Granted, no one has been conditioned to expect much from Americans since, oh, around the time Nixon took office, let alone be aware of other sports besides football (the term other countries usually use to refer to “soccer”). But one did oh so expect that they still had basic reading comprehension skills to understand the difference between Maradona and Madonna. Sure, at first glance, one might make the quick assumption that Diego’s last name looks like Ms. Ciccone’s first. But honestly, it shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to mentally correct the error before making the assumption that the Queen of Pop is dead–as so many haters have long wished her to be. No shade to dyslexic kids or whatever, but this seems like a fairly big leap to make from a visual similarity.
So extensive was the virality of Madonna’s trending death that a fake tweet from “Donald Trump’s” Twitter account reading, “Very sad to hear about the death of Maradona. A great person. Her music was wonderful. I remember listening to her albums in the early 1980s. Rest in peace!,” was briefly believed. Apart from the fact that Madonna had one album classifiable as being in the “early 1980s,” the tweet is also rather inconceivable considering the open contempt both parties have for another, with Madonna doing a cover of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” as an “homage” to the Orange One back in 2017 (after freely stating that she thought about the bombing the White House after Trump was “elected”). And, before that, Trump had placed Madonna in the group of women he had suddenly deemed repulsive because they would never in a million years go out with him. But people on the internet cannot be bothered with such tip-offs to a joke, being easily bamboozled as a result of the Taking Everything Literally Syndrome that has turned America into a humorless abyss.
One thing that is not funny, however, is ever trying to make RIP Madonna trend when her demise could not be further away (try as certain middling comics, like “Sir Stevo Timothy,” might to make jibes about how people wished she was dead for real instead of Maradona). Not only does she have a Boy Toy with the loyal zodiac sign of Taurus, but she’s also working on a biopic of her life co-written by Diablo Cody. Ample fucking reason to endure in this realm. Plus, if she could survive one of the first strains of COVID, there’s no stopping her now. What’s more, she has engaged in far more self-care than Maradona ever did–even evading cocaine use at its height in the 80s when she first rose to icon status.
The irony of it all, of course, is that one of Madonna’s most recognized songs (despite being from a musical) is “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.” This is, indeed, very much the current anthem in the country (and in the country unto itself that is Napoli), where Diego hails from–famously born into abject poverty. In point, of fact, he was the closest thing to a living saint in both Argentina and Italy despite his “sinful” past. To further link Madonna and Maradona through Eva Perón, he was, incidentally, born at the Policlínico Evita Hospital in Buenos Aires.
But short of that (and their names), there isn’t much other connection between the two icons of entirely different mediums–unless one wants to say that Madonna, in marrying a Brit for eight years, briefly got closer to understanding the holiness of football (that’s soccer, if you’re a daft American who didn’t know who Maradona was until now) through better learning about George Best. Ah yes, and then there’s the fact that she moved to Lisbon for a bit so that her son, David, could play soccer for Benfica. Come to think of it, there likely was quite a bit of mourning in the Ciccone household over the death of Maradona. Maybe they even watched the Asif Kapadia documentary to honor him.
What is for sure is that, even though it’s 2020, and anything can happen (meaning any national treasure can die), one thing that cannot is the real Madonna dying. By trying to make that trend, her detractors have likely propelled her to persist all the longer. Still, one imagines no one was loving the confusion more than Mariah Carey, who was probably on the verge of typing, “Maradona? I don’t know her.”
