Arguably the pioneer of the “rebirth” album by way of giving literal birth, Madonna’s seminal 1998 masterpiece, Ray of Light, signaled a new genre in record-making. The kind that could, at last, “allow” women to discuss the formerly taboo subject that no pop star had dared broach before: motherhood. For, as Halsey has iterated with If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, our society conditions women to believe that once they’ve “transcended” into mothers, they can no longer be sexually desirable—not only because giving birth infers being “older” for the most part, but because of the need men (intrinsic within them) have to automatically file a woman under the “Madonna” (no pun intended) or the “whore” categories. And “obviously,” you’re the wrong kind of mother if you’re still being seen as a “whore” (see: Dina Lohan).
Madonna, presaging how she would be treated as she aged in the music industry, was already railing against some aspect of this notion in a 1992 interview with Jonathan Ross. Laying the groundwork for her soon-to-be-constant defense, Madonna was asked by Ross, “Do you think perhaps that you will be someone who will challenge this kind of taboo of like women losing their sexuality or not being seen as sexual animals as much when they get past, say, forty?”
Madonna was quick to respond, “Yes I mean I think not only do we suffer from racism and sexism, and things like that, but we also suffer from ageism—and that is that once you reach a certain age, you’re not allowed to be adventurous, you’re not allowed to be sexual, you know. And I think that’s rather hideous. I mean a lot of people have said, ‘Oh it’s so pathetic,’ and, ‘Oh I hope she’s not still doing that in ten years.’ I mean, who cares? What if I am? I mean, is there a rule? What, are you supposed to just die when you’re forty? And that’s basically what everyone wants people to do and I think it’s stupid. You’re supposed to just kind of, you know, put yourself out to pasture. Why? Life is long, people are living to be, you know, a hundred years old, so I don’t get it.” And clearly, she never will, seeming, at this rate, to be determined to become one of those aforementioned people who lives to (at least) a hundred.
When Ray of Light came along, however, no one was expecting Madonna to do the one thing that went entirely against her image thus far: embrace motherhood. Therefore, theoretically, “act her age.” And maybe for a brief “blip,” it did appear as though M was ready to do that as she entered her forties (the album being released the year of her fortieth birthday). With many cynically remarking it was just another part of her usual “reinvention” media ploy. The Madonna of 1992 would also come to the Madonna of 1998’s defense in this regard as well, telling Ross, “‘Oh look she’s changing her look again,’ ‘Oh she really knows how to manipulate the media,’ but the fact is, if that’s all I was good at doing I don’t think people would be paying attention to me for this long.” Even people like Halsey, who can’t help but be influenced by Madonna, if only in an indirect way. Adele, too, can thank (and has outwardly done so) Madonna for offering a template for the “motherhood record,” for, as she stated at the time of 25’s release, “You know what I found so amazing about that record? That’s the record Madonna wrote after having her first child, and for me, it’s her best. I was so all over the place after having a child, just because my chemicals were just hitting the fucking roof and shit like that. I was just drifting away, and I couldn’t find that many examples for myself where I was like, ‘Fuck, they truly came back to themselves,’ until someone was like, ‘Well, obviously, Ray of Light.’”
Halsey, too, has gotten “back to herself” before she even had her son, having written the album during the pregnancy period as opposed to waiting until after to “see how she felt.” Except that Halsey opted to turn the “genre” of the “I’m a mother now” record on its ear (no pun intended) by not being quite so, shall we say, “serene” about the whole idea of child birth and motherhood. During what she said will be her one promo interview for the album with Zane Lowe, she declared of the change within her, “I still get to be disruptive and I still get to be, you know, expressive, in all those ways—but not in a way that’s self-sabotaging.”
In a similar fashion, Madonna turned to Kabbalah as a means to avoid her own former self-sabotage by way of constantly seeking answers and validation through fame (often, some would argue, by “courting controversy”). Halsey, in contrast, did not turn to a “message of love,” per se, from some ancient religious teaching, but rather, to a message of contempt for patriarchal institutions that still somehow dictate a woman’s perception and place in society. Even when it is she who is responsible for giving all life. Yet Halsey, unlike Madonna, has seemed to fall prey already to the indoctrinated idea that a woman can no longer act a certain way once she is “Mother.” Which is why she told Lowe of the album’s content, “I have to get everything off my chest that I wanna say before I’m somebody’s mom… I’m emptying my vault of all these stories before I have to start over and it’s like, ‘Okay, now I have to be responsible.’” A sentiment that somewhat negates her intent of railing against patriarchal expectations, but there you have it. In contrast, Madonna’s take (during the Behind the Music that VH1 released in ’98) on the “journey” that having a child sent her on was this: “Most human beings get to a certain point in their life and they do say, ‘Okay, why am I here? What is the purpose of life? What is the meaning of life?’”
For someone so supposedly rebellious, Madonna couldn’t help but think that child-bearing was a key part of her purpose. And “the meaning of life,” to boot. Unconcerned with coming across as a cheeseball, she also stated during another interview at the time, “I do think that the birth of my daughter was sort of a rebirth for me. It made me look at life in a completely new way. And it made me appreciate life in a way that I don’t think I ever had before.” In this regard, Halsey shared with Lowe the joy of knowing that everything her son will go through and struggle with is something she endured as well. Something she can relate to and help him overcome (in a way that perhaps her own parents did not)—or so she would like to believe, as any initially naïve parent does.
There’s also a moment that mirrors the path Madonna has taken after having more children (whether biological or adopted) when Halsey admits to Lowe, “No matter how old I get, I’m always gonna kind of be a brat in the sense that like I wanna do the opposite of what people are expecting.” Yes, Madonna has certainly followed that track as well, refusing, in addition, to stop donning her lingerie as outerwear. But Halsey took the subject of pregnancy one step further than Madonna, discussing the state itself rather than the purported joys of motherhood that materialize on Ray of Light. One such aspect, as she informed Lowe, is the bodily violation that results not just from being pregnant, but being famous and pregnant. Thus, she notes to Lowe, “I think being pregnant in the public eye is like a really difficult thing because, you know, as a performer, so much of your identity is predicated on being sexually desirable.” That was definitely the case for Madonna, who built a career out of her raw sexuality. When the media and public deemed her decidedly overexposed during the Erotica/Sex book/Body of Evidence era, she might have mildly “put her clothes back on,” but there was still more than just a tinge of that lingering Erotica sensuality (as evidenced in most of the videos from Bedtime Stories) before Ray of Light came along and it was all sunbeams and Henna tattoos.
It was this legitimate transformation, however, that invoked still more derision toward Madonna for “daring” to change—despite all the previous clamoring for her to do so. To drop the “fairground stripper” persona (even though that was something Elton John called her during her MDNA Tour). Accordingly, Lowe chimed in during his interview with Halsey, “It’s arrested development [on the part of the public]. ‘We like you here, stay here.’” She replies, “Totally. Don’t change, don’t have personal growth.” That was part of the jadedness directed toward Madonna during the Ray of Light era, even if it was a critical and commercial success that seemed to open the door for Cher to release Believe later that year (bearing a Madonna-centric producer, Junior Vasquez). People didn’t want her to “find the light,” as it were. And they certainly didn’t want her to have any revelations about humanity. Not that she had nearly as many enraged ones as Halsey on If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power.
Inspiration for the content that echoes the visceral rage of the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross-produced music stems from what Halsey described to Lowe as follows: “If you’re a sexual being you’re unfit for motherhood, like you could never be someone’s mom. But as soon as you are, like, motherly or maternal and somebody does want you as the mother of their child or their wife or whatever, you’re unfuckable.” Madonna never really felt obliged to bother with saying that because, for her, being forever fuckable was a fait accompli. Even if society had other ideas, she was always going to have her own about this, and so perhaps that’s why she never bothered to say anything about it. You can scream from the mountaintops to people about their wrongness, but ultimately, it’s better to just do what you’re going to do. Madonna-style.
Interestingly, Lowe insists to Halsey, “You haven’t made a ‘pregnancy’ album, you haven’t made an ‘I’m gonna have a baby’ album… this is more a document about the dynamic of being a woman giving birth from your perspective at a time when there’s still a lot of work to do.” That “work” being how women are treated during the so-called “before” and “after” phases of their lives. That “after” part demarcating once she’s had her first child and should “put herself out to pasture” sexually.
Halsey, to be sure, has also benefitted from coming up in an era when it’s no longer “necessary” to wait to “have the career” before she has a child. For women across the entertainment industry have fought for years to dismantle the illusion that you have to be “young” (read: fourteen to twenty-one) to be relevant as a female and, if you want to at least “seem young,” then avoid becoming a mother for as long as possible. Thus, she says to Lowe, “I think that the weight of [time] as a female artist is, like, kind of deciphering time as not your enemy when you’ve been taught for so long to think that it is. You know, ‘Don’t get too old. Don’t get pregnant because then you can’t go on tour.’” But these ideas, like patriarchy, are antiquated and limiting. And it’s time to stop confining women to them while men are out there having their cake and not eating pussy, too.
Madonna would also tell Jonathan Ross in ’92, “People are so frightened of my ideas, that they try to undermine my actual talent or any artistic value that may be in my work and say, ‘Oh she’s just doing that to shock people.’” And yes, the most shocking thing of all might have been her 1998 reinvention into the “Ethereal Girl” rather than staying the “Material Girl.” Yet it set in motion the carving of a path for another female pop star like Halsey to walk on in terms of candidly speaking about motherhood and children as a still-sexual being. The most sexual kind of being (before Billie Eilish came along), in fact, is a female pop star. And, as Britney Spears has shown us via her Instagram, it’s particularly difficult for this breed of woman to somehow cease being seen as a sexual object just because she’s shat out a kid or two.
In any case, it’s only a boon to “ordinary” women that Halsey should make this pronouncement—the one Madonna always assumed was tacit: it’s okay to be sexual after becoming a mother. Ray of Light, like If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, additionally stood out from previous Madonna records not just because of its subject matter, but because of the specific producer used to create the sonic landscape. There would be no Ray of Light without William Orbit, just as there would be no If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power without Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. But unlike If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, Ray of Light was not created to be a “concept album.” Madonna’s never been a believer in that approach, really, so much as exuding a cohesive theme on her records.
Conversely, Halsey stated of her record, “This album is a concept album about the joys and horrors of pregnancy and childbirth. It was very important to me that the cover art conveyed the sentiment of my journey over the past few months. The dichotomy of the Madonna and the Whore. The idea that me as a sexual being and my body as a vessel and gift to my child are two concepts that can co-exist peacefully and powerfully. My body has belonged to the world in many different ways the past few years, and this image is my means of reclaiming my autonomy and establishing my pride and strength as a life force for my human being.”
Madonna, having made Ray of Light before the time of social media when one could spell it out for increasingly daft audiences, didn’t feel obliged to break down the record in that “preface” sort of manner. Rather, it seemed enough for songs like “Drowned World/Substitute For Love” and “Little Star” to give insight about how she felt like a virgin no more…to motherhood. But now Halsey is taking it one step further and politicizing what it means in our society to give birth—how it’s interpreted, tainted and contorted by outside parties typically of a male nature that have no business inserting themselves (usually both literally and metaphorically). And, to be honest, it’s almost surprising that Madonna didn’t take that route on Ray of Light. Then again, Trent Reznor wasn’t really producing much at that time (which might have helped give M an “edgier” sound to bring out “angrier” lyrics), and Madonna did happen to enjoy the perk of making it in a much more hopeful decade, when having a child seemed decidedly less cruel in terms of bringing it into a doomed world (or drowned world, if you prefer).
