Continuing to add to some historic professional moments this year (not least of which was her “spontaneous” live show in Times Square), Madonna has now graced the cover of Interview magazine for the eleventh time. And for this iteration of her cover story, she appears as “Dee Dee,” a woman who has apparently been shoved to the ground by the “evil,” almost paparazzi-like forces (or “vultures,” if you prefer) that surround her. A bold move if for no other reason than it opens her up to the possibility of someone making a “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” meme about her. After all, the internet did worse when she fell onstage at the 2015 BRIT Awards (not because of “age,” but because of a wardrobe malfunction related to her cape). Not least of which was Photoshopping (remember when Photoshop was the thing before AI-generated shit?) her onto one of those “stair chairs” meant to assist the elderly up a staircase so they don’t have to exert themselves.
Anyway, “Dee Dee.” Yet another “persona” Madonna wanted to create for her “art” (a.k.a. magazine photoshoot). As she also did with Steven Klein for her version of “Marilyn Monroe” for a 2021 V magazine cover. In fact, it was during that shoot that Madonna came up with the lines, “I can be whoever I wanna be. Create a new persona. A different identity.” Lines that would find their way into the lead single from Confessions II, “I Feel So Free.” Even though the “persona” here doesn’t truly feel different from many of the others she’s created over the years. It just happens that this one is a bit of a composite of “Dita” from her Erotica era (not merely because of the similar sound of “Dee Dee”) and the woman she was playing on the cover of Vanity Fair in 2005 when still acting as the “English countryside wife” of Guy Ritchie (complete with feeding the chickens). Not to mention a composite of most of the “concepts” photographer Nadia Lee Cohen has come up with in recent years, photographing everyone from Kim Kardashian to Lana Del Rey in her often too-similar looking shoots.
Which brings one to the fact that, in terms of Madonna selecting Cohen for the task of documenting her “cosplay,” it just seems to further prove the longstanding belief that the Queen of Pop is no longer a trailblazer so much as a trail-follower when it comes to the people she collaborates with (and yes, many have traced this to 2008, when she tapped Timbaland, Justin Timberlake and Pharrell Williams to produce Hard Candy). Maybe that’s part of why, despite the attempt to look “avant-garde” and “innovative,” this is one of Madonna’s least envelope-pushing shoots in recent memory (and even when she was being “banal” by playing the “country missus,” it was innovative because no one had ever seen her play it so tame before, save, perhaps for on the cover of Good Housekeeping in 2000). So perhaps, in some subconscious way of making up for that, Madonna chose to drop a few casual bombshells throughout the interview (in the spirit of her daughter, Lourdes, casually reminding that Timothée Chalamet was her first boyfriend).
And it all starts with addressing a blunt truth about why her biopic ended up in development hell at Universal. Indeed, this is how the interview starts, with Madonna explaining,
“I was supposed to make a movie about my life. I worked on my script for two years and spent two years at Universal Studios with the line producers doing budgeting and casting. We had a falling out, me and Universal, regarding budget because I needed—I’ve had an extraordinary life. I’ve had a huge life, so I needed a big budget… They couldn’t get their heads around it. I found a way to make it for less money in Serbia, but I don’t think they were into the idea of—I don’t know. Maybe they just didn’t believe in me. One of their first reactions was, ‘We don’t believe you’d stay in Serbia more than four days.’ And I said, ‘Did you read the script?’ My whole life has been survival. I’m not going there for a holiday. But anyway, I was in limbo when that fell apart, and then Netflix reached out to make a series. That was a whole other long process, because I couldn’t use the script I had with Universal unless I bought it from them for an extortionist’s price, even though I wrote it. Don’t ask.”
Especially since that tea-spilling alone was already plenty of truth-telling. Of the sort that Hollywood really doesn’t like. Perhaps that’s why Madonna then pivots to talking about “old school New York” things, as is often her wont in the years since she started getting more comfortable with “looking back.” In fact, she had to get into the “looking back” mindset while working on the script for her biopic, for as she told her worshipful interviewer, Mel Ottenberg, “I’ve been writing about my past ever since I started writing my script. The Celebration Tour was a retrospective of my entire music career. I feel like my brain is tuned into memory and how it’s all connected and where it has brought me. The past is such an important part of my life—not to dwell in, but to learn from and share with other people.”
To that point, among the other bombshells dropped was that there was a bit more to the lore surrounding how Madonna got Mark Kamins, a big kahuna DJ at Danceteria, to play her demo tape featuring “Everybody.” Oh sure, there was still the fact that she was extremely flirtatious with him in order to “get it done.” But, evidently, there was even more Machiavellian manipulation on Madonna’s part than previously known. Manipulation she was finally ready to reveal to Ottenberg when she confessed, “…eventually I ended up in a bathroom with Mark Kamins, and I saw him snorting coke. He’s dead now. I can say that.” Having seen him with said coke, Madonna formed an idea, recalling, “I started putting two and two together and I was like, ‘Okay, he likes this, he likes that’… So anyway, I brought him some coke in the bathroom, took him in the stalls, me and Debi.” Ottenberg then nudges her to admit that she obviously had to do a bump as well, to which Madonna confirms, “Of course, but it hurt my throat. And I was like, ‘This isn’t a good idea for a singer. I want to have a job more than I want to have fun right now.’ So anyway, we made out, we did a little blow and then he agreed to listen to my demo.”
But getting him to listen to it was only step one in Madonna’s “I’m going to be somebody” quest. She still had to then get him to play it at the right moment and for the right person. Who happened to be Michael Rosenblatt from Sire showing up at the club one night. Or, as Madonna remembers, “One night, Michael Rosenblatt from Sire Records was there and he was in the DJ booth—I could go in the DJ booth now because [me and Mark had] swapped saliva… I convinced him to play my cassette tape. Those days you could play a cassette tape as part of a DJ rig… When he started mixing his set, he mixed it into a song.” And the rest, as they say, is history. For that was really the moment when Madonna (along with Kamins and Rosenblatt) realized that the crowd actually did like her music. Could “vibe” to it as if it were a totally seamless part of the rest of the set. Because, even for as much confidence as she projected, there was likely still some part of her that needed to see an audience reaction to truly know if she had “it.”
In talking about this “two roads diverged in a wood” kind of scenario—for one path would have led to Madonna remaining unknown—there are moments when “Dee Dee” looks like the woman Madonna might have been if she actually had stayed in (or been forced to go back to) the Midwest and gotten married with the intention of starting a “traditional” family. So it is that she tells Ottenberg of the shoot, “I got to live out my housewife fantasies.” Which 1) she already did when tried to embody “Mrs. Ritchie,” the English missus and 2) those “fantasies” look more like the kind of nightmare Betty Friedan was referring to in The Feminine Mystique. Yet, in spite of the staid attire (speaking to Madonna’s quote in the interview, “Now I don’t want to be naked because everyone’s naked”), M still refers to “Dee Dee” as a “good-time girl.” Though that description hardly helps to shift the perception of a depressed-looking Dee Dee knocking back a beer (with Madonna apparently in a mood to suck on bottles lately in the same way she did for Truth or Dare) in a 70s-styled abode (burnt orange carpeting included).
Somewhere past this image, there comes another bomb-dropping in the interview where Madonna freely admits, “Well, I have a bad knee now. I have no cartilage in it, thanks to dancing for so long in high heels and running on pavement and doing Ashtanga yoga. Up until a year ago, I was jumping on trampolines and doing dance cardio and doing a lot of what a doctor would call loading on my joints. Can’t do that anymore.” For Madonna to concede to this is, of course, a very big deal. For she’s always prided herself on her physical prowess (see also: the fifteen jump squats she was doing almost every night in 2001 at the age of forty-two/forty-three). Not only that, but also on never really addressing anything that too overtly calls her out as being “old.” For, as she herself once said at the 2016 Billboard Women in Music Awards, “To age is a sin” in Hollywood, and most especially as a woman in pop music.
The other thing that’s “sinful” as an ordinary woman is to “flip flop” around. To flit about from place to place and make different lives for oneself depending on her fancy. Thus, yet another bomba Madonna chucks into the interview is that she’s officially absconded from her “beloved” NYC. At least for now, telling Ottenberg, “…I never stay anywhere more than three years. I get sick of it. After COVID, I went to New York. Now I’m in London. I like to move all the time. I have to figure out the schools. I have to find out what I’m going to do with my time. Who am I going to work with? Who’s my community? Constantly staying out of my comfort zone and not sinking into comfort keeps me feeling alive. I’m like a gypsy.” So it is that she refers back to her “I Don’t Search I Find” lyric, “It’s our gypsy blood/We live between life and death/Waiting to move on” (Tommy Shelby might call that appropriation, but oh well).
But maybe the most glorious “bombshell” of all is Madonna saying, soon after the topic of moving around a lot comes up, “New York’s kind of boring right now.” Thank fucking God she, even with her rose-colored glasses about the city and the required budget to make it fun, can at last see that. Then again, she’s said things “against” it before (e.g., “New York is not the exciting place it used to be”). And of course she’ll inevitably be back. For the only bombshell bigger than Madonna “talking shit” about Carrie Bradshaw’s man would be the notion that she could actually stay away from it permanently.
As for Dita’s connection to Dee Dee, well, based on the images, which also include a fair amount of dubious randos peppered in, it seems that both women are keen to fulfill whatever fantasy those who happen to be in their orbit would like. And, in the end, isn’t that what being a pop star itself is all about?
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