As Madonna gets older (which everyone loves talking about more than her work itself), it isn’t just that it gets harder for her to “prove herself”–as though that’s something she still needs to do–but even more challenging to dredge someone up who can craft a decent interview around her. For it certainly isn’t Vanessa Grigoriadis for The New York Times Magazine. Grigoriadis a.k.a. the person who famously wrote the article entitled “Britney Spears: Inside an American Tragedy” for Rolling Stone in 2008 (but we’ll come back to that later).
Speaking of Rolling Stone, it is a 1991 (incidentally, 1991 is a year that comes up in this article as well when referring to her Truth or Dare era and her thoughts on Harvey Weinstein’s demise) interview that most clearly comes to mind when thinking of one of the best sources of dialogue pried from notoriously glib Madonna. By none other than Carrie Fisher. Of course, like so many other worthy contemporaries that might be able to extract a similar frankness from the carefully guarded pop star, she’s dead. So we have instead a journalist like Grigoriadis, who writes sentences such as, “I realized I couldn’t ask her about anything as personal as menopause, but I had to broach the topic of aging: If I had followed her this long, where were we going next?” Um, okay. First of all, if you’re going to interview Madonna, have some fucking gumption to ask the questions you want. Secondly, stop making everything about age. There even comes a point where Grigoriadis seems to unknowingly describe that Madonna is trolling her when she responds to all this talk about aging with, “I think you think about growing old too much. I think you think about age too much. I think you should just stop thinking about it…just live your life and don’t be influenced by society trying to make you feel some type of way about your age or what it is you’re supposed to be doing.”
So here we have arguably one of the most interesting people on the planet–someone who has done and experienced just about everything–and this is the banal conversation Grigoriadis has come up with (hence a heavy reliance on the pretty pictures alluding to self-reflection as created by French artist JR). This is a far cry from such candid one-liners as, “Everybody I like is dead,” when referring to people she admires (that’s certainly one thing that hasn’t changed, as inferred by her homage to her female idols in the latest issue of British Vogue). Or asking Fisher apropos of nothing: “Did you fuck Warren?” That’s Beatty, to you know-nothings.
Madonna was never oblivious to the prospect of “becoming old,” as mentioned when discussing the biopics she wanted to develop at the time for Frida Kahlo and Martha Graham (also longstanding idols), noting, “…by the time one of these [projects] comes along, maybe I’ll be too old for it, and then I’ll just direct it.” Foreshadowing indeed, for, of course, Madonna would go on to direct, even if it wasn’t always (or ever) well-received. The frankness of Fisher’s conversation, in turn, incited Madonna to be frank, as with the exchange, “I never understood why you felt the need to attack when you’ve certainly won the battle, if not the war, in your mind.” Madonna replied, “Well, that’s all part of how I’m going to conquer the world: conquer my loneliness.” It’s something she’s still clearly trying to do, which, at the very least, shines through in The New York Times Magazine interview, with Grigoriadis narrating, “In Portugal, she said, she was lonely. I asked if she felt that way because she was living in a castle, which seemed like the most appropriate description of the 16,000-square-foot Moorish revival mansion I read she bought, but she shot back: ‘Let’s not get carried away. I wasn’t in any castle.’ She said about Lisbon, ‘It’s quite medieval and feels like a place where time stopped in a way, and it feels very closed,’ adding, ‘There’s a cool vibe there, but where I was living with my kids, I felt very cut off from a lot.'” Any source of socialization or stimulation included. In this regard, the experience does sound much like her initial arrival to New York City: the wayward Midwesterner with no friends and no idea how to go about making them. That Madonna could still feel this way at sixty incited one of the most standout lyrics from her first single from Madame X, “Medellín,” in which she opens with the lines, “I took a pill and had a dream/I went back to my seventeen year/Allowed myself to be naive/To be someone I’ve never been.” To that end, Madonna has taken on so many personae throughout her career as a means to be both someone she’s never been and come closer to understanding her true self. Fisher knew that part of that self was Madonna not wanting to give head to men because, “Who wants to choke? That’s the bottom line. I contend that that’s part of the whole humiliation thing of men with women. Women cannot choke a guy.” Ah but Madonna’s been choking men for years with her visuals of underwear as outerwear and androgyne glamor. Women, like Grigoriadis, it seems, don’t know what to do with her. Especially now when she’s treated as “Mother of Pop and ‘Bad’ Feminism” as opposed to sentient being with much more to say.
With the subtitle of the unfortunately titled “Madonna at Sixty” being: “The original queen of pop on aging, inspiration and why she refuses to cede control,” it smacks of a journalist going to visit Charles Foster Kane and attempting to drag out one last kernel of truth from behind his curtain of unknowability. Anyone familiar with how Madonna views life and the world ought to be aware that this isn’t the best approach to whipping her into a conversational frenzy.
What’s more, an oddly self-superior condescension rears its head in Grigoriadis’ “prose style,” as when Madonna explains of waiting four years to put out another album after numerous songs from Rebel Heart were leaked ahead of time by a hacker, “There are no words to describe how devastated I was. It took me a while to recover, and put such a bad taste in my mouth I wasn’t really interested in making music. I felt raped.” A liberal apologist, Grigoriadis inserts, “It didn’t feel right to explain that women these days were trying not to use that word metaphorically.” Wow, thanks for that insight. And for making Madonna seem like an out of touch relic merely for expressing a sentiment she has every right to liken to literal rape. After all, she’s experienced that too.
But Grigoriadis isn’t only merciless there, she also feels obliged to paint Madonna as some sort of Miranda Priestly figure in her article introduction describing their meeting at her London home, a moment she also uses to throw shade at her plastic surgery with the insertion of a backhanded compliment: “Then a figure descended a nearby set of stairs. I saw the nude leather heels first, her feet transformed into a fleshy weapon, then the whole person, who was extending her hand to shake mine. Despite unforgiving paparazzi shots of the work on her face, she was shockingly beautiful up close.” Then again, Grigoriadis was an age nazi even when it came to her aforementioned scathing Britney Spears article, in which she paints a scene of Spears as follows: “Britney rifles the racks as the Cure’s ‘Pictures of You’ blasts into the airless pink boutique, grabbing a pink lace dress, a few tight black numbers and a frilly red crop top, the kind of shirt that Britney used to wear all the time at seventeen but isn’t really appropriate for anyone over that age.” Britney was twenty-seven at the time. And that constitutes day old bread that can’t wear a crop top? Jesus. And on a side note, maybe this is why women are so fucked up about their image when they’re expected to use their so-called “sexual peak” at seventeen.
While there are moments when it’s clear Grigoriadis is trying to lend some modicum of empathy to the piece, she has no rapport with Madonna, and it’s unlikely that any interviewer ever will. Least of all in the same brash and brilliant way as Carrie Fisher. What’s more, their bonded experience of both losing close friends to AIDS (one of Fisher’s own died during the timeline of conducting the two-part interview) seems especially resonant now, after Madonna’s recent speech upon accepting a GLAAD Advocate for Change Award. Yet even Fisher couldn’t get Madonna to respond with much candor re: the where she saw herself in ten years question (she accurately replied, “I don’t think I’ll be dead.”). To Grigoriadis, she stated of where she’s headed next, “Straight to the moon.” Whether this is a cryptic allusion to a forthcoming performance or her intention to defect Planet Earth with Elon Musk remains to be seen.
One thing that Fisher, Grigoriadis and most Psych 101-savvy people can agree upon is that Madonna’s entire artistic journey has, after a while, become less about world domination and more about an insatiable need to slowly unravel her psyche. Since she damn sure can’t do it in a twenty-first century interview. As Fisher pointed out in the intro to her Q&A, “She has a quality that I’ve always enjoyed in some people, mainly public ones: she will answer any question because she is genuinely interested in her own reply. A conversation or an interview, then, can become an opportunity for self-discovery, or just discovery.” Grigoriadis, too, ultimately concludes, “Her career had not only been about ambition, or ratcheting up achievement. It had been one long process of meaning-making, of understanding herself through her art” (since Christ knows, clearly, no one else is capable of understanding her–least of all au présent). But her method of doing it has absolutely no cojones. As it might have if she was being questioned by someone as bawdy and sarcastic like, say, Debi Mazar. Then again, even Carrie Fisher didn’t have the vision to understand Madonna’s commitment to breaking down barriers when she inquired, “But in terms of your career, won’t you have to stop being as sexual at a certain point before it becomes weird?” Madonna, at thirty-two, returned, simply, “Why?”
