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Mise à jour : Mardi 8 Août 2006, 13:48

le critikeur le 31.01.06 à 20:56 dans music news

Madonna N°3 avec VOGUE

Is it a subversive gesture—an "I told you" of sorts—that "Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister?" follows "Is Paris Burning?" in bell hooks's 1992 collection of essays Black Looks: Race and Representation? hooks may or may not understand Madonna but she definitely understood the sham of voguing. She wrote: "In many ways [Paris is Burning] was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, lie, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit." hooks's problem with Jennie Livingston and Madonna is the same: their "interest in, and appropriation of, black culture as yet another sign of their radical chic." For hooks, Armond White, or any person of color who struggles not to be seduced away from their race by what hooks describes as a "powerful colonizing whiteness," Madonna's appropriation of nonwhiteness isn't appreciative so much as fixative and fetishistic (see videos for "Secret" and "La Isla Bonita"). "I have the same goal I've had ever since I was a girl. I want to rule the world," Madonna once said. This bald-faced blond ambition helped her achieve worldwide pop domination but it's also what's earned her a legion of naysayers. Madonna has repeatedly mined the sacred turf of nonwhite culture for trends to incorporate into the spectacle of her perpetual reinvention. But let's give the bitch credit where credit is due. Power-hungry as she may be (or was, as her recent dance floor confessions would have us believe), Madonna is not stupid. "Vogue" may not be the greatest dance song of all time, but it's certainly the chintziest and brainiest of all. I'd argue that it understands the culture that spawned the ritualized play of voguing more critically than Paris is Burning, throwing shade at Livingston by liberally replicating the very same part of MFSB's "Love Is The Message" that appears in the film. At the very least, the song nails the complicated and contradictory messages of voguing. hooks says, "Livingston does not oppose the way hegemonic whiteness 'represents' blackness, but rather assumes an imperial overseeing position that is in no way progressive or counter-hegemonic." She might say the same thing about Madonna's song and video, which White decried in The City Sun in 1990 for the way "Madonna and her voguers are vamping for class approval." But that's exactly why voguers "pose": for social acceptance. "It makes no difference if you're black or white," belts Madonna; one could say she recognizes the Latino roots of voguing ignored by White and hooks. Madonna's dance floor, like the arena of the drag ball, has the atmosphere of a sports event, a place of social communion. The thrill of voguing for Black and Latino queens is trying to pass for white. Madonna understands this "racial pathology," to quote White, as a form of "going with the flow" compliance. "Beauty is where you find it," she sings, counteracting the self-denying fantasy voguing encourages—the song could be a precursor to Celeda's "Be Yourself." Madonna may find beauty in the Hollywood icons of the past but she understands the feelings of negation their stardom often disguised. Shep Pettibone, a white boy whose roots were in house and hip-hop, helps stress this idea with his gussied-up house beats; he and Madonna recognize voguing for the artifice that it is. This is a point White doesn't get when he criticizes Madonna's white-fixated roll-call of stars, forgetting that Rita Hayworth was born Margarita Carmen Cansino and that her superstar status in white-bread Hollywood was predicated on her ability to give good face. Ed Gonzalez

lecritikeur - 31.01.06 à 20:59 - # - -