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LATE
afternoon Monday saw me making a detour from picking out
very expensive clothes for an upcoming fashion shoot, to
Music One in Glorietta 3. I came to buy one CD and one
CD only: no, not Janet Jackson’s Discipline, nor
Mariah Carey’s E=MC2, but Madonna’s Hard Candy,
which hit the shelves of music stores worldwide on April
28, a day earlier than its US debut. With CD in hand, it
took me an enormous amount of willpower to not flake out
on the job at hand and just head home, fire up my
desktop PC, rip the album tracks straight to my portable
media player and spend the rest of the night on a sonic
loop.
Of
course, others in the media had the good fortune to take
Madonna’s new CD for a spin prior to its release. The
verdict so far? “The dance floor—not the pulpit, not the
art gallery—is Madonna’s truest home, and it’s a good
place to shake off pretensions and excesses. Her grand
statement on Hard Candy is nothing more than that
she’s still around and can still deliver neat,
calculated pop songs,” writes Jon Pareles in the New
York Times. In Entertainment Weekly, Chris Willman
writes, “Between the fountain-of-youth dalliances and
hookups with hip-hop kingpins, we know what you’re
thinking: Just how massive is this midlife crisis of
[Madonna’s]? Pretty major, probably, but she makes it
work with this surprisingly rejuvenated set.” And the
music bible Rolling Stone’s Caryn Ganz adds, “Madonna
can still scoff at wannabes half her age because she’s
stayed so flexible with her sound....Even when she
wrestles with [The Neptunes’ Pharrell Williams’s] abrupt
stylistic changes or lets herself get absorbed in a
[Justin] Timberlake melody, Madonna still finds her way
back on top. The atmospheric closing track, ‘Voices,’
poses the question, ‘Who is the master, who is the
slave?’ before its operatic wind-down ends in a dramatic
bell toll. The answer to both questions is still
Madonna.”
I can go
on and on about how difficult it is to shake off the
thoroughly infectious “4 Minutes,” the first single off
the album, from your head; or how “Candy Shop” has a
beat and a glistening, sexy chorus that will have you
going down and down and down; or how “Beat Goes On”
bobs, swings and sparkles as a dance-floor gem; or how
“Dance 2night” slinks and sways as perhaps one of the
most delicious and masterful pop-dance confections
Madonna has ever whipped up, which in a career marked by
some of the most memorable music in the last two decades
is saying a lot. But the cover of Madonna’s album—shot
by Steven Meisel, with Madge looking thoroughly fabulous
in thigh-high boots, couture wrestling ensemble, legs
spread apart, eyes mere slits that channel both an
invitation and a dare—does bother me. Or, specifically,
how the cover and the fact that Madonna is turning 50 in
August has spurred a display of misogyny-fueled ageism
in the media and among the public that is outrageous in
its utter viciousness.
“In case
you haven’t noticed, Madonna’s suspiciously wrinkle-free
mug has been splashed across magazine covers, television
screens and web sites for the past month or so,” begins
Amy O’Brian’s review of Hard Candy for the
Vancouver Sun. “Not many fortysomethings have a yoga
regimen like Madonna’s that would let them to get away
with such smoldering photos. Madonna’s chosen to groove
through the question of whether she’s past her sell-by
date on this midlife album. She doesn’t actually need a
forget-your-age cover to scream disco-diva dominance,”
writes Mark Beech for Bloomberg News.
Of
course, you don’t read this kind of snarky ageism when
music critics write about latest work of, say, Bruce
Springsteen or George Michael. Or from the public for
that matter. The articles that have appeared on news
sites and blogs about Hard Candy have been littered with
comments from readers that range from the juvenile (“eeewwww!”
on the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it peck on the lips that
Madonna gives to Justin Timberlake on the “4 Minutes”
music video) to the downright nasty (sex with Madonna
increasingly bordering on a fetish, or words to that
effect).
It’s a
bitch, indeed, to be 40 and beyond in a world stricken
with ageism; even more so if you’re a woman. Edu Manzano
can go on national television hawking vitamin
supplements as key to looking young—impossibly at
that—and feeling young, while people wonder if camera
filters were used on his former wife Vilma Santos for
her TV commercials. The comebacking Gabby Concepcion is
fawned over for looking as young as he did when he fled
the country more than a decade ago in the wake of a
scandal, while his estranged wife Sharon Cuneta
continues to find herself the recipient of nasty asides
about having “let herself go.”
The
worst part about this misogyny-fueled ageism is that
some of the worst offenders are women themselves.
Comments a certain Kirsty from Maidstone in the UK on
Madonna’s Hard Candy album cover on the web site
Digital Spy: “Horrible cover. a 49 yr old woman with her
legs spread? Yuk!! If I was her daughter I’d be
embarrassed!”
You have
to wonder who established this sell-by date for women,
that those into their late 30s or 40s should simply give
it up, forget about their sexuality and just jump
straight into virtual grannydom. No doubt it was some
man well into his 40s and in desperate need of
validation of his manhood by some nubile young thing.
You
would think given that misogyny—which often comes
couched in such pretty palatable concepts as social
propriety and whatnot—continues well after women’s
suffrage was established in the 1920s, women would rally
behind and cheer on their sisters who are flouting
male-established conventions that society has wielded
for decades to stamp down their spirits and keep them
subjugated.
That,
unfortunately, is not the reality. How sad that is. |
