Where next for Madonna?

If the Sunday tabloids are to be believed, Madonna is in the midst of a full-blown meltdown that has been characterised by keeping audiences waiting for hours before she arrives on stage, swigging tequila during her concerts, calling her ex-husband a ‘son a bitch’, slurring her way through her sets, and latterly dressing up and performing as a clown. The general subtext of these headlines is the same one the tabloids have been spinning since the early nineties; that Madonna’s career is over and she’s in the last throws of her pop superstardom. Plus ça change, right? As one execrable article after another asks ‘At fifty-seven how long can the Material Girl keep going?’ Madonna fans the world over just roll their eyes and spur our girl on to defy the detractors who have maligned her career since the very start.

Without doubt it has been a challenging twelve months for Madonna; she had to rush release six songs from her upcoming Rebel Heart album after a deranged Israeli fan leaked all the demos from her recording sessions; the album went on to be the lowest selling of her career, failing to reach number one in both the UK and the US and selling only 650,000 copies to date; she was horribly yanked off the stage during a performance of her single, Living For Love, at the Brit awards; only one of her singles from the album charted in the US (Bitch I’m Madonna, at no.84) and only one in the top 40 in the UK (Living for Love, no.26); and she was horribly humiliated after that Drake kiss in which, let’s face it, he acted like a little bitch. Compare all this to when Madonna released her MDNA album in 2012 and celebrated thirty-years of being in the business – it was one of the high points of her career.

Aside from the professional difficulties Madonna has encountered, they don’t really compare to the personal difficulties she has experienced midway through her very lucrative and critically acclaimed Rebel Heart Tour. Madonna’s fifteen-year-old son, Rocco, jumped ship in December and went to live with his father, Guy Ritchie, leading to a bitter custody battle. Although the case is still playing out in the courts, it looks likely that Rocco will stay with his father in London, a fact which has apparently devastated the singer. The timing couldn’t have been worse for Madonna – contractually obliged to see her sell-out tour through to the end and ever the professional, she has to perform almost nightly while all of this has been happening (rather publicly) around her, leading to the singer crying on stage and posting pictures of her son to her Instagram account.

The tour will close on 20th March, I imagine much to Madonna’s relief, so that she can concentrate on dealing with the issues in her family. But fans have been left rather unsettled, largely because Madonna, in her own words, is a control freak and we aren’t used to seeing her dealing so publicly with her private heartache. In fact, it wasn’t until that infamous 1995 Primetime interview when Madonna revealed how lonely she felt and how her mother’s death affected her, that fans got a first glimpse behind the steely exterior. Madonna has certainly softened since she became a mother and released her critically acclaimed album, Ray of Light, in 1998 but seeing her ‘lose her shit’ so dramatically on stage is something we haven’t see before. Even from the crudest psychological reading we can conclude that the loss of her son and his subsequent (albeit temporary) rejection must have opened an old wound; the loss of her mother aged just 5 years old.

While the tabloids seem content on eviscerating her, Madonna’s fans only wish the best for her and hope that once her tour has concluded, she can take a significant chunk of time out to find some peace and start the process of healing with her son. Artistically, her recent ‘Tears of a Clown’ concert, a one woman show given as a special treat to lucky fans in Australia to apologise for cancelling one too many tour stops to the continent, has given us a glimpse of Madonna as we have never seen her before. Dressed quite literally as a vibrant, garish Pierrot the Clown (calling to mind Madonna’s most creatively successful tour, The Girlie Show) she sang a number of songs she has never performed live before (tellingly a number of songs from albums she recorded when she was with Ritchie) with jokes and anecdotal interludes. Her pain is quite obvious though – just look at her eyes as she sings ‘Paradise (Not For Me)’ for evidence.

With side projects like the X-STaTIC PRO=CeSS exhibition, the Secret Project Revolution film, and her similar one woman concert, Live at Paris Olympia, Madonna occasionally steps out of the mainstream to make fascinating and oblique comments about how she views fame or her long career as one of the most important cultural forces in the last thirty-five years. Having suffered so much sexism and ageism, it’s interesting that Madonna is drawn to the idea of the ‘clown’ – the happy/sad figure who must entertain and make us laugh but who pays a dear price emotionally. As she sang in front of huge screens with images of her son, there is no doubt that Madonna is in great pain but the way she is channelling it into her performance is fascinating. It’s rather tacky and pre-emptive to wonder how this emotional upheaval might affect her artistic output in the future, but after the lacklustre Rebel Heart album, one wonders if her art will be the better for it. Ever unpredictable, I guess we will have to wait and see what she does next….