Sevdaliza and Grimes Enlist Madonna, Julia Fox and A$AP Ferg to Remind Us That “Nothing Lasts Forever”

There is perhaps no better person to incorporate into a song called “Nothing Lasts Forever” than Madonna. Not just because she has made a career out of proving that trends come and go, and that reinvention is the only way to survive the fallout of a certain “fad’s” death (even if fads always end up swinging back around—like voguing), but because to stay stagnant is its own form death. Of course, there’s also the more obvious way the song applies to Madonna in that she happened to have a near-death experience over the summer that reminded her (as if she needed to be) of just how fleeting existence can be. 

With the concept for the video written and directed by Willem Kantine, the visuals for it accentuate just how much the music video art form has evolved since Madonna’s “heyday,” when far more fanfare and linear conceptualization was put into such endeavors. Now, all an artist needs is a “concept” without much else behind it (save for trippy special effects), least of all a narrative on par with the video for “Express Yourself” or “Bad Girl” (both of which were directed by David Fincher). Even so, the video is actually inspired by 90s-era gabber music, which often featured such displays of underground machismo. So naturally, Madonna is game to contribute her visage (#givegoodface) to the project intended to subvert ideas of what “masculinity” is. And, in her own way, maybe it’s a troll on all the blowback she got a couple years ago for putting her face on another woman’s body. Although the altered image Madonna had posted was from 2015, it took six years for the culture to become outraged about it in our newly evolved state of perceiving everything as a violation (which, truth be told, it kind of is). Madonna’s social media choice brought up a larger conversation about “reality” in the internet age, well before the AI panic of 2023. Not to mention the issue of stripping female bodily autonomy when it comes to AI, deepfakes, Photoshopping, etc. Thus, for a feminist like Madonna, such behavior was a big dichotomy. 

In any case, it wouldn’t be unlike M to display a sardonic sense of humor toward that moment by, once again, having her head placed atop another person’s body. This time, a bodybuilder type. Indeed, everyone in the video—Sevdaliza, Grimes, Madonna, Julia Fox and A$AP Ferg—is down to have their physical person warped by this odd “cut and paste” of their head. Better known as: deepfaking. For the most part, it’s Sevdaliza and Grimes who seem to be loosely training for a competition (if all that slow walking side-by-side on a treadmill is any indication). After all, it’s their song. One that combines their shared love of AI in particular and technological manipulation in general. For example, Sevdaliza offered herself up to become the first femenoid robot (named Dahlia) and Grimes has been very open about inviting fans to deepfake her voice via the website she launched to do just that, Elf.Tech. In both instances, each artist has taken a contrasting approach to the new world order compared to other musicians, who view AI and deepfaking as massive threats to art. Rather than fighting it, however, Sevdaliza and Grimes have gone whole hog on embracing it, perhaps adhering to the old adage, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Mind you, that seemed to be the adage that many a Nazi employed as well. 

Madonna, too, has employed this method with technological advances throughout her career, embracing every shift as it comes—from the dawning of the internet (see: her concert at the Brixton Academy being among the first of its kind to get livestreamed) to her creation of a TikTok account. Whatever it might be, Madonna never shies away from the new tech that bombards us because she, like Sevdaliza and Grimes, prefers to use it as a tool rather than view it as a threat. 

Granted, it was Grimes herself who ominously foretold that “we’re in the end of art, human art.” And she’s been the first to practice what she preaches by surrendering herself over fully to the matrix (as she basically did when she started dating Elon Musk and then had his children). Madonna, too, has made that surrender, in case you forgot about the NFT she made of herself (in conjunction with Beeple) that shocked the nation. For Madonna, that kind of immortality is precisely what she’s always yearned for. With technological manipulation a person can not only live forever, but they can look young forever, to boot (see also: Madonna’s face as Andy Warhol’s philosophy). Which brings us to a key lyric from “Nothing Lasts Forever”: “I don’t wanna waste my youth (nothing lasts forever)/Love me then let me go.” If that hasn’t been the credo that Madonna has lived by, then nothing is. 

To be sure, the themes of “Nothing Lasts Forever” apply not just to Madonna’s own approach to life and the pursuit of fame (which took a toll on many of her personal relationships during her climb to the top), but to humanity itself as we start to reconcile with the notion that maybe our jig is about to be up. Just like it was for the dinosaurs. Whether that refers to our extinction by way of AI or climate change (or both) remains to be seen. But when Sevdaliza sings, “We are machines made for dreamin’/Dreams are done, are dreams dead?/Something inside still believes it,” it only further proves that we’ll die living in the delusion that there’s still a shred of hope left. 

Unfortunately, there’s no such hope for music videos as we once knew them in their postmodern prime. Going back to how the medium of the music video has devolved irrevocably since the decades when Madonna was going all in on film-like efforts such as “Like A Prayer” and  “Bedtime Story” (and no, Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” isn’t that), Kantine had this to say of “Nothing Lasts Forever”: “With the rise of TikTok and other trends, the actual time consumers watch videos like ours has been steadily declining. Our project is a response to this phenomenon and challenges the notion that art needs to cater to a specific audience to be successful.”

In other words, we’re living in the era of Just Toss Something Out and See What Sticks/Goes Viral. Madonna, ever the ready adapter, is only too prepared to absorb and wield that trend. One that, hopefully, won’t last forever… then again, maybe it’s better if attention spans, short as they already are, stay the same for as long as possible. Because it can only go further downhill from here.