In 2005, when Madonna first repurposed the lines, “Time goes by so slowly for those who wait,” it still felt somewhat earnest. Even if she had initially declared those words at the age of thirty, while recording the lyrics for “Love Song.” It was during this still far-too-underrated jam featuring Prince that Madonna delivered the verse we would see have more success via Confessions on a Dance Floor’s lead single, “Hung Up.” And yes, she sports red hair for the new edition of the video in homage to the original (though neither one are as suited to the message of the song as the video for 1995’s “I Want You,” directed by Earle Sebastian). In any case, that verse from “Love Song” more specifically goes, “Time goes by so slowly for those who wait/And those who run seem to have all the fun.”
Apart from this being an egregious, burnout-assuring twentieth century lie furnished by capitalism still pretending to give something to more than just one class (the rich), Madonna was essentially forecasting the opening to Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” video as the teen queen stared with ennui at the clock, just hoping that the bell would ring so she could finally leave class. All part of that notion of how time can either expand or contract depending on one’s circumstance. Its “elasticity,” of course, doesn’t feel quite so elastic upon entering the later decades of life. Madonna has always thumbed her nose at time, nonetheless, and this collaboration with twenty-six-year-old Tokischa is her most recent bid to do so. For not only does it check M’s box of being part of the latest “youthquake,” it also appeals to her long-standing predilection for appropriating Latino sounds and aesthetics. Which, incidentally, have never been “chicer” in the musical marketplace.
So it would seem that, with the “underdirected” “Hung Up on Tokischa” video from Sasha Kasiuha and SKNX, Madonna is “subtly” reinventing what she was already doing long ago in the 1987 video for “La Isla Bonita.” A song that recently had a brush with politically incorrect controversy when it was played as Stephanie Beatriz walked out onto the stage to present at the Oscars (compounded by the Academy also choosing Toto’s “Africa” for Daniel Kaluuya’s emergence). Because, tone deaf much? Just as it was for Madonna to comment of the song’s “Latin-infused” melody created by producer Patrick Leonard, “We both think that we were Latin in another life.” Though apparently not Latin enough to ever learn Spanish beyond the “necessities,” instead getting their translation of the very simple phrases in “La Isla Bonita” from a Hispanic housekeeper (who surely wasn’t paid any cut of the royalties for her trouble).
Madonna’s overt fetishization of Latinos also came out when she described the song as a tribute to the “mystery of Latin American people.” Um, there’s nothing that screams fetishism like calling a different race “mysterious.” Maybe it wouldn’t be if a gringa got to know them for reasons beyond money-making potential. Or sex.
As for the “La Isla Bonita” video, directed by Mary Lambert, the backdrop of Downtown Los Angeles was key to cultivating the “barrio” effect Madonna wanted, complete with five hundred or so Hispanic extras that included a then-unknown Benicio Del Toro (though John Leguizamo would have a far more prominent appearance in Madonna’s other early “L.A. video,” “Borderline“). As is Madonna’s usual signature, she plays two characters in the narrative (prone as she is to highlighting the, um, Madonna/whore complex). One is stoic, clean-cut and repressed, worshipping at her Catholic altar devoutly, while the other dresses in a flamboyant, stereotypical flamenco dress in an alternate version of the apartment painted in passionate red amid a series of melting candles that look like they were left-over from not ever being used on Prince’s “When Doves Cry” set. A picture of Jesus hanging on the wall is revised in “Hung Up on Tokischa” in the form of showing up in a lightbulb (a punchline seems to be hiding in there, too).
Then, of course, there are the varying makeshift altars throughout the Washington Heights apartment where M and Tokischa render the sacred profane with their hyper-sexuality directed toward one another. But it was Madonna herself who once said Catholicism is an inherently “sexy” religion, if nothing else because crucifixes have a naked man on them.
Taking note of the “La Isla Bonita” redux in terms of the altars of the “Hung Up on Tokischa” set design, it’s clear Madonna has remained steadfast in her commitment to turning the sadism she felt from growing up Catholic into a profit by constantly finding inspiration in the imagery of the religion. And yes, Catholicism was ultimately an Italian provenance before it was ever so “favored” by Hispanic populations (as one pretty much must favor what is thrust upon them by colonizers posing as “missionaries”—ergo, at present, Brazil and Mexico account for the bulk of Catholic-identifying populations). And Madonna was “Italian” before she ever started coveting the cultures of Black and Latino people prior to her own starting to feel “too stale.” As for lusting after the latter group beyond mere culture, she was known to troll the Lower East Side with Erica Bell to pick up underage Puerto Rican boys in the days of early fame. A fetish that has now extended to younger Dominican girls, ostensibly. And let us not forget the side note on psychology regarding Madonna having a half-Latina daughter, Lourdes (sometimes “Lolahol”). Almost as though wanting to give her what she could never have: “ethnic flavor.”
For whites, Italian heritage is about the “best” they can do, but Madonna wasn’t content to “stick with” that (only occasionally dredging up her link to the “old country” when she goes there for a destination birthday bash that most of the country’s residents could never dream of affording). For she’s long known that, like the white folks in Get Out, she would need to “borrow” certain elements from the races of her choice in order to remain relevant in an era where white supremacy is effectively a bygone “privilege” of imperialism.
It is said there is a fine line between appropriation and appreciation, but Madonna has certainly crossed it many times over the years (from stealing vogueing for herself to create a hit single to the video for “Nothing Really Matters”—you didn’t think Asians were immune from Madonna’s interest too, did you?). Maybe that’s why she’s consistently relied on going back to the “safe” (in terms of not being accused of appropriation) culture of Catholicism for her visuals and themes, with “Hung Up on Tokischa” being no exception to the rule. In it, she makes the sign of the cross, holds a bible and gets on her knees to pray (though, as she once quipped, “When I get down on my knees, it is not to pray”). Being as salacious as she can throughout, Kasiuha and SKNX also provide a different backdrop entirely by way of a garage-type setting with a couch where M and Tokischa can rub up against each other in a manner that also harkens back to the Britney and Madonna scenes in “Me Against the Music” (albeit far less X-rated).
There’s also an element of the “Bitch I’m Madonna (Sander Kleinenberg Remix)” video, wherein M writhes around in a “box”-like setting as well, bedecked in the same style of wannabe “Black man’s garb” (or what white people so often perceive to be as such; and after all, bell hooks did once say that Madonna not so secretly just wanted to be a Black man). A “style” of which Madonna has been favoring a lot of late, complete with NY/New York/NYC-monikered regalia that must have been triggered by her nostalgia (as everything with regard to “affection” for New York is) for the early days of her arrival in the city thanks to penning a screenplay about her life.
It was during those early days that she gradually began to adopt the accoutrements of Catholicism as a “costume,” spreading her “junky” aesthetic of rubber bracelets and crucifix necklaces to the Madonna wannabes that cropped up in droves by 1985’s The Virgin Tour. During this era, Madonna gave many interviews acknowledging the religion’s effect on her work, and her own explorations of a woman as either Madonna or whore—with the new, post-modern Madonna positing, “Why can’t you be both?” And before her appearance in mainstream pop culture, you really couldn’t. Though few have ever classified Madonna as “virginal,” she subverted the idea that such “types” of girls are wholly “innocent” (as Britney herself said in her still-“virginal” days, “I’m not that innocent”).
It was (and is) almost as though Madonna’s entire raison d’être in creating music and the visuals that go with it has been a “fuck you” response to the religion “because in Catholicism you are a born sinner and you’re a sinner all your life. No matter how you try to get away from it, the sin is within you all the time. It was this fear that haunted me; it taunted and pained me every moment. My music was probably the only distraction I had.” Madonna has obviously only leaned into “sin” all the more over the course of her career as a result of that haunting.
“Hung Up on Tokischa” being just the latest example of Madonna flouting the conservatism of a religion that has never treated same-sex relationships (or, in Madonna’s case, friendships with very nebulous boundaries) as anything other than sinful. With Tokischa’s own Dominican roots unavoidably steeped in Catholicism, it seems no coincidence that she, too, should be hyper-sexual as a “character.” After all, when repressed for so long, sexuality tends to come out at full force later in life—something Madonna is still unleashing after suppressing it since the age of five. The age, she once claimed, when she first became aware of sex and its power, telling Interview in 1989, “I was always very precocious as a child, extremely flirtatious, I mean. I was just one of those little girls who crawled on everybody’s lap. I flirted with everyone—my uncles, my grandfather, my father, everybody. I was aware of my female charm.”
So is Tokischa, it would appear, using hers to compel Madonna to name a song in her honor (no small feat). Plus, both women adhere to the mantra, “El tiempo pasa lento y yo estoy rápida.” But it’s only a matter of time (going by so slowly or not) before even Madonna can’t be “rápida” enough to outrun the mounting charge of appropriation that borders often too closely on cringe rather than crave. Even if she does occasionally get those she’s appropriating from to participate for their own separate ends.
