Great article from Josh Ackley at OUT.
Parts that resonated with me and my own experiences with her:
“For a lot of us, Madonna has never simply been a pop star, she has been a figure we associate with permission, with defiance, with the refusal to shrink when shrinking is what the culture is asking for.”
“That is why this announcement lands the way it does now. Not because people are waiting for a soundtrack, not because nostalgia is powerful, but because for many of us Madonna has been tied, across different moments in our lives, to the experience of being given permission when the world was asking us to disappear. She has been tied to survival, not in a dramatic or abstract sense, but in the daily sense of pushing through environments that were not built to accept us, of finding something to look up to when there was very little around us that reflected who we were.
There is also something else that is easy to forget if you reduce her to iconography or legacy, which is that Madonna is fun. Not in a trivial way, not as an escape from seriousness, but as a refusal to let seriousness become a cage. The joy, the sexuality, the humor, the excess, the theatricality, all of it has always been part of the same project as the defiance, part of the same insistence that life should not be reduced to something narrow or disciplined into something manageable for other people’s comfort.
So when she clears the slate and signals that something new is coming, something that reaches back to one of the last moments the world felt this tightly wound, people react. They stop. They pay attention. Because for those of us who have lived through her at different stages, who have needed what she offered at different points in our lives, it does not feel like a routine album cycle. It feels like the return of a force that has, more than once, made it possible to keep going.”
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