What Would Madonna Do?

I don't mind Coachella for a weekend of fun or damnce your feet off, but when it comes doen to <a href="http://blog.loehmanns.com/coachella-not-just-music/"> Coachella for 2008 Fashion Trends</a>, that's where I think I have to draw the line!
If they start selling us only gym socks and Bruce Jenner running shorts, I am rebelling!

monarch butterfly whatever

TODAY'S OPINION

Please don't say you feel sorry…
By Cédric Van der Hauwaert
cvanderhauwaert@gmail.com

Attention whore chic: hard to pull off post 50

Madonna's reinventions have always fascinated me in a positive manner – from the DIY wardrobe post-disco starlet to the whip-carrying S & M dominatrix of the infamous Shep-Pettibone-produced Erotica album (which was universally panned by critics) and Sex book – causing a huge backlash with her vast legions of teenage girl fans – and from the sun-saluting Kabbalist of Ray of Light lure back to the infectious simplicity of seventies hedonism on Confessions.

Nowadays, Madonna has unfortunately gone from clever chameleon to retrograde recycled trash and it's no pretty sight – a 50 plus mother who, in a desperate attempt to be hip and contemporary – has to resort to lip wrestling with twenty-something pop queens who themselves are struggling to make a lasting impression on today's attention-deficient MySpace/Youtube generation (and to stay sober of course!).

Her new album offers nothing new and where in the past Madonna mastered a magic wand that miraculously took the focus away from her weak vocal reach and that made lack of identity a highly marketable and profitable defect, she now comes across as a needy high-class hooker soliciting not wealthy realtors and business leaders on Santa Monica Blvd. but a growingly fickle consumer market bombarded day and night with multimedia.

For this ousting, she teamed up with some of today's most bankable MTV front-runners – the first single is a collaboration with Justin Timberlake who himself offers no more than a merely mediocre interpretation of 80s legends Michael Jackson and Prince.

Madonna always perfectly summed up the zeitgeist – portraying every fad from rampant and unapologetic coarse materialism and consumer-society-driven faux feminism in the Reagan eighties to Hollywood (post-rehab) spiritualism at the turn of the millennium. Like an empty vessel, she soaks up a given era's mood and injects a zest of Madonnaism into a mosaic of lifestyles and attitudes; she excels at imitation (flawlessly pulling of every female stereotype from the Monroe from Gentleman prefer Blondes to the Dietrich from the golden age of cabaret). Unfortunately, today's landscape of popular culture is an all too barren one and the desperation-fueled attempts of a multiple-decade icon at clinging on to her divine status as trend setter don't mesh well with the soundtrack of 2008 – a post-modern amalgamation high on technology yet devoid of any creativity; a music scene feasting on revival, endlessly chucking seventies disco melodies down the electro blender, adding rap to catchy melodies of the past and relying on cover versions of the great music that was once created. Thus, Madonna delivers a slick and perfectly produced electro pop album with no soul whatsoever. And while Britney's personal trauma spices up the manufactured beats on Blackout, Madonna's dull life of horseback riding, mothering and trying to nail a British accent fails to sex up her record.