Express Yourself
The last time I saw Madonna was on September 6th, 1989, during the live telecast of the MTV Video Music Awards. I was in my parents basement with my mother. That was the night I had my final glimpse of Madonna-The-Human. It was glorious.
I had waited all week for this peek at her, and my anxious eyes were rewarded instantly when she opened the show. There was no monologue, no drawn-out opening: a few seconds of an introduction by Richard Wilkins of MTV Australia, and the curtain raised on the tiny woman herself.
Since then, I think, I’ve only seen what she wanted me to see: Madonna-The-Artist. A person as performance, where even the smiles and the jokes are calculated, her elocution sometimes labored, her steps athletic and practiced.
In 1989, Madonna was 31 and I was 12. Most of my memory-making life had been full of her. Glued to MTV, I was on board from day one. What I saw when I saw her was a powerful, smart, overwhelming woman. A woman who always looked good, and never looked like anyone else, at least not anyone I had ever seen before. What she said and did mattered greatly to me. My life sometimes seemed to be marked into chapters by her appearances on television: short interviews on MTV, lip-syncings on American Bandstand, epic shows on the MTV VMA stage. The release of a record required weeks of study and hundreds of listens. I had to sneak in hours of television watching to catch a music video, still at the mercy of programmers and parents but willing to risk it all for her.
I didn’t analyze what I was seeing. I didn’t calculate what percentage of what I saw was calculated and what percentage was actual evidence of humanity, reactions, flubs. I didn’t know what a virgin was in 1984, but I caught her vibe: I, too wanted to go to Venice and hang out on a gondola with a guy dressed as a lion, who then transformed into an actual lion. Cool? Yes. So cool. I was happily a sponge, my ignorant brain sucking down powerful — but vague — representations of womanhood, sexuality, and religion. My experience of her was adoring, visual, and uncritical.
But in September of 1989, on a Wednesday (school) night, even I knew I was seeing something special. Madonna performed “Express Yourself,” and though we can all see this performance whenever we want because YouTube exists, let me tell you what I saw. I saw the most powerful woman in the world, behind the lifting curtain, in an ill-fitting man’s suit. The pants were baggy, the shoulder pads on the jacket too large, and she was wearing what looked like men’s wingtips shoes. Her hair, short but obviously in a growing out phase, seemed to be its natural state: a little bushy, a little curly, a little frizzy. Though she wore red lipstick and her skin was glowing, she looked…natural. She was wearing a watch. When she removed the jacket midway through the performance, there was a bustier. For whatever reason, I thought: “She is wearing her own clothes.”
As she moved down the little staircase onto the main stage, the steps magically lit up as her feet touched them, and she joined her two backup singers, dressed nearly identically to her. What followed was essentially a preview of what was to come: the choreography was almost the same as the opening of the “Blond Ambition” tour, which launched six months later in Japan. But this performance was different from those that followed. Months later, Jean Paul Gaultier had clearly honed the presentation. Her choreography matched up with the gist of the song: power, power, power. But that night in early September she smiled and moved fluidly, and her smiles seemed so very genuine. The performance was light, it was playful. She did the Running Man. She was not lip-synching. By the time she got to her world tour seven months later, the whole operation was dramatically streamlined: her movements from show to show were almost indistinguishable from one another, robotically and impressively fear-inducing. And they were, really, the same moves from that night just a few months earlier, but everything was different.
Madonna, in April of 1990, was a bonafide icon with “Vogue” under her belt, and she hadn’t waited for someone else to give her the title: she had taken it for herself, lining herself up with Greta Garbo and Marilyn Monroe. But in September of 1989, she hadn’t recorded “Vogue” yet, though she clearly had written it, because there on the stage of the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles, near the end of her performance, she vogued. It was brief but unmistakable: she framed her face, she flexed her muscles. I didn’t know what I was looking at, but I was sure as fuck going to try it at home.
What I saw that night was a turning point for Madonna-the-artist, and though I didn’t know it then, it was literally a turning point for Madonna-the human: eight days later her marriage to Sean Penn ended. I’d listened to the lyrics on her latest album Like a Prayer just like everyone else: her marriage was an abusive one. But she had somehow emerged from that experience, and all of the media coverage that came with it, victorious, glowing and inspired. She seemed aware of her power, but human enough to not take herself too seriously.
And this was the last time, really, that I saw actual vulnerability in her. Later displays, I think, such as the ones on Ray of Light, spawned by the birth of her first child, are, if you really look at them, at their core, a performance of vulnerability. Not fake vulnerability, but a vulnerability given to us from a distance. A vulnerability which cannot hurt the vulnerable. Madonna-The-Artist has been since around 1990, untouchable. She has seemed to be keeping her real self almost wholly private. And that’s been just fine! Admirable, even, to me, a dedicated, adoring fangirl since 1983.
Two weeks ago in Montreal, Madonna kicked off her 9th world tour (her first tour, in 1985, was U.S-only). It’s been nearly 20 years since I followed her career very closely. The first review I read of the performance — in the New York Daily News — ran with the headline “Madonna seemed to be happy at last during upbeat ‘Rebel Heart’ tour opener.” The review goes on to say that Madonna, basically, couldn’t stop smiling all night. That she “couldn’t stop having a blast,” and that it’s her “lightest road show to date.” “Never a warm live performer,” Jim Farber writes, “Madonna tends to grimace through her concerts, stressing athleticism and discipline over all.” I agree with Jim. Madonna isn’t the warmest live performer. But she was, once, in September of 1989. And if she is again, well, then I’m on board.
Of course, maybe nothing changed. Maybe Madonna is or isn’t real or unreal. Maybe it’s all been calculated since 1983, or maybe it’s all been fly by night, spur of the moment creativity. Maybe what changed is me: in 1989 I was 12, on the cusp of becoming a teenager. I wasn’t cynical yet, but I would be soon. Maybe when I saw her flex her muscles, and thought I was seeing her humanity for the last time, I was really just seeing myself.
Laura June is a writer.
Video edited by Ryan Manning.