As Usual, It’s Overblown News When Madonna Falls, But Her Latest Tumble Is Yet Another Metaphor for How She Lives (to Tell)

While some pop stars are “allowed” to trip or fall (e.g., Taylor Swift on the top of her precious “Folklore cabin” during The Eras Tour) without it making the overly judgmental rounds on multiple news outlets, Madonna has not been permitted the same luxury for quite some time. Certainly not when she took her last “international incident” of a tumble at the 2015 BRIT Awards (resulting in various ageist memes including the one about her needing a stairlift at her “advanced” age). A fall that was, once again, not something she herself was in control of, but rather, a consequence of an Armani cape tied too tightly around her neck so that it didn’t come off easily at the planned moment, prompting her dancers to whip her backwards like a ragdoll. 

In the newest edition of “Madonna ‘falls,’” it was yet again a dancer-related mishap, with Daniele Sibilli as the “culprit” who actually stumbled (in extremely thin stilettos, mind you) while dragging Madonna across the stage on her “Open Your Heart” chair—this being the song she was singing for a Seattle audience at the February 18th performance of The Celebration Tour when it happened. Unlike during the “Living for Love” mishap at the BRIT Awards, Madonna wasn’t fazed enough by the fall from her chair to stop singing her verse, continuing on as she toppled from seat to stage, legs up in the air for a few seconds as she did so (something about it smacking of Guy Ritchie’s denouement for 2001’s BMW short, Star). 

For a moment, she does try to go on singing as though nothing happened, thinking better of it and making a deliberate attempt to force out her laughter (after all, this is the same woman who had an early demo called “Laugh to Keep From Crying”). Because this is M’s way of publicly announcing that she’s fine, it’s all good. Of course, most fans know from her last majorly publicized fall that she doesn’t do too well with any sign of imperfection, least of all in her live performances, always rehearsed to the nth degree (this probably being why the protocol in place should she fall was for everyone else to just keep going).

After the BRIT Awards debacle, when Madonna went on The Ellen DeGeneres Show to promote Rebel Heart and its lead single, DeGeneres asked, “Can we talk about the fall?” (As was DeGeneres’ way with guests to kind of make them feel like shit.) Madonna was quick to point out, “I didn’t fall. I was yanked.” And it is important to make the distinction that in both of these highly publicized falls, Madonna was collateral damage in the error of something or someone else (a combination of both, if you will). In the case of that performance of “Living for Love,” her cape had been tied too tightly at the neck to be yanked off from her shoulders in the same way as was initially rehearsed. This resulting in her falling backward down some very steep steps. But even then, and for as much more drastic and potentially harmful as that fall was, Madonna still didn’t stop her performance. A consummate believer in the philosophy: “the show must go on.”

After collecting herself, she then continued as though nothing happened, taking the opportunity to prove what a beautiful and well-choreographed piece it was (with the camera flashing to a then freshly married Kimye marveling at it for further proof). And ironically, right after the fall, she even had to sing the lines, “Took me to heaven/Let me fall down” and “Lifted me up and watched me stumble.” On The Jonathan Ross Show that aired a few weeks later, Madonna told him, “I’m never writing lyrics like that again!” Fearing she had somehow “conjured it.” 

The one thing everyone who interviewed her about it could agree on, though, was that she damn well knew how to take a tumble, something she herself also noted with pride to Ross when she said, “I know how to fall. I’ve fallen off my horse many times and I’ve got good core strength.” This is why, as she told DeGeneres about the BRIT Awards, Madonna cried not because of being in pain, but because of humiliation. She also said her first thought was not even about her own well-being but, rather, “Shit, I made a mistake” and “I wanna start over.”

Such devout commitment to the art and the work echoes the even more extreme example of her nearly dying over the summer of 2023 and waking from a coma with her first thought being (after her children, she says) the fans who bought tickets to see the show she had been rehearsing through for months. Rehearsals that, many say, she was pushing herself too hard in, leading to the fever that led to the ignored bacterial infection that led to her hospitalization. So yeah, being such a perfectionist to the point of compromising her health, these snafus known as falls could easily be glossed over instead of blown way out of proportion as an even worse media slight to someone who so rarely “fucks up” (which is why people are eager to see her do so). And again, these were not even her fuck-ups, the media just wants to paint it that way for the purposes of their tireless anti-Madonna campaign as related to her age. Spinning the story as though the fall somehow correlated to her being in her sixties. 

So (un)naturally, every outlet from Us Weekly to Page Six to People to Entertainment Weekly to the Daily Mail had a headline to offer about Madonna’s fall-off from the chair. And of course each headline chooses to conveniently omit that she didn’t “fall”—her dancer tripped, causing the chair he was carrying to teeter and make M fall off of it. But no, that’s not the angle anyone wants to sell. Instead, an entity like The Blast wants to promote, “Madonna, 65, Suffers From a Chair Fall During Her Concert in Seattle.” 

Despite these attempts at demeanment, she’s still going to, as she said in “Living for Love,” “pick up my crown/Put it back on my head.” Which is, as she’s shown the masses time and time again, what she will always do when she falls, whether literally or metaphorically. This being, in the end, the mark of a true success rather than a failure.