Good Booty

by Ann Powers

  Punk’s rejection of adulthood had little to do with the hippie cult of innocence that surfaced in songs like Buffalo Springfield’s “I Am a Child,” which updated Victorian notions of youth as closer to nature and spiritual wholeness. Instead, it responded to realities about children coalescing since the 1970s. The phenomenon of the “latchkey kid,” left unsupervised with no adequate day care while parents worked, had become a matter of national concern; at a 1983 Congressional hearing, researchers reported that nearly 15 million minors returned to an empty house every day. Next came “milk carton kids”—the missing children, whose faces adorned domestic dairy products starting in 1985. Most of these kids were abducted by aggrieved divorced parents, and others were runaways, but the carton campaign inspired widespread terror of pedophiliac perversity. “There are child pornographers out there,” a police officer commented in one report on the campaign. “Others just want a child of their own. Sometimes children are sold in baby-selling rings. It happens all the time.”22

  A more tangible threat was domestic abuse—something several stars of the punk scene themselves had experienced. Los Angeles punk pioneer Alice Bag writes in her memoir about her father’s abuse of her mother. When her boyfriend, also a punk, once slapped her in the early days of her band, Bag found her own furious child energy resurging. “My 6-year-old self is taking control, and she only sees one way to go,” Bag writes. “‘You are either a tyrant or a victim . . . .’ little Alicia whispers to me in the darkness. ‘. . . and you will never be a victim.’” It was this rage and determination that Alice poured into her snarling vocals.23

  Punk was the sound of kids telling adults to cut the bullshit and assuring each other they wouldn’t repeat their parents’ mistakes. In Bret Easton Ellis’s emblematic, punk-influenced 1985 novel Less Than Zero, which depicts a group of rich teenagers descending into unobserved mayhem (and occasional prostitution) in Southern California, the standard answer one kid gives to another when asked about an absent parent is, “They don’t care.” The novel’s only moral presence is an image—a poster hanging in the bedroom of the novel’s antihero, Clay, showing the punk-influenced English singer-songwriter Elvis Costello on the cover of his 1981 album, Trust. (The novel’s title also derives from a Costello song.) Like the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg presiding over F. Scott Fitzgerald’s desolate modern landscape in The Great Gatsby, Elvis Costello’s peer out over pink-tinted sunglasses, witnessing his audience of lost boys and girls gradually abandoning hope.24

  Costello loved words too much to remain in punk’s childhood; his witty, complicated songs heralded the mainstreaming of the music within the more pop-friendly packages of 1980s New Wave, a style that also welcomed back androgyny via code-switchers like Annie Lennox of Eurythmics and Culture Club’s Boy George. Costello’s early music did show some of the childlike discomfort with sex that other punks so gleefully declared; more to the point was his appearance, skinny and pimpled, as he sang about sneaky feelings and the “paper striptease” of failed monogamy. Harder-sounding punk bands provided endless examples of punk’s childish mix of repulsion and base desire. A few choice titles from both England and the United States: “Bodies” by the Sex Pistols; “Orgasm Addict” by Buzzcocks; “Carcass” by Siouxsie and the Banshees; “Germfree Adolescents” by X-Ray Spex; “What Does Sex Mean to Me?” by Human Sexual Response; “Love Lies Limp” by Alternative TV; “Come Again” by the Au Pairs; “Asexuality in the 80’s” by the Tools; “Sex Bomb” by Flipper; “Family Fodder” by Debbie Harry; “Stained Sheets” by James White and the Blacks with Lydia Lunch; “Anthrax” by Gang of Four; “Code Blue,” an ode to necrophilia, by T.S.O.L.; “53rd & 3rd,” about male prostitution, by the Ramones; “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene,” about rape, by X; “Slip It In” by Black Flag; “Too Drunk to Fuck” by Dead Kennedys; “I Can’t Come” by the Snivelling Shits.

  These songs vary in sophistication and political awareness. Some songwriters borrowed from a literary legacy that included French outsiders like Arthur Rimbaud and American barflies like Charles Bukowski; John Doe and Exene Cervenka of X, the artiest of LA punks, had actually met at a poetry reading. Others, like the explicitly Marxist Gang of Four and feminists the Raincoats and the Au Pairs, were openly critical of social norms. Andy Warhol’s favorite punk band, the Talking Heads, were New Wave before the term was invented and didn’t scorn sex so much as infuse it with anxiety; David Byrne’s idiot-savant valentines like “Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town” were both neurotic and sweet. Despite these many variations, what punk’s originators and early antecedents shared was a determined and often gleeful refusal to view sex as either romantic or sophisticated. Marcus calls this “banishing the love song,” though punk didn’t banish the love song so much as smash it, finger it, strangle it, and make it into a nasty nursery rhyme. With a bang, early punks started the process of building a genuinely new approach to sex and gender within rock. It flowered thornily in many different ways: in the more puritanical, aggressively male California and New Jersey hardcore scenes; the politically radical subcultures of clean-living “straight edge” and feminist “riot grrrl”; and in a new generation of mainstream rock musicians who didn’t identify with the spangly satyrs punk first called ridiculous.

  That new cohort had matured in the shadow of AIDS. By the mid-1980s, because of the common practice of intravenous drug use and because its own gay and lesbian members were becoming more visible, AIDS had come to affect the punk scene. Partly in response, a strong queer punk community emerged, though mostly centered in the visual and literary arts rather than in music. Drag artists like Vaginal Creme Davis and Joey Arias, writers including Wojnarowicz and Acker, performance artists like Karen Finley and Athey, and filmmakers like Nick Zedd and Richard Kern faced both social approbation and, in some cases, government censure in the face of social pressure from the religious right. The fun of sexual childishness was fading in light of so many new threats. “It’s a strange world full of frivolity on one hand and people dropping dead of starvation, AIDS and murder on the other,” wrote the queer punk novelist Steve Abbott in 1989.25 He died from complications of AIDS in 1992, but his peers continued to hug romance ’til it hurt at least until the end of the century. In the meantime, pop would deal with the issues of the age in a different way.

  MATERIAL GIRL, UNUSUAL BOYS

  In 1989, after half a decade as the premier pop star of the 1980s and, according to her adoring fans and the press, the most famous woman in the world, Madonna answered an interviewer’s question about how she ever managed to get any sleep. “You know what I do?” she said. “I think of a very specific moment in my life, like when I was nine years old and I was the fourth-grade hall monitor, and everyone in class was all lined up to go to the bathroom. I remember every detail—what people were wearing, what I felt like, what I was wearing, the smell of the school. It works my mind and tires me out. Then I find myself drifting into sleep.”26

  This seemingly trivial anecdote struck at the heart of what made Madonna not only a superstar but the defining spirit of mainstream America’s erotic redefinitions: not her beguiling if admittedly thin voice or her highly trained dancer’s body, but her steely, highly utilitarian imagination. Beginning in 1983, when she became the first major star of the music video age, and well into the 1990s, Madonna embodied the nation’s quest for new paths toward sexual freedom. As AIDS became a devastating fact of life for millions and the Reagan administration continued to “just say no” to civil liberties conservatives found sinful, Madonna created a spectacular music universe where female pleasure and self-determination ruled. She came to stand for a style of liberal, sex-positive feminism that was less idealistic and openly radical than 1970s women’s liberation but better served the tastes of women entering the corporate sphere or trying to bring awareness into their otherwise conventional marriages. She championed a multicultural vision of the erotic, grounded in her own experiences with lovers and close friends of color. And though Madonna herself identified as
heterosexual with only an occasional queer roving eye, she helped bring the sensibilities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities into the light. Madonna did all this within a swirl of controversy arising from her insistence on having the final say about which fantasies her songs and image would sell to the public—and how they would do so.

  Madonna’s waking dreams ranged from reenactments of Marilyn Monroe’s movies to a solo dance, broadcast nationally on the new cable network MTV, depicting a bride having an orgasm. They offered hints of bondage and other unconventional sexual practices that became full-fledged explorations as Madonna’s fame and power increased. In the first years of her career, she was labeled a slut and a tart by social conservatives and dismissed as vapid by many (mostly male) music writers. Madonna nonetheless rapidly found her public: gay men and teenage girls, two demographics whose own erotic explorations had long represented risk and impropriety, and young adult women, who saw in her blend of independence and glamorous femininity a way to move beyond the incomplete transformations of the sexual revolution. Each of these groups found their own forms of solace and inspiration in the dream worlds Madonna and her collaborators constructed in songs, dance-based live performances, and a new form, the music video, which now had its own television network, MTV.

  Born Madonna Louise Cicconne in Bay City, Michigan, in 1958, Madonna willed herself into being as a singularly named, voraciously ambitious young adult. Though she had peers, including fellow MTV favorites Cyndi Lauper and Debbie Harry, Madonna’s aura of utter self-sufficiency—some would say selfishness—made her unusual among female stars in the 1980s, if not wholly unprecedented among women in American pop. Most women in the rock and soul era emerged either within bands or as part of tight-knit communities; few presented themselves as the instruments of their own destinies with the force and clarity that Madonna did. Aretha Franklin was tethered to the church and to her powerful father; Janis Joplin first found success with her Big Brother brothers. Joni Mitchell stood out in the 1970s as a chronicler of female independence, yet spent her early years intimately collaborating with (and struggling to not be overshadowed by) lovers like Graham Nash and James Taylor. Whitney Houston, the biggest female R&B star of the 1980s, had a very visible mentor in Arista Records chief Clive Davis. In punk, the band was the basic unit and few solo artists emerged at all, while the divas of disco were nearly always associated with their male producers. Outliers like Nina Simone, a jazz artist who hadn’t yet been reclaimed by younger generations as the High Priestess of Soul, and Kate Bush, who was forging a highly unusual path within art rock but remained obscure beyond her native England, had little influence on the general presumption that in popular music, women did not stand alone.

  Not so Madonna. From the beginning of her rapid rise from New York club kid to megastar, she presented herself as singular and self-directed. An assertive teenager who felt like a misfit, Madonna had begun her artistic life as a dancer, mentored by her teacher, Christopher Flynn, who would take her to black and gay clubs after ballet class. “Just as Madonna’s adult self was emerging at the age of sixteen, she found a gay man to make sense of her world,” her biographer Lucy O’Brien writes. In dance class, Madonna learned how to manage time and take calculated risks with her body. In the clubs, she discovered how dancers’ erotic display could signal their desires to potential partners or provide satisfaction in and of itself. At Menjo’s, Detroit’s flashiest gay nightspot, Madonna would sip soda and dance to Earth, Wind & Fire, reveling in the room’s amoeba energy while always keeping her wits about her, assessing how she fit in.27

  Madonna absorbed the look and energy of punk, ripping the leotards she’d wear to class and reassembling them with safety pins. Arriving in New York in 1978, she split her time among dance classes, discos, and punk clubs. In a mid-1980s interview with her friend, the actor Harry Dean Stanton, she would cite early punk-pop pioneers Debbie Harry and Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, who sang openly about their own sexual adventures and desires, as among her chief inspirations. “They gave me courage,” she said.28 They also gave her a vocal style. If dancing helped her learn musical structure—to “understand musicality and rhythm and coordination,” as she told Stanton—and the mostly African American sounds she heard in dance clubs informed her ideas about emotiveness, punk and its more commercial cousin New Wave helped her structure the aggressiveness that had been a defining personality trait since her childhood.

  Demos of her early band, first called Breakfast Club, then Emmy and the Emmys, show Madonna trying on the punk techniques of vocal overdrive and word distortion in songs like “On the Ground” and “Burning Up.” (The latter, transformed into a club track, became one of her first hits.) She namechecked R&B singers like Patrice Rushen (also a major early influence on Madonna’s male counterpart, Prince) as inspiration for the demos she shopped to clubs, but punk’s impulsiveness continued to play into Madonna’s vocal approach. This was the sound of a young woman trying out what singing is like, having fun “like a kid on a carnival ride,” as an early review put it, and seemingly not noticing who’s listening. A childish sound, rapidly coming into new knowledge. Young women, especially, could relate.29

  Madonna’s female fans cherished her self-presentation as a modern “material girl” who also felt the pull of old-fashioned romance, if not the values of monogamy and the subservience attached to them. As she aimed for fame, the singer polished up her look to be less punk and more Betty Boop, in a comical reappropriation of classic glamour that was also popular among New Wave artists like Lauper. Her acting ambitions (her first featured role was in the 1985 screwball comedy Desperately Seeking Susan) cemented her connection to Hollywood, and several of her videos replayed classic romances like West Side Story and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Yet unlike Marilyn Monroe or Natalie Wood, who’d both died tragically, Madonna consistently projected a resilience that felt very conventionally male. She identified as much with gay men as with other women; like drag, her femininity was obviously constructed. And even as she mined many histories’ worth of erotic imagery, both in her self-presentation and in dance, Madonna retained the spontaneity she’d learned from punk. The constant interplay of masculine and feminine signals within her own performances offered a new kind of energy that was highly adaptable to different interpretations of sensuality and romance. At a time when earlier erotic models were failing, Madonna presented a way to dance through the landmines.

  “When sexual freedom was tried out on a large scale, many women began to discover that it created a whole new set of problems,” wrote Erica Jong, whose 1973 soft-core pornographic novel Fear of Flying had helped take that revolution to the masses, in a 1986 op-ed entitled “Women and the Fear of AIDS.” “There didn’t seem to be much freedom in waking up in bed with someone with whom you didn’t want to share breakfast.” Once the great advocate of the commitment-free “zipless fuck,” Jong found herself harboring cautious hope that fear of AIDS might cause people to “make sex a little more mysterious and precious again.” Such sentiments revealed a certain blinkered callousness among white heterosexuals, far less at risk (Jong did acknowledge) than gay men or people of color. Yet with so little still known about the syndrome, AIDS anxiety remained very real for everyone in the mid-1980s, compounded by new heterosexual scares about less lethal STDs such as herpes.30

  If the fear of sex was rising among those who once welcomed freer mores, among moral conservatives it began to reach a fever pitch. The religious right was not a new force in American politics, but it surged, a strange mirror to the video fantasy realm of MTV, as televangelists such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell raged against sensuality on their daily cable broadcasts. Falwell founded the Moral Majority political action committee in 1979, then found a partner in the Reagan administration. Reagan’s attacks on social services were grounded in demonizing the poor, especially African American and Latino “welfare queens” who allegedly became pregnant as teens to gain a federally funded free rid
e. Abstinence-only education grew in popularity among conservatives, reviving the Cold War–era notion that unwed sex threatened national security by dissipating the futures of the nation’s youngest citizens. “Babies having babies” became the catchwords for young female lives squandered. Gay men and teenage girls found themselves in a strange (and mostly metaphorical) alliance as the demonized figures of a values-driven backlash that viewed their sexual lives as sick and potentially catastrophic for the whole nation. While many popular musicians stood up against the religious right, only one managed to embody both the resilient joy of gay life and the eager sense of exploration teenage girls inevitably still embraced—Madonna, the woman whose hits spoke in nonjudgmental ways about “physical attraction” and “going over the borderline” and even, in “Papa Don’t Preach,” teen pregnancy.

  “She is living out our fantasies,” a sixteen-year-old “Madonna wannabe” told Los Angeles Times music writer Robert Hilburn at a 1985 concert. “She’s able to be something that our parents would never let us get away with . . . that whole ‘slut’ image. I’d never really want to be like that, but it’s fun seeing someone else do it on stage. It’s usually just the guys who get a chance to do that.” Madonna played up her own girlishness to appeal to these fans, but she also sent them a message serving her original community of artists and bohemians, one highly populated by gay men. Recalling a youth spent going to gay clubs in her native Michigan, she explained to a reporter the awakening she felt in those thrilling environments, her “introduction to glamour and sophistication”: “Men were going crazy and doing poppers,” she said. “They were all dressed really well and were more free about themselves than all the blockhead football players I met in high school.”31