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Jumping a little ahead of what’s sure to be a flurry of think pieces devoted to Madonna’s 50th birthday on August 16 is Hank Steuver of The Washington Post. Steuver’s explicit angle is his career-long ambivalence toward her, which occasionally flashes glimmers of light: “Just watch a Madonna fan listen to the new Madonna album for the first time. There is such instantaneous loathing and fascination. You spend a week telling all your friends how bad the new album is, what a letdown it is, and then a week later, you magically decide you like it.” More often, though, Steuver seems at pains to keep Madonna at arm’s length even while letting us in on his stash of magazines with her on the cover; the result feels passive-aggressive, particularly when he scoffs at academics having picked up on her as a cause celibre. The logic of someone being paid to think on paper about a public figure mocking those who do the same thing in a different setting continues, as ever, to escape me. [Washington Post]
Madonna Turns 50, “WaPost” Bloviates, World Turns
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I’d love to see a piece on what Madonna turning 50 symbolizes to Boomers.
This article sits squarely in the confines of Steuver’s schitck, so I can neither defend or attack. Seriously, that’s how he writes; that’s how he got where he is now.
That being said, the wander into academe-bashing says more about his problems with … academia than Madonna, really. Don’t you think?
@the rich girls are weeping: oh, I’m aware that this is Steuver’s schtick, all right. (of course his academe-bashing isn’t about anything other than his problems with academia–I thought I was clear about that, sorry.)