Ruffian!!! Your man is checking out other chicks! I think you should kick his ass!
Oh, and I think Madonna is horrible as well.
Neither have I. So what? I hate it when celebrities get accolades for being able to handle the most basic aspects of life. I hate hearing about how much pressure they’re under. I hate hearing about how rough they have it. I hate the fact that they’re put up on pedestals when there are so many more deserving role models.
Sorry. This isn’t really about Madonna - I tend to just ignore her - so I’ll stop now. Sorry for the hijack.
Chalk me up as another person in the “Ma-who?” category. Hardworking? Big deal. Self-confident? Yawn. There’re thousands of women who fit that description. And there’re others who are hardworking, self-confident, yadda yadda yadda, who ALSO have a shred of talent… and aren’t as shallow as a puddle of horsepiss.
Rosie O’Donnell, I believe it was, said “The only thing Madonna will ever do like a virgin is have a baby in a stable”.
Sums it all up for me. Oddly, they’re friends now, I think, right?
There is that moment in the video “Papa don’t preach” where she’s wearing jeans and walking up stairs, and I have a brief moment where I’d like to give her a mustache ride to mars, but beyond that, Ma who?
b.
I always thought Madonna was enormously talented (I really like around 50% of her songs). She was market savvy and changes her image (slut -> biggerslut -> sex symbol-> businessmom -> etc) when its required; she is smart.
Ill tell you what disgusted me and made me change her mind though. She gave birth to her second kid and within two months she was back working hard on “Music?” instead of looking after her kid. Iam not saying that women should give up work after childbirth. Making an album and promoting it is a 24 hour job; its almost as if she just gave birth to change her image. That simply sickened me.
But then, feel free to disagree…
brief hijack
Oh, Monster, relax and quit picking on my hubby. 
I check out other chicks. I point out ample boobies to him if I see some bouncing by, and will even call him downstairs when there’s some interesting ones exposed on TV (most recently, Angeline Jolie’s in Gia). He’d have to be blind not to notice some well-endowed, minimally dressed chick as she jiggles by…just as he would have to be blind not to have noticed Madonna’s quite lovely pair. I’m not a jealous chick, especially not about something everyone notices–how can some women possibly expect a man NOT to notice? They’re BOOBS!
/brief hijack
You’re WAY too cool.
Anyway, ** Ruffian **, you make me proud to be a woman. I, too, often point out good looking women to my honey. Especially his favorite types. But then, my honey spends all day looking at naked women as his job, it would be pretty strange if I got upset about it.
stoid
I’m with ExTank on this one: she and her elevator-music songs don’t hold my interest sufficiently to feel a strong emotion toward her. (OTOH, her acting’s periodically had its moments, but even there, she’s no world-beater.)
You may think so, but I don’t.
To me, this seems to go back to this whole ‘X is a business’ routine, where X can be music, baseball, or whatever. Sure, they are all businesses, but they’re someone else’s businesses, not mine. I watch baseball because I enjoy the game, or because I root for a particular team, or whatever; I root for them as teams playing a competitive sport, not as businesses. And I listen to rock, pop, and anything else that sounds good because maybe it’ll capture a feeling, add a little bounce to my day, or occasionally even have a significant impact on my life - not because I care about who’s winning and who’s losing in the music biz.
I don’t have to respect Madonna any more for her success in clogging up the airwaves with teenybopper dippity-do-dah shit than I have to respect developer Til Hazel’s financial success in creating a good part of the detestable Northern Virginia suburban sprawl. He’s been ‘phenomenally hardworking, focused and self-confident’ too, and I wish he’d never been born.
I can think of lots of people with those attributes that have used them in all the wrong ways. They’re what one might call secondary virtues - whether they’re good or not depends on the goal they’re put in the service of.
So I can’t see one good reason why I should respect Madonna.
I’m a the Madonna Fence. On the one hand, I can’t stand her personally. I hate just about everything about her, from her morals (or lack thereof) to her constant self-promotion.
Ahem. However.
[sub]I really like a lot of her music![/sub]
:o
Really. It really stays with you - you can sing along, dance to it, whatever - it’s good. Some of it. Some of it sucks, though. And, as a singer myself, I will say that she has a better voice than a LOT of the so-called pop stars out there today. As far as her singing on “Truth or Dare” goes - and I haven’t seen it - in her defense, it IS really hard to maintain consistent vocal quality while you’re dancing, bopping about, and generally working out. YOU try singing on the treadmill sometime.
I’ve got to check in on the “I really don’t much care for Madonna” side of things. This has made life as a gay man tough for me, but I bear up well under these kinds of burdens.
I mean, how much talent can it really take to buy the rights to someone else’s songs, then do banal covers of them?
Give me Cat Power any day. Or Merrie Amsterberg. Or Edith Frost. But Madonna? Ew.
Madonna is a boring follower, not worthy of hate.
I watched that movie she made with Rupert whathisface the other night. Wooden performance.
Did anyone read that interview with of Madonna and Ali G? Hilarious.
Actually, I watched as much of it as I could stand when it was playing on the movie station. I thought maybe I could figure out what her appeal was. I couldn’t.
Well, has Madonna herself ever claimed to invent the trends that she seemed to start? Or was it in fact the media who gave her credit? I mean, it’s not her fault if the media and critics call her original because they don’t know the origin of the things she emulates. Is she supposed to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times each time and say “No, really, people were voguing long before I made a song about it!” or “I got the idea to wear old lacy underwear from a bunch of punks in Flatbush!” I agree that she mistakenly gets credit for a lot of originality, but I’m not sure that’s her fault.
As for no talent, you guys ought to hear ME sing. That, my dear fellow Dopers, is what no talent sounds like. She’s not without some abilities.
I love Madonna.
I love putting in the Immaculate Collection and dancing around in my room with a hairbrush as a microphone. I love the song Like A Prayer. I love the Ray of Light Album. And I thought she rocked in Evita, and I’m glad she got the necessary voice lessons to handle the part. She’s not the most beautiful woman in the world, but she’s made herself beautiful and kept herself that way through fanatical exercise and nutrition. She’s not the best vocalist in the world, so she’s hired people to help her train her voice so it can do what she wants it to do - B.F.D. - if you are going to sing professionally you SHOULD get voice lessons. She’s a talented dancer who has worked hard to become better and better. She is a PHENOMENAL performer, and by that I mean someone who gives 100% of herself to performing. There is nothing half-assed about her. She has borrowed many of the styles she has been credited with inventing. So what? Shakespeare stole every plot he ever wrote.
I won’t become the apologist for everything she’s ever done. She can be as inane and irritating as any other rock star in the public eye. Who cares? There are few entertainers who can match her devotion to craft, business sense, and work ethic.
You don’t have to like her. I feel about many popular and successful perfomers the way people in this thread feel about her.
But goddamnit, I like her.
yeah, but she’s better than Kevin “here I am shaking hands with Castro , golfing with Tiger, attending both political conventions, and calling JFK “Jack” as if I actually knew him while promoting my historically innacurate film about the Cuban missle crisis” Costner.
Now there is someone to hate.
Now THAT is a bandwagon I’m getting on! That man makes my skin crawl.
I’m with Stoid and djf750…Kevin Costner is one of the most abhorrent people in show business. His unbelieveable arrogance and flat-toned “acting” makes me hurl. I hope he winds up a waiter, so customers can torture him: “Hey SILVERADO! Hey MR. HOLLYWOOD! My soup’s cold!”
another slight hijack
Stoid, your website kicks ass. Those are gorgeous pictures–I called the hubby in to inspect, and we both just love how natural all the ladies are. Much, much more my tastes than the cheap-silicone-porn-star-look that’s prevalent on the web. Kudos!
/slight hijack
i have been obsessed with Madonna since I first heard her music. I love female singers as it is, and I do think Madonna is beautiful.
I have enjoyed almost all the music she has done. I still love “True Blue” as one of the best albums I’ve ever had the chance to listen to. I didn’t like much of “Bedtime Stories” though. Some of it was pretty good, but I could have done without the whole album.
I seem to remember reading in her album jackets that she writes all of her own music. Now, I only had her stuff on tape, and my tape collection is currently 10 hours away, so I guess I’ll need to go buy a CD now to find out. That probably changed for some of her recent work, but even on the old ones a song or two was co-wrote with another singer. “Love Song” with Prince, which was incredible IMO, and she did another with some other guy about family.
I think one thing is certain. She likes what she does, and what she does is make music. She likes her appearance, and uses her appearance to her advantage. She’s a god-damn marketing machine, complete with her own jingles. I love her for it, and she even had the good taste to have sex with Sean Penn. :eek:
So here’s a big HELL YEAH for Madonna. Eris bless her.
Incidentally, I hate Spears, and I fear she is going to be the “next Madonna.” Maybe its an age thing.
“That Britney Spears in no Madonna.”
My sainted mother said that, after being exposed to the extended version of the Britney Spears Pepsi commercial at the movie theater. And she’s right. I never cared for Madonna, but compared to the young Ms. Spears…well, it’s pretty clear who the real hack is. Not only is Brit-Brit utterly devoid of talent, she’s boring. I would normally make some joke about her possibly being computer generated, but that would be an insult to the far more charismatic Kyoko Date.