Pop culture is not for old people. The reason is, pop culture is not terribly sophisticated, so it is highly repetitive. When you are 15, it all seems new, because it is new to you. By the time you hit your 30’s, you have seen a few cycles of pop culture, so it is not new to you and it feels a little trite. It’s why old people listen to the music of their youth rather than the new stuff. It’s not that they are out of touch, but it all sounds the same. The difference is, those old songs remind them of their salad days.
In this age, many supposedly mature adults self-infantilize by obsessing over the latest shows, fads and causes. It’s a sad attempt to sound young and hip. Hearing a middle-aged man using ghetto slang on ESPN is creepy and weird. Seeing Jonah Goldberg write columns about TV shows is another example. Someone his age writing, at a supposedly serious publication, for an adult audience, should not be obsessing over TV shows like he is a lonely teenager. It’s just not normal, but here we are anyway.
That’s why most normal adults make jokes about Madonna’s pathetic attempts to remain current. It is sad and cringe inducing to see a 50 year old women spread her legs on TV for money. Madonna was never a very attractive women, even in her prime. She has an average body, a plain face and a ghostly complexion that borders on the creepy. As you see with Sarah Silverman, you can be too white. In her twenties, her act was vulgar, but in her 50’s her act is gross and bizarre.
The thing about Madonna is she was never really a risk taker. Instead, she aimed for the safe spot near the edge of respectable. She also ripped off her stage act from Wendy Williams. The scanty outfits, bullet bras and sexual antics were done first and better by the Plasmatics. Madonna took the act, stripped out the stuff that scared middle America and made a PG-13 act out of it. Throw in conventional pop ditties with a few allusions to acceptably breakable taboos and you have 1980’s Madonna.
Give her credit for figuring it out and selling it, but it was just conventional pop stuff with better marketing. In many respects, she did what Steve Speilberg figured out with action movies. In his case, the movie was just a long commercial for all the branded merchandise. It’s what Disney did with theme parks and cartoons. the real money was in the merchandise and branding. The other stuff was marketing expense.
As far as Madonna, she managed to hang around longer than most pop stars, primarily because she is a dedicated performer and sound business woman. The mid-90’s through the mid-00’s were not a good time, based on her chart hits, but she had a few songs in that decade. For the last decade she has been trying to find another way to claw back into relevance, but has mostly been the butt of jokes.
Even in these tame, sedate times, the kids are not interested in hearing a granny talk about her vagina. If she was really anything but a corporate product, she would be entering that stage where she could reminisce about her wild days, entertain her generation with stories of the good old days and maybe do a tour singing her old hits. That’s what real rebels do if they make it this far. Corporate shills have to dust off the old marketing plans and hope no one remembers them.