonna: For me {the} running is running from the idea of
death, facing my own demons, facing my mother's death and
dealing with... whatever. People get obsessed by the idea
of fame and being acknowledged by people and having
approval and all those things for any number of mostly
unhealthy reasons. So if you do start to better yourself
you have to figure that one out - why? What is it that I'm
looking for ultimatley? What is it that I want? Why am I
here? And so the running is symbolic running really, from
the truth of not wanting to face myself. Running from
fear, running from being alone, running from being
abandoned. All of those things.Isn't the only reason you're
now confronting these kind of existential questions
because you're successful and materially fulfilled?
Madonna: But the things I'm thinking about are deep and
profound. {They're} not easy things to think about. In
fact it's quite the reverse. What I was thinking
about and doing was much simpler, you know? To really,
really try to figure out, to go deep and examine yourself
and to really say "OK, why am I here? Why is anyone
here? What is my purpose?" There's nothing easy
about it.
Why are we here?
Madonna: {laughs} I don't think that's something anyone
can tell another person. Do you know what I mean? Because
everyone is here for a different reason, but I don't
think we're put on this earth just to work hard, earn a
lot of money and die.
What is the purpose of Madonna
Louise Veronica Ciccone and her costumed, carnival pop
life?
This is a question she is currently in the
process (as she is most likly to describe it) of trying
to fathom, 16 years on from her success in the New York
clubs and a belt that read "Boy Toy". To be
sure Madonna is alone. There's no one else left. The
pantheon of Eighties pop stars who could rock a stadium
from Rome to Rio has been saked, its false idols
collapsed or worn down by time. Madonna, the first woman
to fill a stadium, knows this, although she has been
vindicated - 1998 has been a good year for her. She has
released an album, Ray of Light, which was
enthusiastically recieved by press and public alike, the
single "Ray of Light" swept the board
at the MTV Video Music Awards, and she recieved a
Lifetime Achievement Award from music channel VH1,
although she picks awards up just for getting out of bed
these days. Ray of Light, which has now sold
over eight million copies worldwide, saw her team up with
English producer William Orbit to create fluid
soundscapes that provide a lush backdrop and rhythmic
mantra to what is a lyrically rawer, more vulnerable
Madonna. "I hadn't worked with her before,"
says Orbit, "But Ray of Light was clearly
very personal. She was really laying it bare."
The opening line of the album "I traded fame for
love" suggests that she now has a more
intricate relationship with her fame than ever before,
although to speak of fame to Madonna is like asking
someone who has lived with a condition for so long to see
themselves anew. When asked about it she slips into the
impersonal, as if fame were a universal experience,
something we have all undergone."Fame does a funny
thing to you," she says. "Everyone thinks that
they know you. Perfect strangers coming up to you asking
very personal things, touching you, taking liberties and
asking you for things. And if you weren't famous then
people would have too good manners to actually do those
kind of things. Even though everyone's paying attention
to you, actually they don't know you at all, which you
feel just kind of exaggerates everything.Maybe this is
modesty, shying away from the funeral toll of the
subjective pronoun deference. Maybe its more than that -
a separation of the person who brushes her teeth and has
a daily disco with her daughter from the pop frankenstein
she has created. Maybe it's the way a mddle-class girl
from Michigan who took New York before conquering the
world copes by putting some distance between the person
she still is (or at least the person she feels she is)
and the person she always wanted to be. Like many, she
thought that fame would make her complete, furnish her as
whole. What she discovered was that performing on a stage
in front of 100,000 hysterical people can be as lonely as
anything you can imagine.
She has been driven at speed through
the Place de l'Alma underpass in paris where Diana
Princess of Wales car crashed, has been pursued
by paparazzi through its gloomy expanse. There were
mutterings whe she was staying in London last March that
photographers tried to flush her out of her hotel by
setting off a fire alarm, nevertheless she concedes that
the press, particularly in London, has given her a bit
more room since Diana's death and dismisses any
suggestion that the video to her single "Substitute
For Love", in which she is hounded by photographers
in London, is in any way a reference to Diana's death.
"I was kind of confused and bewildered that people
were drawing those kind of comparisons because thats my
life. I get chased by paparazzi too, and why people
said I was trying to imitate her I don't know. It really
was like a night in the life of me." I ask her how
it feels, now that Diana is dead, to be the most
recognisable female face on the planet. "Really?"
she says. It's odd that she appears not to have thought
about this before, to have prepared a stock answer for a
not unsurprising question. She stares into space for a
few seconds as if trying to think of someone else more
famous. Really famous. Madonna famous. "It just
seems so absurd," she says, eventually and not
unkindly. "Anyway, it's a pretty strange thing to
sit and think about: "I'm the most famous woman in
the world." Maybe not; not if your'e Madonna. Fame
is the defining aspect of her life - more than her music,
or style, or movies she will be remembered for being one
of the most relentlessly seft-realised people of the
century. Along with Monroe and Ali, Madonna will be
remembered for defining the times by inventing and
changing and promoting herself with ambition and, in so
doing, providing us with a way of understanding ourselves
and remembering what we used to dance to, who we used to
be.
Do you think about your own death?
Madonna: All the time.
Why?
Madonna: Why not?
Because it's morbid and might depress you.
Madonna: It depends on how you look at it.
If you start practising yoga the whole idea is that you
learn detachment and ultimately this is preparation for
your death, and so you can't help but thinking about
death. There are actual positions in yoga that activate a
feeling in you that supposedly - and this is based in
acient Vedic text - is very similar to the fear that you
experience when you're facing your death. And the idea is
to bring yourself closer and closer to that feeling and
actually make yourself really comfortable with it.
So the idea is not to fear death...
Madonna: Yeah exactly. Which I still do. But I'm more
comfortable with the idea of thinking about it. I mean, I
grew up... [this seems a little difficult for her, she
halts slightly]... I grew up incredibly fearful of death
and obsessed with it because my mother died when I was so
young, so I was very fixated on the idea.
How would you like to die?
Madonna: Ready. I'd like to die ready.
Famously, Madonna smells nice. She
first appears from the gloom of the concrete-and-steel
hotel lobby, her face glowing pale.
She wears a black-ribbed jumper, loose trousers, black-wedged
Spice Girl shoes. She is petite - even the Most Famous
Woman In The World is smaller than you thought!! -
frailer even, although the body is athletic, all business.
The shoulders are square, the walk, rangy and loose-hipped.
The walk of an athelete. We sid down and mmmmm! - doesn't
she smell good? We sit in a circular room lined with
padded faux leather. Perched on a stool Madonna leans
back against the wall. The lights are dimmed and the air
conditioning is on too high. The room is seperated from
the rest of the lobby by a velvet rope. (Madonna spends
more time that she would perhaps like in private nooks
and dens and fuselages that you and I will never see.)
The face is fragile. It's not conventionally beautiful,
but unexpectedly beautiful, like a painting that starts
to reveal itself the more you look at it. She look at you
sometimes, and although you've seen the face a thousand -
no, many more - times before there is much about it you
haven't taken in. The greenness of her eyes, for instance,
which contrast dramatically with her pale face. She looks
better with dark- or honey-coloured hair than she did in
her peroxide days when it seemed she would do anything to
shoehorn herself into the vestiges of fuck-me pop stardom.
She knows that all the things that you have read about
her are mostly false. What is true is that Ray Of
Light affirms the belief that she's at her best when
she is in harmony rather than discordant, truculent,
troubled, as she seemed to be at the start of this decade
when she reached a personal low after releasing Erotica,
publishing Sex , and suffering poor reviews for
the movie Body Of Evidence during 1992. She is
not the kind of person to let things creep up slowly upon
her, so we must deduce that Sex was an attempt
of a kind to engage us in some kind of discourse. "I
see a lot of things I did in my Sex book now in
advertising and I think, well, I was happy to get the
shit kicked out of me so that you guys could have this
freedom," she says, laughing long and hard. There
was a part of you that wanted to provoke?
"Yeah, absolutely."
Why? Because you wanted to change things? Because you
felt that America needed it?
"Because I was dealing with my own demons," she
says. "Because I couldn't deal with the face that
people were constantly saying, "Oh, she's sexy and
she's this and she's that, but she doesn't have any
talent." And it really irked me that you couldn't be
a, you know, sexually provocative creature and
intelligent at the same time. So I went to the extreme
and pushed the envelope to kind of prove to myself more
that anything that that was bullshit."
And do you think that you achieved that?
"Yeah. Uh huh."
Do you feel like you've changed things for
women?
"Yeah, I sort of lived out a lot of things
that they wanted to do," she says. "you have to
go through a process. I sort of grew up in public. I went
through a whole period of saying "Fuck you, I will
wear what I want to wear and act in a way I want to act
and I will grab my crotch if I want to and I will say
duck on TV and I will do all the things that men are
allowed to do and you're just going to have to deal with
it." And that was me trying to figure things out,
because ultimately a lot of women are very different, and
you don't have to act like a slovenly pig [laughs] to get
respect. But you do have to go through things. I grew up
in a very repressed home, in a very strict kind of
Puritan family environment and, in a way, America is that
way too. So, you know, you have to get to the other side
and everyone has to go through their form of rebellion to
figure out that they didn't actually have to do so much
kicking and flailing." Do you think that you provoke
such a strong reaction because America doesn't like to
idea of a woman being sexually liberated? "Or anyone
being liberated. I mean look at what they've done to
President Clinton. [She takes on a stern English voice] We
do not have sex in America."
Not with interns.
"Not with cigars."
She is famous for having sex. With
men, with women, with herself.
She has sex with the famous, and people become
famous for having sex with her, but the fact remains that
she cannot have sex with anyone more famous that her. Not
anymore. Mostly she cannot meet anyone who has not seen
her naked. She practices yoga for two hours a day and
doesn't eat lunch but returns calls instead. She has
revealed herself to us intimatley in a book and in the
movies, but rarely in interviews. To read interviews with
madonna is to encounter a set of different women, all of
them smart and talented, but some waspish, others
compliant; some warm, others distant. She is bored easily
and likes to be active. Madonna likes to do
things ans some of these things get her into trouble of a
kind. At times she has offered us hope and a belief in
the power of self-creation and at others she reminds us
that getting what you want, arriving at a place of your
own conception, can offer as bleak a vista as any. She is
wary of being misunderstoof, even thoufg she talks
eloquently and at length and favours explanation over
occlusion. She changes her opinions just like normal folk,
and maybe just because she might have heard a question
before. She uses a lot of British vernacular, including
the word "bollocks", and is the only American
who can say the word "wanker" without making a
fool of herself. She looks like a woman of 40, which is
just fine, because this is her age and she is The Last
Pop Giant On Earth. She has never known the zero-degree
freeze of failure. But she does know what it is to feel
alone, to feel pain. And having a child has both
alleviated and exacerbated this. we talk about morality
and she says "I was thinking about that the other
day. I was carrying my daughter to bed, and I just
thought some day she's going to be a very old woman and
someone's going to be carrying her. And the thought just
devastated me." Listening to tapes of our
conversation over the following weeks I am struck by the
number of times she yolks intimacy and death.
She has a reputation for control, or
wanting to control,
although I suspect that much of this is down to
the fact that she is a powerful woman and women are not
allowed to be powerful unless they are also perceived to
be manipulative. Men often fear her. She has not been
sanctified like a Diana, Jackie or a Marilyn, but then
she is no victim and is big enough to make her own errors,
of which there has been more that one. Clearly there are
parts of her life, namely her work, over which she still
insists on exerting almost total mastery, but there are
other areas where she feels freer. We talk about the song
"The Power Of Goodbye". "It's about not
wasting so much energy," she says. "It's really
about accepting [things] and the freedom that it gives
you. I did waste a lot of time trying to hold on to
things and control things. The song is also about facing
death because ending a relationship is a kind of death -
that's why it's so hard to break up with people. If you
become emotionally interwined with someone else it is a
kind of small death in a way. "So, you know, it all
leads to the same place - fear of the unknown, fear of
letting go, facing your own death. All of that is
connected to the idea that life does go on and the reason
that people don't want to let go of people or things is
because they see everything as finite but, in fact, I don't
believe that is true. And if you can embrace that then
saying goodbye to things can be very empowering." In
her answers he uses the language of self-help a great
deal, talking of "empowerment", "the
growing process", and "the next place".
She is clear that music is central to her own "development"
and throws her guard up sharply when it's suggested that
the fickle nature of pop misic might not be a place for a
grown woman.
"Am I a grown wmoan" she asks.
You've turned 40, so society would say you've grown up.
"So? that's bourgeois society. I'm not interested in
that."
So you're going to continue to do everything on your own
terms. "Why not? I mean the thing is I do think that
what I do is art. And does an artist, does the creative,
you know, mind turn off at 40? Did Picasso stop painting
at 40, youknowadimean?" Are you still going to be
having number one records when you're 50? 60? "I don't
know. But, you see, That's not how I define myself."
Have you lived the best life you could have had? "Yes,"
she says without equivocation, without a doubt.
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