The Material World

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully process Madonna’s half-time performance at the Super Bowl, but here are a few initial impressions, a few hours after the fact:

• WORLD PEACE!  Madonna has finally declared it!  It’s official!
• Can we please talk about how the half-time show for the AMERICAN HETEROSEXUAL MALE EVENT OF THE YEAR began with an art form created by queer people of color?  I wish she had made that lineage more explicit.   
• Yeah, she tripped!  Shut up, it was AWESOME!  She was so good at it!
• Listen, the way the sound and stage was set up in that stadium, there was no physical way she would have been able to sing live.  She DESERVED to lip-synch that show!  For someone with a weak voice, she has always been a total champ about singing live, even in situations where her peers would have never done so.  She earned this!
• RuPaul tweeted: “Madonna. The time has come for U to lipsynch for your life! Good luck & don’t f%k it up!”“
• This was the first time “Open Your Heart” has been on a Madonna set list since 1990!  It’s such a good song, even if she only sang 2 lines of it!
• Didn’t you think it was so classy that she only sang the part of “Express Yourself” that Lady Gaga didn’t steal?  DIGNITY.
• I generally just feel like this is a huge triumph for feminine and queer energy in the universe.  The Super Bowl is such an ugly symbol for everything that is brutish and stupid about American/Western masculinism, and this was like an INTERVENTION.  Not only did this woman make millions of football fans watch VOGUE — not only her GAYEST song, but a song that is LITERALLY ABOUT BEING GAY, AND IS BASED ON AN APPROPRIATION OF GAY STREET CULTURE — but she made it even gayer by projecting images of VOGUE MAGAZINE ON THE FUCKING FOOTBALL FIELD.  “FUCK YOU, FOOTBALL.  FUCK YOU, AMERICAN MALENESS.”  “BETTE DAVIS, WE LOVE YOU” - that sentence was said AT THE SUPER BOWL.  The major theme of that performance was that FEMININE GAYNESS IS AWESOME, and WAY MORE INTERESTING THAN CONVENTIONAL AMERICAN MASCULINITY.  As soon as it was over, I tweeted, “It got better.”
• Madonna stole her exit from Bernadette Peters in “Into the Woods.” #culturalappropriation

I’ll probably have more to say later.  I feel so lucky to be alive at the same time as Madonna!