I thought Madonna did pretty well in her performance at the Super Bowl halftime show.
Obviously, she was going to be subject to heavy criticism. She’s 53 now, the majority of the athletes on the field had no idea who she was and given the nature of how she’s framed her career, she was obliged to once again play the role of vibrant sex symbol. It’s a difficult situation in which to truly excel, I think.
Over the last three decades, Madonna’s success has had little to do with actual music and everything to do with dance, or rather the theatrical construction of persona choreographed around music. Her voice has always been kind of thin and irritating, her music girlish and immediate, the sort of thing you respond to rather than reflect within, and her performances rigidly controlled spectacles of camp grandeur.
How does an aging person exist within this milieu?
Well, in the entertainment industry, the first thing you do is refuse to age. Madonna, necessarily vampiric, fed off the blood of Nicki Minaj, M.I.A. and LMFAO, who all appeared on stage with her at various times. She looked mostly as she has for the last 30 years, although conspicuously more covered up now, and she gave a solid, professional performance that was vividly commercial, appealing familiar to aging Gen X’ers and well, not at all embarrassing.
Still, I found it kind of poignant. Madonna remains a relatively athletic and competent dancer, but her movements are little slower, a little softer and more practiced than when she was younger. She moved almost gingerly about the stage, careful not to fall or do anything that her body would no longer permit, and when one of her supporting dancers was holding her up as she did some sort of cartwheel thing (designed more to show she could do it than to add flash to the show) you could see in his face a kind of apprehension. He wasn’t interacting with a peer but with somebody’s mother, and he was careful to be gentle and sturdy, in short, to not drop her. The look on his face said that Madonna was no longer a viable sexual creature–she had passed through into a different realm, a realm from which there was no return.
As I watched her performing I found that my eye no longer fell naturally upon her. It used to be that when I saw her move I was sparked by an almost exhilarating sexual charisma. Everything she did was an aggressive seduction, the manifestation of her ever questing sexual vitality, but she seemed remote from that now and I couldn’t help but notice the youth and physical charisma of those who were supposed to be background players. And seeing that natural fact of aging, however cleverly disguised and professionally executed, rendered her vulnerable and watching her try so hard to be who she was– or who she thought we wanted her to be– rather than who she might now be, made me feel just a little bit sad.