But remember--you're not your mother, or her mother, or her mother. You know things, you have awareness, they didn't have. Their fate is not your fate.
Josh, I’ll tell you even more, I almost (almost) turned my parents away in 2019 because of how much I disliked President Trump and everything and everyone who wasn’t in the democult. I didn’t wake up from my coma until 2020. It was bad. I still apologize to my parents.
I remember the original episode about this and your review with the friend you went to the concert with (George?). I never thought I'd say or think this about Madonna, but: poor thing. That is all. Show is over, say goodbye.
The one concert in which she was chained to a rail presumably so not to fall. She like many others famous and not so famous, both men and women can’t accept reality. So they pretend it’s still 1989. Her time and place have no pass. Now she’s just sad and pathetic.
Not the first to observe this; but, yes, you do have a way with words. Not joking when I say that I could imagine myself being there.
Sorry you ended up disappointed; probably just an inevitable part of growing up. The only song of hers I personally enjoy listening to is Papa Don’t Preach. I do think she has a nice voice, but, oh God, how she wasted that talent.
Madonna in her prime was an artistic tour de force. It's sad to see her become a caricature of the artist she was then.
It makes me appreciate even more Grace Slick's essential wisdom in knowing when it was time to take the final bow and exit the stage. Because she stepped away at a decent time, her timeless classics such as "White Rabbit" and "Somebody To Love" remain with us unspoiled by later excess.
Beautifully said and I agree. With age, hopefully, can come grace, self respect and authenticity and that can be more beautiful than anxiety and fear, running after the elusive golden ring. Grace and self respect allow us in getting older to adjust to truly who we are and what we can do well and presenting ourselves authentically not as “a caricature” of some lost or wasted youth and past time.
(I love Grace Slicks’ more recent interviews! An intelligent and real woman)
A young woman I worked with once asked why I didn't try to color and cover the grey in my beard. I told her "I earned every one of these white whiskers! I'm not covering any of it ever!"
And as an older woman I find grey and white, salt and pepper in a beard attractive. The point isn’t to color the hair to look younger it is to take care and respect ourselves and adjust to and appreciate our changes. And the authenticity is more attractive than the alternatives. Such as women with fat lips, botoxed so much there is no emotion left on the face, leaving the eyes wide open and blank. Or seeing sagging crepey skin everywhere but dressing 50 years younger and hair colored like a 20 year old and see them turn around. Caricature or cartoon? It’s sad. And I pray every day that I am accepting of all my changes because it is what made me who I am today and I’m happy for that.
Having a cluster b mother is an exercise in watching someone dig their own grave over time.
There are parts of me who feel so terrible that she just keeps getting worse and worse – this was a reminder that that’s just what these people do and it’s out of my hands.
They just stew in their own delusions and become more and more aggressive and distorted and strange. Thank you for this reminder.
Wow so similar! Three in my family too. She’s 84. Alone. It’s a terrible disease, one of the worst, most untreatable, mental health illnesses. A disorder in one’s capacity to love.
Cluster B is all the same. Every single one of them, every family.
I say this gently, not as a gotcha, but it's important to me. This is not a "disease." It's not "medical." It's moral. Not physical, not somatic, not "it's a disability", not "she can't help it." It's *not a disease like diabetes*.
It's corrupted morality. If we can't grasp it that way, we'll have so many problems.
I'm not accusing you personally of "doing something wrong," please know. But the more we talk about "disease," the more these people and their enablers tell us that they're the actual victims, they're the "sufferers," and it just continues helping them evade responsibility for abusing their families.
I love what you write and feel every angle on this horrific human scourge is important.
We all have something to offer to help each other GET AWAY FROM rabid humans, whether they’re frothing at the mouth, lunging at us, because they’re so damaged themselves from trauma they can’t do better (as I see it) or because they’re so damaged morally that they have no access to any compass of right human behavior and interpersonal boundaries.
The fact that they do sometimes manage to keep their rage and aggression under control when the incentives are just right is certainly evidence for your interpretation.
My bff and I decided about 15 years ago that if we were going to see her, we wanted front row or closer, damn the cost. It's worth it. It's a thrill to see a superstar a few feet away, and worth every penny. So the last four or five shows we've had seats in rows 1 or four at the furthest.
I think my favorite show was the MDNA tour in 2012 (I didn't get to see Blonde Ambition, her pinnacle, nor Confessions, to my disappointment). The opening number, Girl Gone Wild, was un-fucking-believable. I'll link it below. We were right there under the swinging church censers and saw the whole thing up close. She was maybe 6 feet away for most of it.
She looked beautiful, and sounded fantastic. It was one of those intricately choreographed numbers where you could tell she was counting beats to hit dance steps--she's so perfectionist.
The Sticky and Sweet Tour was also great--we saw it two nights in a row. On the first night, we were screaming out to her backup band members, and then to her as she went down the catwalk. She looked directly at me and smiled. It was a wonderful thrill.
I wish I had a bff like you back then. All I needed was for one person to say fuck it we're getting front row seats and I would have gone all in. The only show I saw was Blonde Ambition. I still have my T-shirt.
That video was — WOW. I kept imagining her now, watching all her old shows and videos, just sitting there weeping fat tears over her crazy old face. Poor girl.
I took my wife to Tina Turner on one of her last tours. I was expecting something like this, but no, it was amazing. It's probably the best birthday gift I ever gave her, as she still talks about it to her friends and the fantastic seats I found-- that sort of thing makes marriages last.
Madonna is and always has been crass (cluster b, matrix, red pill or not), but if we’re going to cancel all ageing women trying to survive in show biz—which remains as ruthlessly ageist now as it was at its early onset—then it’s time to say goodbye to the likes of Nicole Kidman, Demi Moore, Naomi Campbell, and countless others too. These women, like Madonna, are navigating an industry that fetishises youth and punishes the natural process of ageing, particularly for women. Show biz doesn’t just dislike ageing women—it despises them, scrutinizing every wrinkle, every sag, every sign of time’s passage with a glee that borders on sadistic. Yet Madonna stands out as the one who refuses to bow to that pressure, flipping the bird to the rules while others either fade away or conform.
Contrast her with other ‘80s icons like Cyndi Lauper, who rode the crest of a wave of enormous popularity only to find themselves abandoned by the fickle winds of fashion when times moved on. Most artists from that era either couldn’t or wouldn’t reinvent themselves—perhaps lacking the stamina, the resources, or the sheer audacity to keep fighting an industry that discards women the moment they’re deemed “past their prime.” Madonna, though? She’s kept her audience, not by ageing “gracefully” (whatever that means in a culture obsessed with Botox and filters), but by refusing to let the conversation about her be reduced to her skin’s elasticity. Is that survival down to talent, narcissism, or just a thicker skin than most? Maybe all three. But it’s telling that we don’t demand the same relentless evolution from ageing male stars—Bono, Dave Gahan,Mick Jagger, and Bruce Springsteen can shamble onstage with gray hair and crow’s feet, and we call it “iconic.”
Our society keeps clinging to the same ageist double standard: men get distinguished, women get discarded. Madonna’s refusal to play nice—to smooth out her edges, literal and figurative—makes her a lightning rod for criticism, but it also exposes the game for what it is. Show biz hasn’t changed; it’s still a machine that chews up women and spits them out the second they’re no longer ingénues. And we, the audience, fuel it. We mock Madonna’s latest reinvention while praising Robert Downey Jr.’s umpteenth comeback. We clutch our pearls at her “crassness” but shrug when aging male celebs date women half their age. We get the celebrities we deserve because we’re the ones setting the rules—then punishing the players who dare to break them.
Blame the game, not the player. Madonna’s not the problem; she’s the symptom. If we want better, we’d better start asking why Nicole Kidman’s latest face-lift or Ozempic addiction gets more headlines than her performances, or why Demi Moore’s body is still the story when she’s pushing 60. Until we stop obsessing over youth and start valuing women for their craft over their crow’s feet, Madonna will keep thumbing her nose at us—and we’ll keep proving her point.
Nah. Madonna bought into the idea that a woman’s power is in her ability to be sexually attractive and young looking. If it’s a game, she’s trying to win it. But nobody fools Mother Nature forever.
At the time of her emergence, I was a Mohawk wearing punk artist steeped in nihilistic hardcore music. I was creating poster and album art for local punk bands and managing my ex-husband's band affairs, including booking their gigs.
To my jaded eyes, she was just another attention junkie, out to grab the corporate bucks, and was thoroughly mocked as a cheap sensationalist, by my peers. Oh, the irony.
Despite all my efforts to reject my religious past, I think it was my Catholic imprinting still clocking in the first time I saw her videos, I was angered. She touched on some very sensitive taboos that I was dealing with myself.
As much as I pushed against that programming, I still couldn't shake the idea that she was blaspheming and mocking God in her performances. As much as I thought I was rebelling against that religiosity and the old social norms, it was Madonnas flagrant middle finger displays that made me rethink my own notions about morality and personal responsibility in a wider context.
Watching her now, just reminds me of what can happen to a person when they continue to indulge those baser emotions rather than take accountability for their actions and mature.
This is slightly off-topic but I recently discovered this interesting YouTuber called "Wings of Pegasus". He does vocal analyses of singers, a lot of it compares pre-technology greats to modern tech-processed vocals. Apparently hardly any voice you hear these days is live or unaltered by pitch correction.
I finally saw precisely why the greats were actually so great, the Orbisons & Garlands. Really worth checking out.
I’m not going to lie—I’ve shed real tears over this. It had to happen, but it’s not pleasant.
I know, oh, I do.
But remember--you're not your mother, or her mother, or her mother. You know things, you have awareness, they didn't have. Their fate is not your fate.
Completely unsurprising.
Gawd this was a delicious read and I am part of the tribe of liberal minds that stepped out of the matrix. This is so relatable. 🎯🧠
Like me, I bet you never thought you'd think what you think today.
Josh, I’ll tell you even more, I almost (almost) turned my parents away in 2019 because of how much I disliked President Trump and everything and everyone who wasn’t in the democult. I didn’t wake up from my coma until 2020. It was bad. I still apologize to my parents.
I remember the original episode about this and your review with the friend you went to the concert with (George?). I never thought I'd say or think this about Madonna, but: poor thing. That is all. Show is over, say goodbye.
The one concert in which she was chained to a rail presumably so not to fall. She like many others famous and not so famous, both men and women can’t accept reality. So they pretend it’s still 1989. Her time and place have no pass. Now she’s just sad and pathetic.
Self-awareness is a beautiful thing
Not the first to observe this; but, yes, you do have a way with words. Not joking when I say that I could imagine myself being there.
Sorry you ended up disappointed; probably just an inevitable part of growing up. The only song of hers I personally enjoy listening to is Papa Don’t Preach. I do think she has a nice voice, but, oh God, how she wasted that talent.
It’s funny because I never liked the aggressive Madonna. I never thought females should be like her.
Cyndi Lauper, was my favorite. She was actually cute. Non-aggressive and funny.
Madonna in her prime was an artistic tour de force. It's sad to see her become a caricature of the artist she was then.
It makes me appreciate even more Grace Slick's essential wisdom in knowing when it was time to take the final bow and exit the stage. Because she stepped away at a decent time, her timeless classics such as "White Rabbit" and "Somebody To Love" remain with us unspoiled by later excess.
Beautifully said and I agree. With age, hopefully, can come grace, self respect and authenticity and that can be more beautiful than anxiety and fear, running after the elusive golden ring. Grace and self respect allow us in getting older to adjust to truly who we are and what we can do well and presenting ourselves authentically not as “a caricature” of some lost or wasted youth and past time.
(I love Grace Slicks’ more recent interviews! An intelligent and real woman)
A young woman I worked with once asked why I didn't try to color and cover the grey in my beard. I told her "I earned every one of these white whiskers! I'm not covering any of it ever!"
And as an older woman I find grey and white, salt and pepper in a beard attractive. The point isn’t to color the hair to look younger it is to take care and respect ourselves and adjust to and appreciate our changes. And the authenticity is more attractive than the alternatives. Such as women with fat lips, botoxed so much there is no emotion left on the face, leaving the eyes wide open and blank. Or seeing sagging crepey skin everywhere but dressing 50 years younger and hair colored like a 20 year old and see them turn around. Caricature or cartoon? It’s sad. And I pray every day that I am accepting of all my changes because it is what made me who I am today and I’m happy for that.
Having a cluster b mother is an exercise in watching someone dig their own grave over time.
There are parts of me who feel so terrible that she just keeps getting worse and worse – this was a reminder that that’s just what these people do and it’s out of my hands.
They just stew in their own delusions and become more and more aggressive and distorted and strange. Thank you for this reminder.
Yes. But it is also to watch her try to dig *your* grave, too. That's why I had to push her permanently out.
Oh yes sir!!
They will indeed try to claw you into the ground with everything they’ve got if you let them. I’ve been no contact for seven years.
I’ve watched from afar (through my siblings).
But now even that watching will end, as she has finally alienated them so badly, they refuse to talk to her.
I’m sad for her, but I feel that it is for the best in terms of their mental health.
Eight years for me now. And the same result. None of us three children speak to her. No one in the family, not even her sisters, will speak to her.
70 years old and alone, having alienated and punished every single person in her life who loved her. She threw it away.
And now she may lie in the bed she made for herself.
Wow so similar! Three in my family too. She’s 84. Alone. It’s a terrible disease, one of the worst, most untreatable, mental health illnesses. A disorder in one’s capacity to love.
Cluster B is all the same. Every single one of them, every family.
I say this gently, not as a gotcha, but it's important to me. This is not a "disease." It's not "medical." It's moral. Not physical, not somatic, not "it's a disability", not "she can't help it." It's *not a disease like diabetes*.
It's corrupted morality. If we can't grasp it that way, we'll have so many problems.
I'm not accusing you personally of "doing something wrong," please know. But the more we talk about "disease," the more these people and their enablers tell us that they're the actual victims, they're the "sufferers," and it just continues helping them evade responsibility for abusing their families.
An illness. Not a disease, indeed.
Took me 60 years to figure it out.
Parents divorced after almost 30 years. 2 of three kids no longer freely communicate with the cluster-b person.
I straight-armed what I had been seeing for decades, until I snapped.
It still bruises my heart, but I now see that the damage extends back at least 3 generations.
I will no longer cooperate or subject the family I co-created to this miasm
It breaks my heart
I love what you write and feel every angle on this horrific human scourge is important.
We all have something to offer to help each other GET AWAY FROM rabid humans, whether they’re frothing at the mouth, lunging at us, because they’re so damaged themselves from trauma they can’t do better (as I see it) or because they’re so damaged morally that they have no access to any compass of right human behavior and interpersonal boundaries.
The fact that they do sometimes manage to keep their rage and aggression under control when the incentives are just right is certainly evidence for your interpretation.
You saw her 8 times? What was your favorite show? Loved this essay.
Hard to pick!
My bff and I decided about 15 years ago that if we were going to see her, we wanted front row or closer, damn the cost. It's worth it. It's a thrill to see a superstar a few feet away, and worth every penny. So the last four or five shows we've had seats in rows 1 or four at the furthest.
I think my favorite show was the MDNA tour in 2012 (I didn't get to see Blonde Ambition, her pinnacle, nor Confessions, to my disappointment). The opening number, Girl Gone Wild, was un-fucking-believable. I'll link it below. We were right there under the swinging church censers and saw the whole thing up close. She was maybe 6 feet away for most of it.
She looked beautiful, and sounded fantastic. It was one of those intricately choreographed numbers where you could tell she was counting beats to hit dance steps--she's so perfectionist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozRE7Nxk7lw
The Sticky and Sweet Tour was also great--we saw it two nights in a row. On the first night, we were screaming out to her backup band members, and then to her as she went down the catwalk. She looked directly at me and smiled. It was a wonderful thrill.
I wish I had a bff like you back then. All I needed was for one person to say fuck it we're getting front row seats and I would have gone all in. The only show I saw was Blonde Ambition. I still have my T-shirt.
That video was — WOW. I kept imagining her now, watching all her old shows and videos, just sitting there weeping fat tears over her crazy old face. Poor girl.
I took my wife to Tina Turner on one of her last tours. I was expecting something like this, but no, it was amazing. It's probably the best birthday gift I ever gave her, as she still talks about it to her friends and the fantastic seats I found-- that sort of thing makes marriages last.
Madonna is and always has been crass (cluster b, matrix, red pill or not), but if we’re going to cancel all ageing women trying to survive in show biz—which remains as ruthlessly ageist now as it was at its early onset—then it’s time to say goodbye to the likes of Nicole Kidman, Demi Moore, Naomi Campbell, and countless others too. These women, like Madonna, are navigating an industry that fetishises youth and punishes the natural process of ageing, particularly for women. Show biz doesn’t just dislike ageing women—it despises them, scrutinizing every wrinkle, every sag, every sign of time’s passage with a glee that borders on sadistic. Yet Madonna stands out as the one who refuses to bow to that pressure, flipping the bird to the rules while others either fade away or conform.
Contrast her with other ‘80s icons like Cyndi Lauper, who rode the crest of a wave of enormous popularity only to find themselves abandoned by the fickle winds of fashion when times moved on. Most artists from that era either couldn’t or wouldn’t reinvent themselves—perhaps lacking the stamina, the resources, or the sheer audacity to keep fighting an industry that discards women the moment they’re deemed “past their prime.” Madonna, though? She’s kept her audience, not by ageing “gracefully” (whatever that means in a culture obsessed with Botox and filters), but by refusing to let the conversation about her be reduced to her skin’s elasticity. Is that survival down to talent, narcissism, or just a thicker skin than most? Maybe all three. But it’s telling that we don’t demand the same relentless evolution from ageing male stars—Bono, Dave Gahan,Mick Jagger, and Bruce Springsteen can shamble onstage with gray hair and crow’s feet, and we call it “iconic.”
Our society keeps clinging to the same ageist double standard: men get distinguished, women get discarded. Madonna’s refusal to play nice—to smooth out her edges, literal and figurative—makes her a lightning rod for criticism, but it also exposes the game for what it is. Show biz hasn’t changed; it’s still a machine that chews up women and spits them out the second they’re no longer ingénues. And we, the audience, fuel it. We mock Madonna’s latest reinvention while praising Robert Downey Jr.’s umpteenth comeback. We clutch our pearls at her “crassness” but shrug when aging male celebs date women half their age. We get the celebrities we deserve because we’re the ones setting the rules—then punishing the players who dare to break them.
Blame the game, not the player. Madonna’s not the problem; she’s the symptom. If we want better, we’d better start asking why Nicole Kidman’s latest face-lift or Ozempic addiction gets more headlines than her performances, or why Demi Moore’s body is still the story when she’s pushing 60. Until we stop obsessing over youth and start valuing women for their craft over their crow’s feet, Madonna will keep thumbing her nose at us—and we’ll keep proving her point.
Insightful comment. Bravo
Nah. Madonna bought into the idea that a woman’s power is in her ability to be sexually attractive and young looking. If it’s a game, she’s trying to win it. But nobody fools Mother Nature forever.
At the time of her emergence, I was a Mohawk wearing punk artist steeped in nihilistic hardcore music. I was creating poster and album art for local punk bands and managing my ex-husband's band affairs, including booking their gigs.
To my jaded eyes, she was just another attention junkie, out to grab the corporate bucks, and was thoroughly mocked as a cheap sensationalist, by my peers. Oh, the irony.
Despite all my efforts to reject my religious past, I think it was my Catholic imprinting still clocking in the first time I saw her videos, I was angered. She touched on some very sensitive taboos that I was dealing with myself.
As much as I pushed against that programming, I still couldn't shake the idea that she was blaspheming and mocking God in her performances. As much as I thought I was rebelling against that religiosity and the old social norms, it was Madonnas flagrant middle finger displays that made me rethink my own notions about morality and personal responsibility in a wider context.
Watching her now, just reminds me of what can happen to a person when they continue to indulge those baser emotions rather than take accountability for their actions and mature.
This is slightly off-topic but I recently discovered this interesting YouTuber called "Wings of Pegasus". He does vocal analyses of singers, a lot of it compares pre-technology greats to modern tech-processed vocals. Apparently hardly any voice you hear these days is live or unaltered by pitch correction.
I finally saw precisely why the greats were actually so great, the Orbisons & Garlands. Really worth checking out.
Josh, you had me at “Madonna Dearest!” 😊💜