Madonna's Changing Image

Madonna is a pop icon who is known to reinvent herself from time to time, changing her style, changing her look, and changing her image. Image is in fact very important to Madonna. She started as the Material Girl, mirroring the attitude in her popular song. She reinvented herself as a nastier version of that girl, one who wore underwear on stage and projected sexuality. She also tried to be the dutiful wife and an actress at the same time when she was married to Sean Penn. She became even more overtly sexual after that and alternated between a raunchy stage performance and an attempt to portray a more sophisticated woman in film. In fact, one of the problems Madonna has is that she cannot settle on one image and keep it. This may please many of her fans, but it confuses others and has probably hurt her film career. She is not a bad actress but is also not a great actress, and in such a case creating and projecting one image is maybe the best approach.

One of the ways Madonna has tried to reinvent herself is by self-promotion around different ideas and different attitudes. In 1992, madonna traveled to different parts of the country to pose for pictures in 1992 for her book, Sex, in which she appeared nude as a hitchhiker in nothing but a pair of spiky black heels. Madonna is also the CEO of something called Boy Toy Inc., something observers believe would not be possible if she did not swing wildly between outrageous cheapness and crazy excess (Levitt, Wagner, and

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is also control, and this can be seen in Truth or Dare as she directs the filmmakers and selects what they see and do not see--at one point she asks that they not follow her during a rehearsal discussion, for instance. She has a purpose in what she does, and one critics sees that purpose as being shocking for the sake of the shock itself: Madonna's career has never really been about music; it's been about titillation, about image, about publicity. But amid all the hype over what Madonna wears and what her sexual orientation seems to be this month, one thing sometimes gets obscured: in the course of her career, she's actually produced several remarkably skillful and entertaining albums. She's never been an innovator, but she's always adeptly seized on the latest dance and music trends; and while any number of pop musicians have made a new style palatable to the masses by watering it down, Madonna has displayed enough talent and taste to remain true to the spirit of her borrowings (Farley 81). This seems to mean that Madonna is harming her own reputation in the field she has chosen. She is not taken seriously as a singer because of her antics on and off stage, and she is not taken seriously as an actress for the same reasons.

Category: Arts - M