5 months ago
"This song is brilliant; it may be the best political pop song of the past twenty five years. This may seem counterintuitive; here's a reason or two: if it's truly pop, the politics should not stand out, just totally be there; if you hear a message it's protest not pop. This song gets this: the girl, the shallow blond, becomes emblematic of the world at large, or at-least the USA, and its materialism; one can't dismiss the girl as vapid etc because in fact she's ground zero for where some of the world is totally at--to dismiss her is to dismiss real politics. Put colloquially: Bitch (finger points at dude), you think I mean nothing but I'm really at the very pulse of what your world means."
On a different, but related, note: I love the word-play happening in the title "Like a Virgin"--which, too, is a great song; isn't a Madonna a virgin mother? So like a virgin like a virgin mother--lol.
OK, back to MG: I like the video--apparently it's the official one: M on a staggered/stair-like stage, in a long pink dress, with lots of cute guys in suits--but think this would extend the politics wonderfully:
M is overseeing an assembly-line chute chockfull of packages containing man dolls, and tossing the packages with damage...and scrutinizing how they should be displayed at toy stores....and doing other things clearly linking male bodies to Capitalist profit. As it stands in the video, M is still a consumer--but she doesn't control the means of production. With my fantasy version, girl does have this control. Hmm, and then to play with cultural cliché of girl on stage being "bid for," we could have male execs fight to bid to buy her man-doll company! My acedimazation of this song feels like such a no-brainer to me, so hopefully someone, or manyone, has made a version of this hypothetical video.
