Despite Madonna constantly being called “old,” few people seem to immediately brand her as “boomer,” the very generation she hails from. For some reason, Madonna has always felt outside of any classifiable generation. Her rebellious and envelope-pushing ways have served to fortify her as that type of anomaly. And yet, there are occasional moments when the principles and values of her birth cohort possess and take hold of her at unexpected moments. As was the case at her January 15th performance of The Celebration Tour in Detroit.
Dubbed as the town she “hails from” (despite being born in Bay City and spending her formative years in the outlying Detroit areas of Pontiac and Rochester Hills), Detroit has long held a special place in Madonna’s heart—even if she hasn’t always managed to make it there for a tour date. Or even all that regularly for a visit. This is still, after all, the same woman who said, “I just wanted to get the hell out of Michigan.” And once she got out, the thought of going back, even for a short stint, seemed like too much of a trigger. As she says in 1991’s Truth or Dare, “Detroit was definitely the hardest place we went to on the tour, at an emotional level. God, going home is… Well, it’s just never that easy for me.” Not just because of the greatest trauma of her life—the death of her mother—happening there, but because it represents all those oppressive values she sought to escape from when she fled to New York (itself oppressive in a different way). Values that are inherently tied to the baby boomer era: work hard, get married, work harder, start a family, work even harder. The funny thing is, boomers, in their youth, existed in a period when things tended to more easily fall into one’s lap—jobs, fun, rights—than they do now (hence, their ability to be homeowners when most everyone else is not). Which is perhaps why some boomers chose to partake of the drug and hippie culture of the time rather than bothering with the proverbial suit and tie routine. Madonna always seemed to be caught in between the boomer stereotypes of being both rebellious and being overly stern and obsessed with work.
That latter element also stems from being born to an Italian-American working-class father in the Midwest. It was that geographical circumstance that repelled her as much as it compelled her. Thus, she has never failed to return, in some way, to the Midwest (even if it’s “just Chicago”) for her tours to honor where she came from. And to honor her father, Silvio “Tony” Ciccone. As she told the audience during her first speech of the night, after performing “Into the Groove,” “He taught me to never quit, to work hard and to never give up,” later adding, “Working hard and this working-class mentality that I have that is running through my veins all started here.” But it also all started with being born to a generation that still bowed to the god of Capitalism. And, indeed, no one has embodied the capitalism Cinderella story better than Madonna. Convinced it was “hard work” that got her where she was and not, in the end, a lot of good luck intermixed with what Robert Sapolsky would call “a science of life without free will.”
To boot, Madonna’s long-standing status as a “mascot,” of sorts, for (white) feminism and being an independent woman doesn’t quite track in the speech she gave to Detroit about ultimately relying on a man—her first serious boyfriend in New York—to swoop in and offer her shelter/the opportunity to learn how to play guitar. That man was Dan Gilroy. And then that sort of “helpful” man would morph into Mark Kamins and Jellybean Benitez and so on and so forth until Madonna was finally able to carve her way to true artistic and financial independence. That happened when she signed her first recording contract in 1982, just eight years after women were truly “allowed” to get their own bank accounts. How timely for Madonna indeed. A woman who came of age during an era when things were finally becoming more progressive. Or so it seemed until the 1980s, when Reagan came to roost. Madonna’s rise to fame during the same period was like a counteracting godsend. A means to remind boomers and Gen Xers alike of what “boomer values” were once supposed to mean: iconoclasm. And yet, the irony rooted in that iconoclasm is a continued commitment to and reverence for tradition.
This is where Madonna’s sentimentality about family and being a mother comes in, bubbling to the surface during her speech when she said, “I get to relish and revel in the importance of being a mother… I have accomplished many things in my long career, but the most important thing that I have ever done is become a mother. And I don’t give a shit about any of my accomplishments if I’m not a good mother.” She then reveals her generational indoctrination with the lines, “Hats off to all you mothers out there who work your asses off ‘cause it ain’t easy. Especially if you have a job. How many working mothers are out there in the audience?” This antiquated phrase, “working mother,” implying that being a mother in and of itself is not “enough” to be classified as work despite her insistence that being a mother is the hardest job there is. But still, she can’t quite relinquish the boomer-ish thinking that all “real” work must result in a paycheck. Her father also being the source of this indoctrination. In fact, she loosely calls out fathers after her display of affection for mothers by asking the crowd, “How many working fathers who are parents?” (and yes, the phrasing of that question doesn’t really add up). She then goes on to display even more deference for her father, de facto patriarchy, by gushing, “[My father] taught me the meaning of hard work, he taught me the importance of earning your way through life, he taught me that life is not a day at the beach—you better be prepared to work hard to get somewhere in life.”
Once again, Madonna doesn’t seem to pick up on the idea that she was heavily inculcated with the “values” of capitalism. Continuing to describe how her father instilled within her such a “wonderful” work ethic, she recalls him saying, “‘You wanna go to the movies? You wanna take a ballet class? Go get a job and pay for it.’ I was very angry at him for saying this, but that was the best lesson that he could teach me. It turned me into the person that I am today.” In truth, though, Madonna was made into the person she is today the same way that all of us become “ourselves”: by being a product of the time during which we grew up in. And, for Madonna, it’s never been clearer that she is at last coming into her own so clearly as a baby boomer. The “Me” generation before millennials and Gen Z came along to perfect that negative epithet with social media. And before they came along to question the so-called value of hard work when none of it has ever once paid off as a direct result of capitalism.
Madonna, on the other hand, happened to come of age during an era when that system could still be effortlessly packaged and sold as what fellow boomer George W. Bush would call “the best system ever devised.” And for boomers, it truly was. It’s those who have come after that have been forced to suffer the consequences of that lie. Granted, not Madonna’s own children, who will undeniably benefit from the perks of generational wealth and nepo baby status.
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