'Bow Down': Why Madonna Remains in Vogue
The Queen of Pop cements her legacy at Coachella, while her contemporaries Prince and Michael Jackson are also in the news
No one likes having their things stolen — least of all world-famous pop stars.
But Madonna, who made a triumphant surprise appearance at Coachella over the weekend only for the vintage costume she wore on stage to go missing, should probably embrace the apparent theft as a sign of her enduring cultural relevance, 43 years after the release of her debut album.
If people are stealing your looks — literally or figuratively — it means they still care.
The Queen of Pop turned up on Friday night during Sabrina Carpenter’s set at Coachella, the annual music festival/influencer gathering in the Southern California desert. The stars — born four decades apart but sharing a cheeky, sex-positive sensibility — teamed up to perform two of Madonna’s most enduring bangers, “Vogue” and “Like a Prayer,” as well as a new song “I Feel so Free,” from her forthcoming album, Confessions II.
Even if the iPhone-wielding zombies in the crowd couldn’t be bothered to just let go and freaking dance dance dance, the intergenerational collaboration was both a thrilling acknowledgement of Madonna’s profound influence on today’s female pop stars, and a vivid reminder of her remarkable longevity. (She first performed at Coachella 20 years ago in support of Confessions on a Dance Floor, the disco-influenced album many Madonna-heads consider her crowning achievement.)
In a career spanning five decades, the habitual provocateur has never been afraid to drive people crazy, whether it’s the Pope, George W. Bush, or executives at Pepsi. But as a sixty-seven-year-old woman and mother of six, Madonna’s most subversive act may be her insistence on sticking around.
Madonna’s continued ability to shape the culture is particularly remarkable when one considers the tragic fate of many of her contemporaries. The Coachella appearance kicked off a week when the Holy Trinity of ‘80s pop stars — Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Prince — are all in the news, though for vastly different reasons. Tuesday marked the 10th anniversary of Prince’s death from a fentanyl overdose, a grim milestone that his estate commemorated by releasing the demo of “With This Tear,” a song he wrote for Celine Dion. For fans desperate for material from Prince’s storied “vault,” it was a welcome development.
Friday also brings the release of Michael, a sanitized Jackson biopic that was produced by his estate and does not address the child molestation allegations against the late singer. Critics have called it a “ghoulish, soulless cash grab,” yet Michael is quite likely to make a ton of money at the box office, such is the power of Jackson’s fandom (and their collective denial). The film is part of a multi-pronged effort to rehabilitate Jackson’s image and make money off his music.
Madonna, Prince, and Jackson defined the Golden Age of MTV and ascended to international stardom because they understood that the images they cultivated were as important as they music they performed. All three were born within a few months of each other in 1958, and grew up in religious households in the Midwest — experiences that shaped their art and fueled their work ethic. But the connections run deeper than demographics. Prince and Madonna briefly dated circa 1985, and collaborated on the Like a Prayer album (Prince co-wrote the duet “Love Song” and played the guitar intro on the title track). Their relationship grew more strained in the ‘90s, and for years they publicly lobbed insults at each other — but made up by 2011.
Madonna never recorded music with Jackson, but she did bring him as her date to the Oscars in 1991 — the year she did a Marilyn Monroe-inspired performance of “Sooner or Later.” (If she was trying to steal attention from her ex, Warren Beatty, it worked.) During her Celebration tour in 2023 and 2024, Madonna paid tribute to both artists in a way that asserted her place alongside them in the pantheon of pop music greats.
Prince and Jackson are now gone — as are George Michael, Whitney Houston, and too many of Madonna’s peers, while the legal entities that control their assets are also furiously trying to control their legacies.
As chronicled in this excellent piece in The New York Times Magazine, Jackson’s death in 2009 enabled a posthumous comeback that probably would have been impossible had he kept living and behaving in bizarre, possibly criminal ways. By the time he died from an overdose of sedatives administered by his personal physician (who was later found guilty of involuntary manslaughter), Jackson’s public image was arguably lower than it had ever been. The once-beloved star’s reputation was hopelessly damaged by numerous child molestation allegations, a decade-plus of erratic behavior, and disastrous interviews. Jackson died while preparing for a concert residency he hoped would pave the way for a comeback.
Instead, his estate orchestrated his return to good graces, releasing a hit concert film This Is It and producing a successful Broadway musical about his life. The 2019 docuseries Leaving Neverland, which follows two young men who claim they were groomed and sexually abused by Jackson as children, convinced many viewers that the Thriller superstar was, in fact, a predator.
His estate sued to get it permanently pulled from HBO Max in 2024.
It has since been hard at work on Michael, which underwent extensive reshoots to remove any mention of the child sexual abuse allegations. Directed by Antoine Fuqua, the film ends in 1988, when Jackson was still primarily known as a dazzling generational talent and not a baby-dangling weirdo, and is a clear attempt to crystallize a younger, less problematic version of MJ in the public imagination. (Anyone interested in a biographical portrait of Jackson that recognizes his musical genius while fully considering the allegations against him should instead listen to the podcast Think Twice: Michael Jackson.)
Prince died in 2016, seven years after Jackson. His passing came as a greater shock, as he was known for maintaining a healthy lifestyle — abstaining from booze, cigarettes, and even meat. In private, however, he was struggling with opioid addiction. Fans longing for insight into Prince’s art or his mercurial personality will not be getting that from his estate, which has been zealous about rehabilitating his legacy. It managed to kill a Netflix docuseries directed by Ezra Edelman (O.J.: Made in America), which featured extensive footage from the artist’s personal archive. The nine-hour series, which Edelman spent nearly five years making and was called a “cursed masterpiece” by the New York Times, delved into the artist’s many contradictions, highlighting both his unrivaled musical gifts and his darker personal life, including allegations of physical and mental abuse. It is unlikely the public will ever see the film.
Years after her contemporaries left us, Madonna continues the shape-shifting that has defined her career she’s been doing since she was an East Village scenester dating Jean-Michel Basquiat. She’s tried her hand at acting and directing. She’s rebranded as an enlightened earth mother, a radical revolutionary, an English gentlewoman, and a disco diva. She’s done truly remarkable things, like raising awareness about AIDS at a time when the disease was rampantly stigmatized. And she’s also done things that even her most ardent supporters — cough-cough — would consider cringeworthy. (Seriously, enough with the grills.) She is not above risking to burnish her own legacy. Back in 2023, Madonna was planning to direct a biopic about herself. As of last year, she was working on a biographical limited series with filmmaker Shawn Levy. (Can we get a dishy memoir instead?)
Unlike Prince’s admirers and Jackson’s most feverish stans, Madonna’s have the privilege of grappling with their hero’s complexities in real time.
Consider one semi-recent example: In 2023, she showed up at the Grammys with a visibly puffy face, likely the result of a cosmetic procedure gone awry, and was dragged across the internet for the mortal sin of trying to look younger. (Of course, had she shown up looking like an actual sixty-four-year-old, she would have gotten dragged too.)
Madonna responded with her typical brash defiance.
“I look forward to many more years of subversive behavior — pushing boundaries [and] standing up to the patriarchy — and most of all enjoying my life,” she said. “Bow down, bitches!”
We’re all bowing now.
Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian