Why Madonna still matters

In my day job, I work with children. Well, OK, they’re in their twenties, but when they ask me who my favourite musician of all time is, and I say Madonna, they usually look blank. That funny-looking woman who had a few hits in the 1980s? Meh, what about Taylor Swift?

Madonna may not have topped the charts for a few years, but for me and many other women of my generation, she is the greatest. And she always will be, in a way that the pop stars of today – derivative, airbrushed, on-message and PRed to the max – can only dream of. She changed the world of music, she changed lives and even now, in my forties, I still look to her as an inspiration – which is why I was so concerned last week when the news broke that she had spent several days in intensive care with a bacterial infection.

At 64, Madonna is the bestselling female recording artist of all time; she has sold 300 million records in her 40-plus year career. She continues to release albums every three or four years. Before her hospital admission she had been preparing to begin a seven-month, 45-city world tour. Contemporary radio stations that ignore her in favour of younger artists are missing a trick, as she is still making both first-class dance-pop bangers and addictively beautiful slow-tempo tracks. To pick out just two from her recent albums: ‘Turn Up The Radio’ is a fantastic dance track that has lifted me out of a low mood more than once; ‘Ghost Town’ is a haunting evocation of the beauty of having a soulmate which I first heard with my equally music-obsessed ex and which, five years after we broke up, still revives a sadness.

So what, you might say, she’s just a singer who’s made some good tunes and become very rich as a result. But there is so much more to Madonna than that. She moved to New York at 19, alone, and the five years she spent there before becoming famous were a time of grinding poverty and knockback after knockback as she struggled to make it big. She lived in cockroach-filled apartments in dangerous neighbourhoods, worked a series of low-paying jobs, was sexually assaulted at knifepoint and at times was homeless. When her father came to visit her he was so appalled by the squalor she lived in that he begged her to come home. But she refused; she wouldn’t give up. She clung to her dreams and ambitions with a tenacity that, given some of the conditions she endured, seems almost superhuman. How many of us can say that we would do the same? I certainly would have fled home at the first sign of all those six-legged housemates. But when you see someone you admire show that level of determination, and eventually succeed, it helps you to find a strength of your own. I can remember how upset I was when a man I was involved with told me to give up on my journalistic dreams: ‘The industry’s dead,’ he told me. ‘Retrain as a translator.’ Madonna didn’t retrain, and I wasn’t going to either; and he was out of the picture by the time I finally got published in the national press.

Yet that very strength of character has meant that Madonna has often been criticised for not conforming to traditional expectations of what a woman should be like. She has always been outspoken – taking on everyone from the Catholic Church to George W. Bush – sexually confident and even aggressive, and the latter especially means she has developed a reputation of not always being the nicest person. But in a world where women are still told to ‘be kind’ at their own expense, even, or perhaps especially, when their rights conflict with the desires of men, I think we need to see more women who don’t prioritise being ‘nice’, who aren’t afraid to state their opinions honestly, make trouble and stand their ground.

People don’t tend to mind opinionated women who have the ‘right’ views – Dua Lipa knows she’ll win points for criticising the government’s stance on refugees. Madonna has never had the right views. She was a vocal supporter of gay rights in the 1980s when homophobia was much more rife than it is now and Section 28 was still in force. She spoke out against the stigma surrounding HIV and Aids at a time when sufferers sometimes died alone because their families did not know they were gay. Yet there she was, on the Jonathan Ross Show, telling the world that being HIV positive was nothing to be ashamed of. A leaflet on safe sex was provided with every copy of the Like A Prayer album when it came out, and it included the line: ‘People with Aids, regardless of their sexual orientation, deserve compassion and support, not violence and bigotry.’ That may seem uncontroversial now, but I can remember the 1980s and it wasn’t then. It’s easy to forget the intensity of the fear, suspicion and prejudice that existed then and how against-the-grain her stance was. It could have ruined her career.

But it didn’t. Seeing a woman who is outspoken, argumentative, and with a lot of the ‘wrong’ opinions, helped give me the confidence to be honest about who I am (a left-leaning Leave voter, so everybody disagrees with me). Madonna has continued to take flak throughout her life over everything from her much younger boyfriends to the quality of her singing, and she doesn’t cave in – she just carries on doing what she wants to do. Every time I’m made to feel I need to shut my mouth and switch off my brain, I think of Madonna, who has never shut hers and never will.

Madonna is living proof that you don’t have to be ‘nice’ – people-pleasing, appeasing, uncontroversial – to do good. She has donated millions to numerous medical and children’s charities, including Aids and breast cancer charities, and paid the huge medical bills of friends diagnosed with Aids, most notably her former flatmate Martin Burgoyne, whose bedside she was at when he died. She has founded two charities – the Ray of Light Foundation, which supports education for girls in poorer countries, and Raising Malawi – and has raised four adopted children as well as two biological children, for much of the time as a single parent.

Madonna isn’t all good, or all bad. And this is why her fans love her. She’s a megastar, but we see ourselves in her. Like all women, she makes bad fashion choices, has insecurities about her appearance (hence overdoing it just a bit on the fillers recently), dates unsuitable men and has struggled to find the perfect partner. Like all mums, she’s had difficulties with her teenage children. Like all career women, she’s had failures and flops, made bad choices and wrong moves. Like all unmarried women over the age of 30, she’s written an embarrassing book about her sex life – OK, maybe that’s just her.

But again and again, Madonna bounces back from very public criticism, ridicule and failure, puts it behind her and moves onto something different in a way that ought to inspire each of us who’s messed up in a smaller, less public way. She never lets it get the better of her. And if she can overcome her mistakes and go on to new successes, then so can I.

Get well soon, Madonna. You’re needed now as a role model as much as you ever were – maybe even more.