‘Madame X’ Finds Madonna a Mother Concerned with the Legacy and Inheritance She’s Leaving Her Black Son
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There’s been a sense in recent years, whenever Madonna makes an appearance that she’s trying too hard, that she seems obsolete. It’s unfair and true at the same time and thankfully in her new concert film Madame X she simply revels in the world we live in, the world she made.
It’s also a world that’s very specific.
The most cynical view of Madonna is that of a cipher. A blank slate, with no real meaning. A figure upon which meaning can be applied. That’s always felt too derisive, and after all in the age of spin we inhabit, one dominated by social media, everyone has become less than and more than that. Multiple contradictory meanings that seek to appease everyone. This latest iteration of Madonna, Madame X, had a veneer of a wise old whore, yet this show seems to upend everything.
She is not a whore, she is a mother.
She is Madonna.
As a matter of fact she is the Black Madonna.
The term Black Madonna or Black Virgin tends to refer to statues or paintings in Western Christendom of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus, where both figures are depicted as black.The Black Madonna guides us through our darkness and represents the inner process of transformation. Her blackness has been attributed to the accumulated smoke from votive candles of the faithful, or the dark-skinned inhabitants of the Holy Land, or simply to artistic license. The most well known is Our Lady of Częstochowa in Poland (above) but in this version it’s meaning and significance go beyond religion. and is fraught with something else, it is a powerful symbol of national, that is Polish national identity.
“Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.” The Fire Next Time
So it is far more likely, as art historian and critic Daniela Vasco has pointed out, “the Black Virgin Mary is linked to ancient pre-Christian worshipping of Mother Earth and other female divinities. These divinities are shared ancestors between her and goddesses such as Cybele, Artemis, Gaia and Isis (some of them often portrayed as Black). In this case, black is not only a mystical color associated with fertile earth, but also an expression of an ancient cultural memory that connects us back to our early history in Africa.”
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I say this because this world she presents is her living her current truth. It is Lisbon, Portugal where she’s been living since 2017 to support her son, her Black son, David Banda’s soccer aspirations. This isn’t a stretch. she heavy handedly bookends the show with James Baldwin quotes and with moving critiques of global capitalism and incarceration.
@madonnaLets go Madame ❌!!!❌????♥️????????♥️ When your son is your biggest fan! ????????????????????❌♬ original sound – madonna
“To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” The Fire Next Time
But I’m not mad at it.
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Madame X opens with Madonna at a typewriter tapping out words by James Baldwin:
I really don’t like words like “artist” or “integrity” or “courage” or “nobility.” I have a kind of distrust of all those words because I don’t really know what they mean, any more than I really know what such words as “democracy” or “peace” or “peace-loving” or “warlike” or “integration” mean. And yet one is compelled to recognize that all these imprecise words are attempts made by us all to get to something which is real and which lives behind the words. Whether I like it or not, for example, and no matter what I call myself, I suppose the only word for me, when the chips are down, is that I am an artist. There is such a thing. There is such a thing as integrity. Some people are noble. There is such a thing as courage. The terrible thing is that the reality behind these words depends ultimately on what the human being (meaning every single one of us) believes to be real. The terrible thing is that the reality behind all these words depends on choices one has got to make, for ever and ever and ever, every day.
The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not. You’re bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face.
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Well, one survives that, no matter how… You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less. Then, you make — oh, fifteen years later, several thousand drinks later, two or three divorces, God knows how many broken friendships and an exile of one kind or another — some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are: that is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are.
By opening with this, I believe Madonna is communicating very clearly who this show is for, it is for Banda, because what she really evokes though all this, is The Fire Next Time. A book of essays that are meditations on race in U.S. history written in the form of a letter to Baldwin’s 14-year-old nephew. The second essay, which takes up the majority of the book, deals with the relations between race and religion, focusing in particular on Baldwin’s experiences with the Christian church.
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I cannot think of anything more apt at this juncture of Madonna’s life for her to embrace.
Make no mistake, there are a series of very, well Madonna moments, she admits she likes men to “fuck me then get out” and brags she is “known” for self-pleasuring on stage. Once, believe it or not, pretending to do just that, on a bed during her 1990 Blond Ambition tour, it almost led to her being arrested during a show in Toronto, Canada. Madonna however — now dating her 27-year-old backing dancer Ahlamalik Williams — reckons she is just getting started when it comes to her ever-scandalous life.
The idea of someone arresting Madonna now seems absurd. But she can’t help herself it seems. “I love to irritate people. You know people hate my grills so I wear them. They hate my eyepatch, so I wear it. You hate that? I hate you. Fuck you.”
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Throughout her show, “Vogue “singer Madonna — the best-selling female musician of all time — boasts about how artists should “disturb the peace.” At another point during the show, she tells the crowd: “I love my grandma. She lived to 100, God bless her. I’m going to live to 200, bitches — just you watch.”
Owen Gleiberman, the critic who has most consistently written about Madonna over the years and now is at Variety writes: “Certainly, there’s a political dimension to Madonna’s art. At her height, she was a revolutionary, changing the possibilities for women, smashing more than a few ceilings to do so. For those of us who adore her, in song after song her passion and her message are inseparable. But one other thing that’s inseparable from those two things used to be her joy.”
Her feminism has evolved. She now presents herself as part of a collective, a larger women’s consciousness, and as a mother in every sense — the mother of her children, but also the mother of a movement away from the entrapment of male attitudes. In a sense, she’s been singing about that her whole career, but now it’s more explicit, more pointed. She’s a “freedom fighter,” she tells us, “but fighting for freedom comes with a price, as we all know.” She lets us feel the price. Though she’s still striving, in theory, to have a good time, she comes off as a tad defensive, as if people were still unfairly attacking her, and all the years of it had gotten to her. But I don’t recall Madonna being persecuted in recent times for letting her erotic freak flag fly. The culture is now freakier than she is, and the biggest change in her career is that she’s no longer center stage.”
And yet the staging is itself a throwback and yet seems to be of the future. USA Today: The ornate staging is ideally used during “Crazy” (Madonna stands atop a baby grand piano, warding off handsy dancers) and the double punch of “La Isla Bonita” and “Medellín.” Her “True Blue” gem from 1986 (originally written for, and rejected by, Michael Jackson) coupled with the “Madame X” track – which features Colombian duet partner Maluma, shown on video during the show – are a sensuous melding of Latin sensibilities. Even Madonna’s theatrical tapping at a typewriter morphs into the backbeat of “Medellín,” which employs a significant chunk of the nearly 50-person cast to conga across the stage.
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Then in an uncanny and visually stunning creation, Madonna sings “Frozen,” in all its haunted beauty, while inserted in a video of her oldest daughter, Lourdes “Lola” Leon, whose lithe dance moves prove her strong genes.
But it’s January 2020. We are about to enter a dark lost year of the COVID pandemic and Black Lives Matter, and as usual Madonna it seems is prescient about what’s about to come next, when a magical moment occurs. She takes a break. And it is her son, who takes her hand, as she steps off stage, “Why thank you David Banda,” she says, “Such a gentleman you are. Your mother raised you well. I would love to sit down for moment, can you find a chair for me?”
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“Let’s all rest,” she says as she sits in the crowd and acts surprised when Dave Chappelle happens to be there. “Dave Chappelle!” she yells, faux surprised.
It’s presented as nonchalant, and I believe it was. He reaches for her mic and she says “You want to say something? How unusual…”
Chappelle says, “I didn’t expect I was going to want to masturbate during this show.”
“You did?” she replies, “I always masturbate, I’m known for it.”
“You are?” Chappelle says?
“You’re known for smoking on stage, I’m known for masturbating on stage. It’s a known thing. Honestly,” she looks out to the crowd, “I always tell Dave and this is no bullshit that he’s the next James Baldwin, and he refuses that title. He won’t… take it motherfucker! We need someone like you now.”
Chappelle says, “You know Madonna, I had a poster of you, before I was famous, on my bedroom when I started my career. You and Salt n Peppa. And then I scored some tickets to see Saturday Night Live and you were the musical guest. And I saw you and Tupac backstage. You both were talking and you looked very worried about him. And as the years went on I met you backstage at Amy Schumer’s show and it was if we’d known each other a million years.”
“Madonna,” he tells her, “I believe in God and and I believe all humanity comes from a single source. And I thank God every day that he made me this talented so I could meet people like you.”
The two hug in a genuinely heartfelt moment. “Madonna, these are terrible terrible times and you made me happy tonight. I believe life has a purpose and i believe that every human being is exactly where they’re supposed to be at all times, be it good or bad. And that is why I feel free. You’re the best.”
Not Madonna calling Dave Chappelle “the next James Baldwin” in the middle of the Madame X concert film. pic.twitter.com/T9YjO1xV0J
— A Reaper Franklin (@SoulAtlantic) October 8, 2021
The gay press has gone apeshit about this moment, but they and their lazy conflation with the timing of its release can suck it, this is a moment that predates the current controversy surrounding Chappelle by nearly two years and only reveals their own cynicism and misplaced credulity in their own positions.
“Toward the end of the show, Madonna is joined by a choir, perfectly aligned on the steps in the shape of an “X” behind her, to perform “Like a Prayer.” It’s the closest to the original of any non-“Madame X” songs buffed and tweaked for this new era, and Madonna continues to revel in the anthem’s religious overtones as she stands garbed in a black cassock adorned with crosses. The uplift provided by the song has not diminished with age.
I find it hard to impart to younger gay men the profound impact Madonna made on mine and may other of my contemporaries’ lives. That’s because she was so mercurial and so masterful at her height that she is literally everywhere and no where all at once.
This used to be bother me, but after watching Madame X it doesn’t.
Everyone from Harry Styles, to Taylor Swift, to Megan Thee Stallion, to Miley Cyrus, Nicki Minaj, and even Justin (Bieber and Timberlake) wouldn’t be who they are had she not come before. And the trio of artists who I really believe are her scions, whether they know it or not , are queer: Lil Nas X, Olly Alexander, and Greyson Chance.
@madonnascrapbook Closer view of #Madonna with #LilNasX #mtvvmas #lgbtq #gayicons #fyp #foryoy #foryourpage ♬ original sound – madonnascrapbook
As the show closes a black and white recording of James Baldwin appears: “Love has never been a popular movement and no one’s ever wanted really to be free. The world is held together, really it is, held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people.”
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Watch the trailer to Madame X below.
Madame X is currently streaming on Paramount+.
