If anyone knows a thing or two about being “cancelled” long before it was the norm, it’s Madonna. And, based on her “sordid” past riddled with all manner of sexual and political controversies, it seems the tables have finally turned in her favor with regard to the world finally catching up to the recurrent themes she was touting all along in her work. For example, it is now more abnormal in the mainstream to look down on the presence of the LGBTQIA+ community in media depictions than it is to freely trumpet hate speech directed at this group without consequence (read: cancellation—even though Madonna’s dear friend, Dave Chappelle, has yet to be fully cancelled). Yet these were “taboos” Madonna frequently explored with gusto and fervor at the height of Reaganism and Bushism, particularly in the early 90s with the Blond Ambition Tour, the “Justify My Love” video, the Erotica album and the Sex book. Works that, in the present, might come across as garden variety, tame even.
Yet, at the time, Madonna was pushing hard on the buttons of a still extremely conservative America. Railing and raging against that conservatism just as she did her Catholic upbringing. However, now that her brand of politics has been effectively absorbed by the masses as being “normal,” it seems Madonna has a new bone to pick, one that conservatives themselves have been adopting as their sole “viable” platform: freedom of speech and expression. Of course, conservative extremists seem to have a difficult time differentiating between free speech and outright hate speech. And, as Madonna once said with her usual ironic flair in Truth or Dare, “I wouldn’t hire fags that hate women. I kill fags that hate women. In fact, I’ll kill anybody that hates women. In fact, I’ll kill anybody that hates. ‘Cause I hate people that hate.”
Alas, if that were really true, there would have been a lot more dead bodies piled in her wake today, especially those from the media. Namely, the conservative media. But who knew Madonna’s new brand of anti-cancel culture politics would end up aligning so conveniently with the current conservative rhetoric about how “you can’t say anything anymore”?
Madonna phrases it in her latest interview in V Magazine as follows, “The censoring that’s going on in the world right now, that’s pretty frightening. No one’s allowed to speak their mind right now. No one’s allowed to say what they really think about things for fear of being canceled, cancel culture. In cancel culture, disturbing the peace is probably an act of treason.” “The peace,” in this sense, referring to the manner in which a message or story is conveyed—which is to say, in a “carefully curated” manner with language “preordained” by the proverbial leftist censors that never veers too far off the course of what’s “acceptable.” How something should be “handled” in art…a statement that’s completely oxymoronic when going by the fact that art’s entire intention is to make people feel uncomfortable and provoked. Something conservatives appear to do all the time. But again, evidently we must iterate that what conservatives do is not art, their ideology not “challenging” the status quo, so much as begging for a return to a white supremacist past.
Nonetheless, even Madonna herself has backed down when her words or actions have been accused of veering much to closely toward treason. Like that time she pulled her “uncensored” version of the “American Life” video or announced that she “thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House” after Trump’s election. Even abroad, when comparing Marine Le Pen’s politics to Hitler’s (complete with a swastika on the former’s forehead) on one of her screen backdrops for the MDNA Tour, the threat of a lawsuit from Le Pen resulted in her amending the image. The point is, Madonna does have her own alarm bells when it comes to being signaled on when she should “back down.” That, indeed, seems to be a very key difference between liberal and conservative thinking regarding “free speech,” with the latter group rarely, if ever, retracting statements and attempting to “apologize” for the sake of saving face. Instead, they seem only to get their erections hardened when people exhibit outrage toward their behavior, doubling down on their statements the way, say, Piers Morgan or Tucker Carlson might. That is, in truth, the primary source of divergence between party line reactions to and definitions of “being cancelled”: Republicans revel in the grossness of what they’ve said and parade it all the more when they’re told to recant, Dems cower and snivel once they’ve been called out for their ignorance (well, except for Lana Del Rey).
As Madonna once did, Repubs bask in the glow of being able to offend and “push buttons.” Because, yes, where once it was easier to be cancelled for doing the things Madonna did for most of the 80s and 90s, it’s now likelier for a person to be cancelled for doing things in opposition to those types of behaviors. Ergo, Madonna not fully envisioning the interpretation her statement on cancel culture might garner in the wrong hands… that is to say, in Republican hands (where former M collaborator Nicki Minaj has also been embraced after her “my cousin’s friend’s balls” comment). And god knows the party is always looking to take on any crumb of a celebrity endorsement it can get, especially at this juncture…and even if it’s someone they’ve always been so gung-ho about lambasting.
