Date: 2008-03-23 16:09 Subject: Obama = Madonna Security: Public Location: 773 Mood: awake Music: 4 Minutes to Save the World Tags: madonna, obama, politics

I dunno that either Madonna or Obama would be thrilled by the comparison, but hear me out.

Once upon a time, in the early 1980's, there were some established gatekeepers to the world of popular music, gatekeepers such as Rolling Stone magazine. And these gatekeepers knew, with certainty, what rock music was and what it was not.  Tom Petty, for example, was rock music and Madonna was not. She was a manufactured commodity, no different from The Monkees.

What has been interesting in the time since then is how these gatekeepers have been so angry, so totally indignant over the continued success of Madonna. It wasn't enough to simply dislike her. They have spent a ton of time and energy dismissing her as not music. Not simply music that they loathe, like bluegrass or Wagnerian opera or whatever, that it was not music.

This is interesting for a few reasons. One is that these same gatekeepers had been around long enough to see a similar revolution, to have heard people complain that Chuck Berry is not music, while an arrangement by Nelson Riddle most certainly is music. So they should have known better.

Here's why I think they got confused. Because Madonna originally appeared to be a known quantity--a woman trading primarily on her looks. For instance, wearing "Boy Toy" on her clothes, cooing about her virginity, etc. And while Madonna has never tired of showing her flesh, she has seemed entirely indifferent to the desires of straight men. She has, instead, formed a coalition of seemingly everybody else--women (gay and straight), gay men, racial minorities. And this turns out to be a significant number of people. Enough to make for an incredibly lucrative and long-lasting career.

As you've probably noticed, the behaviors that marked Madonna as "not serious"--use of synthesized sounds, focus on image, product endorsements--are no longer remarkable. It's a little much to say that she single-handedly created these shifts but she certainly was observant and saw the directions that the culture was headed and put herself forward as a leader.

Obama gave a speech about racism this week, a remarkable speech that touched me and millions of others. It was interesting how many pundits, self-described gatekeepers, came out to say that Obama failed some sort of mysterious test. They say this a lot about Obama--they know what a politician is and he isn't doing it.

In the early 1980's it was clear to the gatekeepers who the serious female musicians were (Carole King, Patti Smith) and who the non-serious ones were. But it turns out that people will do things, they will cast a vote, whether a literal vote or a metaphoric vote of money or attention, even when the experts tell them that they are betraying some official set of rules.