Why Does It Take A Video of Madonna Doing Successive Jump Squats From Over Twenty Years Ago To Appreciate Her?

Being that there’s really no rhyme or reason to what might “take hold” with regard to virality on TikTok, one supposes it should be no surprise that a very specific moment from Madonna’s 2001 Drowned World Tour has become a popular “challenge” on the accursed app. That “moment” being more like fifteen seconds of unheard-of physical rigor for someone of any age (let alone someone over forty) as she proceeds to do approximately sixteen jump squats in rapid succession right after screaming, “Ah yeaahhhh!” An utterance few people would exclaim with joy prior to having to do something so physically strenuous. But such is the nature of Madonna: equal parts endlessly driven and masochistic. 

It was that sort of vigor that went into conceptualizing the tour, which itself wasn’t very appreciated in its time, derided for not having enough “hits” performed, for a start. To boot, Madonna’s own brother, Christopher Ciccone, would condemn it in his “tell-all” by saying that the “tree concept” he had originally come up with for the backdrops that would appear onstage became something darker and more sinister. As did the entire tour once it transformed into Drowned World. Originally, Madonna had planned to tour in 1998/1999 after Ray of Light was released, but life kept getting in the way and it was 2001 by the time she took her act on the road again. For the new millennium, Madonna had reinvented herself once more. This time as both a “ghetto fabulous” cowgirl for Music and as an English “missus,” married to Guy Ritchie. 

But if Ritchie thought she was going to stay home and darn his socks, he had another thing coming. Less than a year after her marriage (and giving birth to a second child), she would embark on this world tour in promotion of Music. It was, indeed, the title track and lead single from that record which would serve as her pièce de résistance of a finale for the tour. A finale that, as stated, is suddenly attracting far more attention than it ever did before. Perhaps because, in the early 00s, women were simply “expected” to be that physically fit if they wanted to still be considered part of the game at all. Not that it stopped anyone from continuing to call Madonna “over the hill” at forty-three. Though, as it’s long been plain to see, Madonna could always outpace the pop stars half her age. 

With her recent bacterial infection, however, the media has been quick to pounce on the narrative that Madonna got it as a result of trying to “keep up” with those pop stars half her age—Taylor Swift being one such name specifically mentioned despite the fact that Madonna has always been a more entertaining (and more political) performer. Anything to discredit not only what she’s still capable of, but what she’s already been doing consistently from the very outset of her live performance days. Which is, to reiterate: dancing her fucking ass off. This is probably why she needed to get ass implants to replace it. In any case, apparently even “TikTokers” (a polite euphemism for nitwits who don’t catch on to things until decades later) can’t turn a blind eye to the impressiveness of what Madonna was doing even then, at an age when she was already being branded as a “geriatric.” 

Perhaps it took the passing of a couple decades to fully understand the grueling nature of the choreography on that tour. No matter how old one is. Even Britney Spears, who was in the “prime” of her pop stardom in 2001, would have admitted to its difficulty. Thus, maybe the one token of Establishment appreciation it got—being nominated for an Emmy in the category of Outstanding Choreography—was telling of just how elaborate those moves were. But, as Madonna declared long ago, “I got the moves, baby.” In addition to, “Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free.” In that respect, Madonna has said that she’s always associated movement with freedom. Freedom to flit from place to place, freedom to try new things. Thus, her phobia of being fat. Or “zaftig,” as she put it in a 2006 article for Elle. 

And it’s a fear you can see in her determined eyes as she does those jump squats. Not just the fear of being “rotund,” but the fear of being told that she “can’t.” That because of her age, she should be limited by her body. Repeatedly, Madonna has defied everyone, including herself, to prove the contrary, going so far as to keep dancing as she would have in 2001 during 2019’s Madame X Tour, which resulted in her needing hip replacement surgery afterward. At present, she’s hell-bent on proving her body (and the masses) wrong again by not giving up on the idea of this new world tour, celebrating (ergo, its name: the Celebration Tour) forty years of hits, just because she may or may not have almost died due to a serious bacterial infection. Itself caused by ignoring any signs her body was trying to give her about slowing down. Maybe, for that brief blip when Madonna was on the other side, neither God nor the Devil wanted to allow entry to someone so persistently stubborn. 

Stubborn enough to endure the wait it took for her to be vindicated as a “stamina queen” twenty-two years after doing those relentless jump squats at the end of her show. While, on the one hand, it’s nice to see her being appreciated in some way by those who might not have known the extent of her tireless commitment to pop music as theater art, it’s also total bullshit that it takes TikTok to justify the Madonna love. Or at least love for her fitness routine. 

In that same aforementioned Elle article, Madonna remarked, “I hope by the time it’s my moment to leave the world physically, I’ll have gotten my head around the idea that life is an endless cycle.” If that’s the case, hopefully in the next matrix, the cycle of taking too long to appreciate Madonna’s physical (and mental) prowess won’t occur yet again.