Which brings us back to Britney Spears. From the start, Britney busted sales records for a solo female artist, selling fourteen million copies of her debut album, ... Baby One More Time, in the United States. Her cumulative thirty-two million album sales to date still pale in comparison to Madonna's sixty-four million, though it's worth noting that Britney's debut has sold more than any single Madonna album. It's not unthinkable that as Britney's album was flying off the shelves in '98 and '99, and Madonna was seeing comparatively slow sales for Ray of Light, the original Material Girl might have felt threatened.
In 1997 the RIAA reported a boom in music purchases by female consumers, which accounted for more than half the market share for the first time in the decade. A large chunk of that uptick can be credited to the boy-band and girl-power pop of the late '90s and early 2000s, and Britney was at the center of it all. She hit the touring circuit opening for *NSYNC in 1999, and by the time she headlined her own tour in 2000, she had one of the top-ten highest-grossing concerts of the year (behind, among others, *NSYNC and Metallica—2000 was a weird year in music). She was in high demand, from both her fans and the media, who couldn't get enough of the "Is she or isn't she a virgin?" game.
And though neither would admit it, Britney and Madonna became subtle competitors. Britney talked to the press about idolizing Madonna, while Madonna talked to the press about loving Britney. Everyone else, bloggers and journalists alike, was ready to declare Britney the next Madonna. In the face of this youth-quake, Madonna used a clever business maneuver to inject herself back into the center of the conversation: She staged a takeover. In the business world when a smaller company begins taking attention, money, or customers away from a corporation, the corporation's most prudent move is to buy them and eliminate the competition. For Madonna, the takeover would be sealed with a kiss.
When Madonna kissed Britney on national TV during the 2003 MTV VMAs, even the celebrities and jaded music-industry types in attendance were shocked. It was, naturally, followed by a round of thunderous applause. This was my first year working at the VMAs for MTV, and the feeling in Radio City Music Hall that night was electric; we were watching a moment that everyone would be talking about the next day. And our collective gasp was warranted—the kiss still makes top-ten lists of the most shocking VMA moments, hottest girl-on-girl kisses, and scandalous events in either Britney's or Madonna's history. In an instant, Madonna reclaimed the full attention of the press and used the public's fascination with Britney to change the conversation around their relationship from one of competition to one of collaboration. And she reinforced her own sexiness and youth appeal, after making such a spirituality- and mommy-oriented album (read: grown-up) like Ray of Light.
In the public-relations aftermath, it wasn't Britney who appeared on Oprah. It was Madonna. She used the opportunity to promote her latest album, American Life, while directing all controversial attention and eyes back on herself. She feigned surprise that the world was so shocked and interested in the kiss, as though it hadn't been a perfectly executed publicity stunt. Britney may have thought she was getting a big-sister figure or pop-icon mentor in the only living person who could identify with what she was going through. In retrospect it seems obvious that Madonna was using their relationship and the public's fixation on Britney to bolster her own image. She did not hesitate to cut all ties after the bloom rubbed off Britney's flower during Brit's unraveling in the public spotlight. In any case, Britney began defining what it would mean to be the Next Madonna, which entailed more than being a blonde pop star who hints around about sex. She made us see that for the old Madonna to be replaced, we would need someone who could capture the public's attention in the same scandalous-but-likable manner, while providing us with that special pop-star sparkle.
Since those halcyon days, the idea of Britney as the Next Madonna has faded out of favor. It's become obvious she lacks the drive to sustain her career. She is surrounded by a crack team of marketers, but she appears to have no artistic vision of her own, nor a keen-enough business sense to pull off pop-stardom for the long haul (we're talking the fifty-year long haul here, not the "while I'm young and convincingly sexy" haul).
Regardless of whether you like Madonna's music or not, you have to have some respect for her tenacity and cultural intelligence compared to the pop stars who have come after her. She manages to deftly pull together a variety of artistic influences and cultivate them into a persona that engages people. Her name-checking of Marlene Dietrich and tribute to her in "Vogue" is perhaps more responsible for contemporary awareness of this actress than any of the movies Dietrich actually starred in. Britney, on the other hand, probably couldn't tell you who Madonna's artist friend Jean-Michel Basquiat was, let alone work him into a song's lyrics.
Britney has had no problem captivating the public and the press in good times or bad, but her coming undone has provided us with a different sort of spectacle—and it's not at all what we expected. In 2007 I was working at the VMAs in Las Vegas when she gave her absolutely frightening performance of "Gimme More." It was a complete disaster and a cultural phenomenon. Looking as if she'd spent ten minutes getting ready, Britney took the stage. She might as well have fallen right off it for how badly she flopped. She stumbled listlessly around in a Vegas showgirl-style outfit, appearing dazed and most certainly not fully there. This was not the confident pop star we knew, but some broken doll, too weak to say no to what turned out to be an exploitive performance that would only further her decline. It was shocking that a star of Britney's stature would appear so sad and out of control in public, let alone as the opener of the VMAs. Madonna would never be caught on stage in anything less than full control, whereas Britney's performance that night gave the impression that she was too feeble-minded to know she shouldn't have been there in the first place. Everyone who suspected she was a puppet had further proof after that night.
In my opinion, her neutered return to the VMAs in 2008, when she'd cleaned up and was ready to collect her awards with decorum, was just as bad as "Gimme More." The public was ready for her redemption, but Britney seemed just as vacant and noncommittal as she had the year before.
It requires a special kind of self-possessed mind to look into the face of iconography, understand how universally adored you are, and continue to function at all, let alone maintain your humanity. Britney couldn't handle it.
Madonna, in her own struggle with control, freaked everyone out in 1992 with the dual release of Erotica and the Sex photo book—not because we were scared of her sexuality, but because we collectively felt this was too blatant and lacked depth or emotion—but the idea that she might atone for any stir she caused never crossed anyone's mind. Every track on Erotica brought a Madonna with a different look. She assumed a disco persona in a nod to Edie Sedgwick for "Deeper and Deeper," rocked a black-haired pixie cut (a first for her) in the "Rain" video, and got Christopher Walken to play her guardian angel in the "Bad Girl" video. However, the Sex book, with all its unabashed and sometimes tasteless kinkiness for the sake of shock, grossly overshadowed any sort of stylistic ambition she tapped into with Erotica and undoubtedly had an impact on how poorly it sold in comparison to her previous albums. The naked pictures of her with Vanilla Ice in Sex didn't do anything to help her cred in music circles. And the release of Body of Evidence in 1993, the notoriously awful "erotic thriller" that was neither erotic nor thrilling, only further pushed along her reputation in pop-culture circles as a pantheon of the tasteless. And not a bit of that matters in the long run, because even if she marred her reputation, everyone was still obsessed with her every move. Separated from the firestorm of controversy at the time, most music critics consider Erotica, in retrospect, one of Madonna's most important releases. She made us love her even when she was a badly behaved outcast. And she did it on her terms.
Madonna maintained her sense of humor and sense of self beautifully for many years after that lapse, doing the sort of things we all do. Getting married and divorced, havi
ng kids, making stupid mistakes, finding spirituality: in short, growing up. And she incorporated all of these stages of life into the music she created, so her fans could follow along. As she gets older and the urge to stay youthful through high-intensity workouts and plastic surgery becomes irresistible, even her most adoring fans have to admit there is every chance she could slip into that same dark downward spiral. From 1983–1999, however, she had her shit firmly together and was the model female pop star. Which is probably why Lady Gaga is trying so hard to be her.
I first met Gaga in 2008. Back when her "Just Dance" video was newly in rotation on MTV, the powers that be at Interscope Records set up a meet-and-greet with Gaga. She was still a new artist at the time, and we didn't yet understand that she embodied the Gaga character 24-7. She came into our conference room wearing no pants—this was during her leotard phase, which was followed by the hair-as-hair-bow phase. Needless to say, Gaga had the theatrics angle nailed down before most people even knew she was, and she clearly has a big artistic vision for herself.
Gaga has evolved the elements of style and costuming on her character, but she remains firmly entrenched in shock-value pop-art performances, both live and in music videos, as the big carrot to pull an audience in. And she's not ashamed to lean heavily on Madonna's style to do it. In the '90s, when Madonna was in the zone as a pop icon, she did an amazing job transforming herself and her look into several vastly different styles. She kicked off the decade playing a serious brunette who kissed a black Jesus, morphed into a Marilyn Monroe look-alike who costarred in Dick Tracy, became a cheesy kinkologist with the Erotica album and the Sex book, toyed with being a respectable movie star in Evita, and wrapped up the decade by recounting her experiences becoming a mom and finding Kabbalah on Ray of Light. Those were more than evolutions. Madonna inhabited entirely different characters at breakneck speed. As of the writing of this book, Gaga is just releasing her second all-new album. She has certainly switched out fashion accessories quickly, à la Madonna, but it's too soon to tell whether her sound or lyrical subject matter is going to evolve as well. This isn't to say that Gaga doesn't have musical talent to go with her outfits, but it must be said that Gaga's songs are not as good as Madonna's. At least not yet.
Amidst all this reinvention, Madonna—and now Gaga—are constantly accused of ripping off other artists' style, music, and looks. The wide variety of people Madonna has been accused of borrowing from is too long to list in one book but includes people as far-reaching as '70s girl punk band the Slits, Marilyn Monroe, and photographer Guy Bourdin, whose estate actually sued her in 2003 over the claim that images in her "Hollywood" video were plagiarized copies of his famous photographs. (She settled but acknowledged no wrongdoing.) Gaga faces a chorus of rip-off references to David Bowie, Grace Jones, and, of course, Madonna. My thoughts on this matter swing toward the Ecclesiastes* quote, "There is nothing new under the sun." All artists pull from those who came before them. Some do so more heavily than others. However, in a world where Girl Talk can be considered a talented artist for doing nothing more than mashing a bunch of song samples together, when a Gaga or Madonna brings aspects of their lesser-known influences to the mainstream, it's hardly worth crucifying her over. Bear in mind that most of Gaga's fans hadn't even been born yet when Bowie and Grace Jones put on the live shows she visually references. If she inspires kids to Google those earlier artists and discover their music, I don't see a downside. Obviously, she'd be a lot cooler if she were more original, but in music what is critically lauded is rarely popular, and the most-popular performers are rarely important to the critics.
When it comes to her relationships with corporate America, though, Gaga may have surpassed Madonna. She has the expected tour sponsors and music-video product placements, but she's also struck a deal with Polaroid to act as a creative director on select projects. Judging by the product placements in Gaga's video for "Telephone," the creative influence is hardly one-way. Neither party has laid out the exact details of their collaboration agreement, but it's a highly sophisticated product-integration deal that brings the commercialization of art to new levels. In her creative-director role, Gaga will potentially affect actual design, marketing, and presentation of new products for the camera company, a role relatively unheard of for a pop star.
This is where Gaga loses people who think that the mixing of corporations and artistic endeavors is a bad thing. You either appreciate the ingenious integration of Gaga into the Polaroid company and reciprocal integration of Polaroid products into the Gaga brand or you find tasteless the idea of corporations using art to sell products.* Either way, as sales and profits in the music industry weaken and advances and marketing budgets shrink, more artists are relying on corporate underwriting. Essentially, the bar Madonna set for pop-star performances created a financial barrier to entry for every pop starlet who wants to follow her. Gaga is using connections with business to help her generate enough capital to create the giant spectacle show she requires to top Madonna and support her pop performance-art vision. Between her blatant nod to Madonna's looks of the past and her aping of Madonna's basic economic strategies (even if she does do it on an advanced level), Gaga is just following the template that Madge established decades ago. If the Next Madonna is truly as inventive as the first Madonna, she'll look nothing like her. She'll be someone no one can see coming.
When she launched her career in her twenties, there was no way Madonna could have known she would still be making pop music in her fifties. Aside from Cher and Barbra Streisand, who are in a very different world, it's unprecedented for a female pop star to be such a cultural phenomenon for so long. In the last decade, Madonna has tried desperately to hold on to a youthful audience and she's faltered. As she chases her next hit, her evolution as an artist seems to have stalled. It's hard to get behind an album like Hard Candy, where her thighs are the main feature of the album art, every song is stacked with weirdly cold beats, and guest appearances by Justin Timberlake and Timbaland feel like a weak attempt to remain relevant to teenagers. Not only is she losing her original base, but she's out of touch with the younger audience who are looking to new idols like Gaga and another Next Madonna contender, Maya Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A.
If you were at all tapped into music-blog culture in 2004, then you first heard M.I.A. when music blogs went batshit crazy for "Galang" and Maya's massively leaked first album Arular. Maya is a woman of the world. She's originally from Sri Lanka, where her family was heavily affected by the civil war. Her father helped found the Tamil militant group EROS, which sought to create a separate Tamil state in Sri Lanka. EROS was later taken over by the Tamil Tigers, a militant group that wasn't shy about employing terrorist tactics in their fight. Her father wasn't a Tiger (she would tell you he was), but M.I.A. didn't shy away from using Tiger imagery and references in her music, which led to her labeling as a terrorist sympathizer by some members of the press. She lived in India for a period before her family relocated to London, where she met singer Justine Frischmann of the band Elastica, leading to her appearance on M.I.A.'s debut album. From the jump, M.I.A.'s music has been a crazy mix of hip-hop/grime, reggaeton, Bollywood, and pop. Her lyrics are very political, not always well-informed and, by extension, controversial.
Lynn Hirschberg of the New York Times was among the first to acknowledge M.I.A. as the potential successor to the Material Girl's throne. In her controversial feature on the singer in May 2010, she noted, "in fusing style, music and controversy, Maya evoked Madonna." Hirschberg then went on to call Maya out for being uneducated about the political groups she purports to support, accused her of using shock tactics to get attention, and said she co-opts the talents of male producers and songwriters to bolster her own rise to fame. These mirror accusations that were flung at Madonna in her early career, substituting lectures on morality for accusations of terrorist sympathies. But it seems fitting in a post–9/11 world that the next Madonna would take up the issue of terrorism as her focus for shocking everyone.
Madonna used the intersection of sex and religion to provoke us, and now there's very little left in that arsenal. That's a big part of why no one was especially taken aback by Lady Gaga's "Alejandro" video, which rehashes the tools of Madonna's trade from nearly twenty years earlier. Religious intolerance and xenophobia in the West—issues at the center of the current global political divide—are Maya's playground. It doesn't even matter what she says, whether she has actual or exaggerated ties to the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, or whether she actually cares about the third world or lives an incredibly privileged life. It just matters that she uses an extreme point of view to shock everyone into listening to her. Madonna and Maya both know the first trick is to get the world's attention. And once you have it, you can push that button for decades.
Record Collecting for Girls: Unleashing Your Inner Music Nerd, One Album at a Time Page 11