In this review of the new biography, Madonna: A Rebel Life by Mary Gabriel, Joanna Biggs argues that Madonna is more than a singer, dancer, and an early champion of many causes. She’s an unapologetic artist—first, foremost, and above all else.
Madonna will not be with us forever: she dances much less vigorously onstage, she needs ever-longer periods of rest even to be able to perform, and she nearly died last June from a bacterial infection. Both Prince and Michael Jackson, her collaborators and rivals from the era before streaming, died from overdoses of pain medication to treat injuries from decades of performance. She has resolved, in one of the most conventional decisions in an unconventional career, that her face will no longer age. But we are lucky to have grown up in the age of Madonna. She has stood not for tradition but for freedom: to love who we love, to change at will, to say what we want, to earn money, to court fame, to desire more than we’re given. We should want our heroines to be bad girls like her. It leaves us, in the real world, freer.
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