Local thinkers | Lucas Prud’homme-Rheault: again Madonna

I liked it. Reading this dissertation on Madonna transformed into an essay, written feverishly and in admiration, but also in practical erudition and criticism, I found a new, rich and playful voice. It is the fiery pen of a young author, who seemed almost surprised that I had called him to tell him about his book, a new essayist who chose to talk about an old pop singer. And not at all from the work of the great era, on the contrary, he writes about that of the last few years, to tell us in short: listen, look how great it is, still.

The book focuses on two relatively recent works of the kind that made conservative parents of my own generation cringe 30 years ago, namely the tour MDNA extension of 2012 and the short film secretprojectrevolution of 2013. It was in those years, I remember, that these speeches began to be heard in which it was said that Our Lady did not know how to age, that she held on, that she refused to step back gracefully.

It is to make everything wrong, if you read this book, which it would be wrong to open without having previously seen at least the short film in question, offered free online.

If there is a flaw in the work, it is precisely this: we should have inserted QR codes to clearly highlight the link between the text, the images and the sounds it analyses, so rich and thick, but a bit dry without YouTube turned on next to it.

References and contradictions

What happiness, however, to dig into the references scattered here and there in this tour and in this maturity film of the singer! Sometimes Wagner, sometimes Dante, but also Martin Luther King and James Baldwin, who enjoys quoting, digesting, making him. There is no shortage of feminist speeches about the singer, Despentes celebrates her, others denigrate her. And as a consequence of all this, as is well known, Madonna embraces the ideas of a pop version of Jewish Kabbalah, however rejected by the thing’s most official supporters, with which, in short, she affirms, not without flagrant contradiction, that she wants to erase her ego as much as possible from the his life.

These contradictions are as big as your arm, but it’s these tensions that make it interesting, the author argued at the end of the line, when I got the impression he was pacing, talking to me energetically about what kept him busy. school until the start of the pandemic, when he presented his thesis. It is not without contradictions, he knows, but at least it tries, as in this moment of the short film in which he allows himself a very embarrassing comparison of struggles, saying that feminist struggles are taken less seriously than racial struggles. We raise our eyebrows as we hear it, we’re forced to think anyway.

When I saw this book hit shelves this fall, I thought the “orchestrated decline” of its subtitle had a lot to say about the aging star system.

If there’s a decline, it’s not in Madonna’s diminishing importance, it’s rather that she knows how to descend to people, to reality, descend to hell if necessary, and then the ascent would be so spectacular.

“I would really like to write a book about Lady Gaga sometime,” Prud’homme-Rheault told me. And we will read it carefully, to understand how the art of quotation at the heart of Madonna’s work has become the quotation of the quotation in Lady Gaga, who with this process subverts the lover to instead swallow the swallowed.

For someone like me who would live under a rock: it is not the joy between the two singers, the godmother would not appreciate the healing on the part of the newly elected, but for the researcher of popular culture it is their symbolic confrontation that is interesting.

Touched, I left my copy of the book leaning against the counter of a Center-South bar on the outskirts of Montreal’s Village one Friday night, after reading a lengthy quote by Baldwin about the status of the artist who loves to cover Madonna. This is taken from a text titled The artist’s struggle for his integrity. Baldwin writes that “even if you spent 40 years raising this child, these children, none of it belongs to you. You can only have by giving up. You can only take if you are ready to give. And giving is not spending the day at the sales counter. It’s risking everything, yourself, everything you think you are.”

As I picked up the book again, I thought of this young author, who dedicates his book to his parents. He spoke to me a few times about their significance during our conversation two days later and their influence on his interest in popular culture. And I tell myself: none of this belongs to them.

Madonna: orchestrated decline

Lucas Prud’homme-Rheault

Varies

174 pages