Good Booty
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Having lost close friends (including her former roommate and style advisor, the artist Martin Burgoyne) to AIDS, Madonna championed awareness of the pandemic. In 1985, as a host on Saturday Night Live, she appeared in a skit lampooning straight people who feared they could contract the infection through skin-to-skin contact. She participated in AIDS fundraisers throughout the 1980s and recorded a safe-sex public service announcement in 1988. Her 1989 album Like a Prayer included an insert instructing readers about safe sex and declaring, “People with AIDS—regardless of their sexual orientation—deserve compassion and support, not violence and bigotry.” In 1992, on her multimedia foray into soft-core pornography—the album Erotica and the book Sex—she paid tribute to Burgoyne with the tender ballad “In This Life.” The song concluded with Madonna quietly intoning, “Someday I pray it will end. I hope it’s in this lifetime.”
Madonna offered those affected by AIDS—anyone sexually active in the 1980s—a gift: she cleared a space where eroticism could run free. That space was in the mind. She established this safe zone in the video for her breakthrough hit, “Lucky Star,” a simple clip of two performances, one solo and another accompanied by two other dancers, against a white background that looked like infinity. While the group shots establish Madonna’s athleticism and unique girlish androgyny, the images of the singer alone, gazing seductively but most of all knowingly at the unidentified recipient of her advances, are key; they make the viewer think of Madonna thinking, dreaming, feeling herself. The girl group–style lyrics—“you must be my lucky star, ’cos you shine on me wherever you are”—reinforce the message that Madonna can enjoy this love light without the physical presence of her lover, by imagining him (or her). It was the first of countless erotic performances where Madonna showed she needed only herself to be satisfied.32
Soon, this self-pleasuring power would become explicit and central to Madonna’s version of sexual liberation. Her 1984 performance at MTV’s first-ever Video Music Awards ceremony, in which a flowing but translucent wedding gown covered her white corset as she sang her latest love song, “Like a Virgin,” while gyrating across the floor, climaxed with a series of floor humps that were unmistakably onanistic. Masturbation was the centerpiece of her 1990 Blond Ambition Tour, in which she mounted a bed while singing the same song and, caressed by male dancers in conical bras, gestured herself to feigned climax. Her most famous video of the 1980s, for the gospel-inspired “Like a Prayer” (a song that seemed to many to be about oral sex, with its catchphrase, “I’m down on my knees, I wanna take you there”), was an elaborate and surreal sequence in which Madonna fantasized about carnal relations with a statue of St. Martin de Porres (the patron saint of mixed-race people, played by the actor Leon Robinson) come to life. By the time she embarked upon the Erotica/Sex project of 1992, preceded by the explicit (and banned from MTV) video for “Justify My Love,” Madonna was stating the obvious: “These are my fantasies,” she wrote in the introduction to Sex. “My fantasies take place in a perfect world, a world without AIDS.”33
Madonna’s safe-sex imaginary, as it evolved from the come-ons of “Lucky Star” to the interracial, polymorphously perverse bondage fantasies of Erotica/Sex, was much more redolent of music video than of Golden Age pornography. Everything is sleekly posed and informed by a dancer’s sense of telegraphed gestures. As the most significant superstar borne to greatness by MTV, Madonna’s aesthetic defined the network and, in many ways, the medium, at least until hip-hop and alternative rock became more prominent at the turn of the 1990s. More than the early New Wavers who preened and posed through their clips and the heavy metal stars who enthusiastically eyed strippers in theirs, Madonna was a fully realized subject and agent of this new form.
And what was music video? As its pioneering scholar, Andrew Goodwin, wrote, it was television made musical: “Television is made to succumb to new rhythms, in the pulses of rock, rap and dance music . . . [M]usic has invaded television as [much] as it is true that video has ‘taken over’ music.” In music video, the logic of the song, not of cinematic narrative, takes over. Conflict and resolution can occur simultaneously. The performer’s identity merges with that of the song’s main character, and the main “action” involves the viewer’s physical and emotional engagement with stimulating musical hooks, complemented by visual ones, instead of with an unfolding story line. Finally—and this is even more evident today, as youths grow up making their own video tributes and posting them on social media platforms like YouTube—music video encourages imitation, the living fan fiction of learning stars’ moves and styles by watching them on repeat. Ultimately, music video is a fantasy realm, creating a feeling of privacy in viewers and listeners who experience through these clips the nonlinear barrage of sensation they otherwise create in their own daydreams.34
It was the perfect form for an era whose great erotic metaphor was, by necessity of the epidemic, self-pleasuring. Music video was also a great foil for the moral arbiters of the religious right, whose desire to keep sex neatly within the bonds of marriage made the awakening of women, gay people, and the young a particularly vivid terror. The songs that video made popular, with their appeal to the erotic imagination, deeply disturbed many parents. In 1985, when the religious right found strange allies in the Congressional wives of the Parents Music Resource Center led by liberal Democrat Al Gore’s spouse Tipper, the view was firmly established that video made music a threat in children’s own homes—where they might, as moms say, get ideas. The PMRC’s most memorable battle was the attempt to label albums with “explicit content” stickers. According to Gore’s cofounder, Susan Baker, her seven-year-old daughter’s interest in Madonna’s song “Like a Virgin” inspired the censorious campaign.35
That’s one historical account; others credit Tipper Gore’s discovery that a song on the soundtrack to the film Purple Rain, “Darling Nikki,” included a line about its heroine “masturbating with a magazine.” That song was by Prince, Madonna’s chief rival, brief lover, and onetime collaborator in cultivating Reagan-era safe-sex outrageousness. Born Prince Rogers Nelson in Minneapolis the same year Madonna was born in Detroit, the African American multi-instrumentalist and songwriter was also inspired by Joni Mitchell, 1970s dance music, and, if not punk, New Wave. He released two albums in the late 1970s, but it was 1980’s Dirty Mind that established his winning persona. On the front cover, he wore an overcoat and black bikini underwear, while the back cover showed him lounging on a bed, revealing that he also wore thigh-high stockings. His glam look and his blend of rock hooks, funk rhythms, and synthesizers defied musical categorization and led New York Times critic Robert Palmer to ask, in 1981, “Is Prince Leading Music to a True Biracism?” Noting Prince’s isolation outside any musical milieu, Palmer also heard in his explicit but also often spiritually tinged lyrics the idea that “sexual liberation is both a political program and a religion.” In fact, like Madonna, Prince was most interested in cultivating a sexual utopia within his listeners’ minds and bodies.36
Simultaneously androgynous, worshipful of women, and boisterously heterosexual, Prince reconnected the dots between Little Richard and glam rock to enact a sly critique of heterosexuality. Like Led Zeppelin, he incorporated elements of pornography into his act.37 His trick was to rewrite porn’s story lines. Songs like “Little Red Corvette” and the notorious “Darling Nikki,” both released at the peak of his fame in the mid-1980s, recount sexual encounters in which women fully run the show. “I guess you could say she was a sex fiend,” Prince snarls appreciatively about the self-pleasuring exhibitionist he meets in a hotel lobby in the latter song. Throughout his music, Prince depicts himself as both pursuer and pursued, an experienced alpha male and a virginal, androgynous beta. His songs about more sustained relationships—“When You Were Mine,” which has Prince accepting a threesome with another man to please his lady, or “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” one of many fantasies in which he imagines himself as a woman’s soft and wet plaything—invoke a utopian ideal
in which a conventionally aggressive masculine principle and a receptive feminine one can be cultivated within one person. In Prince’s ideal couple, a man and a woman interchange roles with ease. When, in “Uptown,” Prince and a potential female lover each ask if the other is gay, both are recognizing an innate androgyny that disrupts the straight paradigm.
In a 2009 interview with Out magazine, Lisa Coleman, a keyboard player in Prince’s most notable band, the Revolution, called Prince “a fancy lesbian.” Her musical partner and former girlfriend, the guitarist Wendy Melvoin, corroborated the description: “He’s a girl, for sure, but he’s not gay. He looked at me like a gay woman would look at another woman.” She added, “It doesn’t matter what sexuality, gender you are. You’re in the room with him and he gives you that look and you’re like, ‘Okay, I’m done. It’s over.’” Dez Dickerson, also a guitarist for the Revolution, once said that Prince devised archetypes for each member of the band to embody. The bandleader’s was “pure sex. Those were his exact words.” Prince’s pure sex either transcended or preceded designations of gender or orientation, but it always released a feminine perfume.38
Prince imagined heterosexual love as a mirror in which the male reflects the original female. This was deeply appealing to female fans, especially. It reflected the artist’s comfort with his own feminine side and suggested that “women, not girls, rule my world,” as he sang in “Kiss.” Funk and glam rock had played at boys being girls; Prince played with the idea of putting the girls in charge. In Purple Rain, he pays homage to David Bowie with a scene that reflects his own nonbinary vision. During a nightclub performance by the Revolution, the menacing synth riff of the song “Computer Blue” fills the room. As the band plays, Melvoin, dressed and coiffed to identically resemble Prince, strides over and drops to her knees before him, miming fellatio on his guitar as she continues to play her own. It’s a clear reference to Bowie’s early 1970s habit of putting his mouth on Mick Ronson’s Gibson Les Paul during Spiders from Mars shows. “The total effect is unnerving,” the Purple Rain script reads. “Prince is going down on himself.” Is this an autoerotic moment, or one in which Prince reveals his true self as the “fancy lesbian” of Coleman’s description? Traces of the male homoeroticism of Bowie’s electric blow job remain in this scene of a lesbian woman who struts like a man servicing a man who looks like a woman. The signals blur until it becomes Prince’s ideal: pure sex.
Madonna employed image and voice to cultivate sexuality; Prince found equally strong tools in lyrics and instrumentation. His songs incorporate a multiplicity of styles and effects, overtake the senses, and make the stories he tells—of every taboo-breaking subject from transvestitism and oral sex to public masturbation and even sibling incest—clearly fantastic and even utopian. In an early interview revealing his porn roots, Prince made clear that his tall tales came strictly from within: “As far as the sexuality and explicitness goes, when I was a kid, the only books that I read were my mother’s pornography books. And when I got tired of reading them, I would write my own stories. That was at an early age and that sort of warped my mind.”39
This likely apocryphal origin story, told when Prince was twenty-one, reflects Prince’s love of blurring all kinds of categories—his particularly idealistic spin on mixing, the erotic underpinning of American popular music. By suggesting that his mother was the porn connoisseur in the family, he upended assumptions about the family structure and proper female desire. His songs did the same, voicing sexuality in vividly hued psychedelic language. Only highly deluded people could possibly view Prince’s fancies as posing as any kind of actual moral agenda; they’re outrageous, the stuff of play. Though in later years he himself became a Jehovah’s Witness and questioned the worth of his early material, Prince in the 1980s delighted in being the trickster the religious right loved to hate. The great film critic Pauline Kael recognized the service Prince provided in showing up the Moral Majority’s prudery: “I’m disposed to like Prince,” she wrote in her review of Purple Rain, “because he is, as a friend of mine put it, ‘the fulfillment of everything that people like Jerry Falwell say rock and roll will do to the youth of America.’”40
The third great star of the music-video era also dealt in fantasy, but was far less frank when it came to sexual expression. Michael Jackson, who eventually claimed the self-generated title of King of Pop in order to rival Madonna and Prince, was a child prodigy who grew up to be a prodigiously talented but troubled man. At the height of his stardom, in the 1980s, Jackson’s appeal crossed all boundaries, including moral ones. “Jackson, unlike Prince, appeals to the innocent child in all of us,” wrote one conservative commentator in 1984. “He keeps us in touch with our better selves.”41 Jackson was actually as much a fabulist as Prince and as much a provocateur as Madonna. His 1983 video for the song “Thriller,” the most popular and influential music video of all time, may have been inspired by a childlike sensibility—“everything that happened on ‘Thriller’ happened because Michael wanted to turn into a monster,” director John Landis said of the hugely elaborate thirteen-minute film, which cost a record $500,000 to produce—but within his Eden lurked the specter of erotic inner conflict. As great a dancer as pop has ever known, Jackson “exploded” in performance, often thrusting his pelvis in ways that seemed not just masturbatory but multiply orgasmic. In “Thriller,” desire transforms him into a beast—a werewolf, who stalks the pretty ingénue that human Michael simply wants to take to the movies. In his other great 1980s videos, for “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” and “Bad,” Jackson plays similar roles: whether noir gumshoe or gangland street fighter, he is always a hero driven into action by baser desires. Jackson’s eroticism was soaked in the sexual anxiety of the 1980s, presenting a potent, troubling counterpart to Prince’s antic utopianism and Madonna’s messages of self-love.
Madonna, Prince, and Michael Jackson remained pop household names into the 1990s, as the conservative presidencies of Reagan and his successor, George Herbert Walker Bush, gave way to the more liberal era of Bill Clinton. In the 2000s, each responded differently to the waning commercial success of their recordings, a seemingly inevitable reality for American pop stars over age forty.
Jackson became increasingly eccentric, modifying his appearance through plastic surgery and leading a semi-cloistered life, especially after he faced multiple accusations of child molestation from young men who had worked with him or served as companions as boys. Jackson died of a prescription drug overdose in 2009 while preparing for a comeback tour. His death was mourned by fans worldwide, and his artistic legacy remains indisputable despite the deeply troubling and still unresolved claims made against him. His sister Janet, also a favorite of the MTV age, upheld his memory and established her own way with musical erotica on albums like The Velvet Rope.
Prince transformed himself numerous times after his 1980s glory days. In an effort to wrest control of his music from his record label, Warner Bros., he changed his name to a “love symbol” in 1993—a combination of the alchemical symbols for male and female combined with a cross. This flamboyant iconography served Prince’s serious intention to produce as much music as humanly possible; his output never slowed, and his reputation as one of the most astounding live acts of the rock and soul era only grew. His fluid body did not prove immortal, however; after enduring years of chronic pain in the joints he’d destroyed executing backflips and floor drops on stages across the globe, Prince died of an overdose of painkillers in 2016.
As for Madonna, during her 2015 Rebel Heart Tour, the fifty-seven-year-old staged elaborate tableaux celebrating oral sex, queer sex, and sex on staircases, still declaring herself the queen of postmodern burlesque. Showing off a body honed by a strict exercise and diet regimen, she danced solo to “Like a Virgin” on a runway shaped like a cross. Her fans continued to rave at these displays—that tour was one of the top three grossing of the year—but others questioned her attempts to maintain the visage and body of a twenty-five-year-old as she ne
ared sixty. Celebrity branding consultant Jeetendr Sehdev, a professor at the University of Southern California, claimed to have conducted a survey of one thousand millennials and found that the youngest adult generation now found Madonna “toxic” and “irrelevant.”42 Having shown her own generation how erotic freedom might work even during a plague linked to sex, Madonna could not seem to escape the trap of America’s conventional attitudes about aging. Instead of using midlife as an opportunity to develop a new vision of mature sexuality, she still sought to be that material girl whose pleasure in feeling herself stimulated lust in others. That many found this stance implausible indicated that even Madonna’s dares had their limits when it came to redefining American eroticism.
Much has happened since Madonna first imagined herself a sex symbol. A new genre, hip-hop, came to dominate and change how music sounded and what it said. Rock fragmented into many different forms and reclaimed the mainstream for a brief and difficult moment. The generation coming of age during hip-hop’s rise and rock’s resurgence had grown up with AIDS, with the furious eye of the Moral Majority upon it. Their musical movements carried with them a spirit of reform, particularly in their most lauded and scorned manifestations: grunge and gangsta rap.
KOOL THINGS
On a summer day in 1989, Kim Gordon found herself sitting uncomfortably in a corner in a New York rehearsal studio, wondering what the man she was there to meet had in mind when he glanced toward her. The bassist and singer was used to being around sullen rock boys who didn’t always make things clear; playing in the art-punk band Sonic Youth, she’d been living around various kinds of obnoxious attitude for nearly a decade. But she hadn’t spent much time around rappers, the kingpins of another rapidly mutating musical form, hip-hop. She was a fan, had in fact borrowed from rap songs in her own music. But she would have been the first to admit that within this black-made-and-nurtured genre, she was an interloper. Someone at Spin thought it would be cute to put the thirty-seven-year-old Gordon in the ancient hot seat held by white observers who step into African American music making’s circle, so they’d sent her to interview LL Cool J, the nineteen-year-old rapper who was then considered by many to be the best (and by virtually all to be the sexiest) in the game, and who was one of Gordon’s favorites. But he was busy, keeping her waiting. “Occasionally he shoots a look my way,” she later wrote in the interview’s introduction. “I have no idea if he’s expecting me or he’s just looking at my out-of-place bleached blonde hair.”43