Ann Powers in "Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music”, 2017, wrote about the complexities and contradictions in the performances of Madonna. She says that in 1983 Madonna became a major star who embodies a movement toward sexual freedom. Powers claims that she “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…”. (266) While absorbing “the look and energy of punk.” (270). I attended Madonna's MDNA Tour, Seattle Key Arena 2012, which seems more Bessie Smith, and Riot Grrl than earlier Material Girl. Her performance incorporates the tensions within the politics of purity (Lecture, 5/13/2020) outrage and murder, sexual freedom and the right to protect her/female body with a gun, against the male entitlement right to rape. Madonna opens her first set with "Girl Gone Wild" holding a rifle and "breaks'' the glass of a confessional box, then "Revolver" with female dancers dancing with automatic rifles that harks back to Bessie Smith
Judge you want to hear my plea/Before you open up your court/But I don't want no sympathy/
'Cause I done cut my good man's throat/I caught him with a trifling Jane/I warned him 'bout before/
I had my knife and went insane/And the rest you ought to know/udge, judge, please mister judge/
Send me to the 'lectric chair/Judge, judge, good mister judge,/Let me go away from here/
I want to take a journey/To the devil down below/I done killed my manI want to reap just what I sow/
Oh judge, judge, lordy lordy judge/Send me to the 'lectric chair/Judge, judge, hear me judge/
Send me to the 'lectric chair/I love him so dear/ cut him with my barlow (?)/I kicked him in the side
I stood here laughing o'er him/While he wallowed around and died/Oh judge, judge, lordy judge/
Send me to the 'lectric chair/Judge, judge, sweet mister judge/Send me to the 'lectric chair/
Judge, judge, good kind judge/Burn me 'cause I don't care/I don't want no one good mayor
To go my bail/I don't want to spend no/Ninety-nine years in jail/So judge, judge, good kind judge
Send me to the 'lectric chair
Madonna's Performance is no less damming as she picks up her revolver in "Gang Bang" and shots male dancers circling the motel, blood everywhere
You have to die for me, baby
That's right, you have to die for me, baby
How could I move on with my life
If you didn't die for me, baby?
If you didn't die for me, baby?
I need you to die for me, baby!
Bang bang, shot you dead, shot my lover in the head
Bang bang, shot you dead, shot my lover in the head,
Now my lover is dead, and I have no regrets
He deserved it
And I'm going straight to hell
And I've got a lot of friends there
And if I see that bitch in hell
I'm gonna shoot him in the head again
Cause I wanna see him die
Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over
Madonna as a Riot Grrl (White, 129) confronts a rape culture that the Riot Girl embodied. With a performance of pure aggression she confronts cultural contradictions within and about women.
Some male critics argue that "Gang Bang" is not a "brutal sex romp", but
“Rather, the title is a misguided attempt to distinguish itself from Sixties pop classic Bang Bang, from which Madonna borrows the central image of murdering a paramour: “Bang bang, shot you dead / Shot my lover in the head”. Sparse and atmospheric, with a stripped back electro beat and low, drawing vocal, buoyed by bursts of sub-bass and developing into a solid techno groove, it's one of the album’s odder and most interesting tracks, only sullied by Madonna’s dedication to leaving no lyrical cliché unturned. She is a fish out of water, a bat out of hell, apparently. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopmusic/9127093/Madonnas-new-album-MDNA-track-by-track-review.html
While others such as critic suggest that her work has taken on more depth:
"There’s something remarkable about Madonna’s decision to share her suffering the way she once shared her pleasure. Her music has always been about liberation from oppression, but for the first time the oppression is internal ....."
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/mdna-203057/
Does this performance suggest rage, aggression or a commodification of resistance? There is no romanticism in her performance. It’s a loud aggressive protest calling out the contradiction of living in a misogynistic culture. A culture resisted through the music performances of Madonna, the Riot Grrls and Bessie Smith. I suggest that Madonna is as much a feminist in her 60’s as she was in her 20’s.
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