A well-meaning friend asked me on Facebook yesterday after I'd earnestly posted the 'Bitch I'm Madonna' video: "Do you actually like this?"
There was only one sensible way in which to respond: that if something has got a) Beyoncé in it; b) Madonna striding round a ridiculous party dressed in a pink leather jacket covered in metal spikes; c) production by Diplo; d) Kanye pulling stupid faces and e) Katy Perry in it - then yes, chances are I am going to like it. This is my genre of choice.
Yes, after an emoji campaign that was audacious even by her standards, Madonna finally dropped her star-spangled video for Rebel Heart's third single, and it really did break the internet, although not in the way she might have hoped.
Having used the thing as bait to get people to sign up for the ridiculous TIDAL streaming service that she holds major stake in and nobody likes, thousands of people gave their credit card details and signed up for a month's free trial. But because the supporting tech was not up the job, the thing stopped with a jarring groan and a frozen shot of Madonna's arse ascending some stairs. At first you thought it was Jonas Ã…kerlund having a film student moment, until you reloaded and the same thing happened again.
The TIDAL own goal is just the latest in a line of internet faux pas that have plagued the Rebel Heart of late, from the Martin Luther King photoshops to the claims that the leaked demos were a "form of terrorism" and tantamount to "artistic rape". All of this despite the fact that the 12-track album buried deep somewhere within Rebel Heart (of which 'Bitch I'm Madonna' is one of the 'choicer' cuts) is actually one of her best ever.
As Peter Robinson has pointed out more eloquently than this, being a Madonna fan can be exhausting. And yet we still keep coming back for more, and this video - weirdly small-scale despite all the bells and whistles - goes some way to explaining why, and provides a handy guide on how to be Madonna yourself. If nothing else, it's a whole bunch of fluro fun.
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The first rule of being Madonna is to round up a gaggle of your most famous mates, and have them claim via the medium of lip-sync that they too are Madonna. Only Kanye West, if you can get him, will not be prepared to make a lip-sync declaration that he is Madonna. One can only wonder in awe how the meeting went when Kanye refused to publicly claim to be Madonna, but this is presumably how things roll in the billionaire boys' club.
Beyoncé, Perry and Cyrus did agree to the lip-sync but wouldn't show up to the party in person, while Minaj opted to deliver her segment via a flatscreen one of the dancers were waving about. Which meant the only ones who actually turned up for the party were Rita Ora (desperate), Chris Rock (random but fair dos), Alexander Wang (ditto), Diplo (we're saying nothing) - and Rocco and David Ciccone (Madonna's children). I suppose you wonder what happened to people like Spears, Aguilera, Lovato - even Lambert could have bumped up the numbers (Gaga presumably wasn't invited).
Another friend commented that while Taylor Swift had recruited people for her 'Bad Blood' clip that would make her look cool, Madge chose people who would make her look powerful. And even if the video does add up to a little bit less of the sum of its parts, the fact that she's still trying is half the battle.
No, actually that's wrong. I can remember being little more than 12 and hearing Lorraine Kelly say something like: "Ooh, whatever you think of her, you have to admire her ambition," and even then it was an old argument. To admonish Madonna with praise for her "ambition" alone is to refuse to accept that 30-odd years into her career, she has rarely been anything less than an incredible popstar, even in relatively B-list periods like 'Bedtime Stories'.
Incidentally, the very best Madonna-related video I've unearthed lately is Queen Ruby Wax walking an audience of insurance brokers (me neither) through her trashing of her Madonna interview from that very period. It was always like this.
Madonna wheeling out her megastar mates for a pop video and then using it to hold fans to ransom to sign up for TIDAL - and then it backfiring spectacularly, is just another example of one of those things that is sent to test us as fans (the remix EP is great though; the Sander Kleinenberg mix in particular). And yet we all know we're in this for life.
See, I swore I would kill myself, and probably her, before inflicting another Madonna thinkpiece on the world, yet here I am, 1000 words in (listen, girl's gotta make rent). The point is, for all the white noise of opinion that will surely flood the internet forever, Madonna has managed to distil all of it into what sounds on the surface like her dumbest single.
Because quite simply… well she's Madonna. Bitch.
