While Cohen’s limbs, skin, flesh, and bones all seem to be in tact,
they may not be for much longer. Cohen’s ruthless (though by all
accounts probably totally accurate) depiction of Madge as a vapid, shape-shifting,
image artist is probably not the type of PR she was hoping for on the
eve of her latest studio album.
He likens her to a cult leader, suggests that her true genius is that of ripping off people’s images, and explicitly portrays her as a tragic has-been. Likening looking back on her body of work to romping in “a tub filled with suds, and you search and search but never find the naked lady,” VF‘s harsh profile is a refreshing treat for those* who are sick of listening to self-righteous celebrities paint themselves as Christ on a disco-dazzled cross. For those of you who can’t read more than 250 words without changing the channel, we offer the highlights of Cohen’s notepad ruminations:
Madonna made her fortune selling sex-what will she sell when the thought of sex with Madonna seems like a fetish?
If anyone ever won a lottery, it’s this child, David, who one moment was living in poverty in Africa and the next had been flown to a palace in the great frozen North. …What a strange life for David, being carried off to London-like Pocahontas, the beautiful Indian girl found in wild America-because, as Conrad wrote of London, “this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.”
I kept thinking about Britney Spears. I mean, here is Madonna, singing with Justin, whose very public breakup with Britney marked the moment the pop tart began her battle with the furies. And, of course, I was also thinking of those MTV Video Music Awards in which Britney, already well on her way to madness, frenched Madonna. In light of this record, and all that’s happened, I wondered if, in the course of that kiss, Madonna somehow extracted Britney’s soul from her body, or implanted the crazy chip.
Add in a creepily sexual allusion to Plato’s cave upon meeting her face to face, a straightforward list of her ruminations on topics ranging from Africa to 1980’s downtown New York, and a startlingly sci-fi transcript of a point in the interview when she accuses him of misogyny by having only fathered boys. The only unanswered questions that remain are how she gets her arms to look so smooth and youthful for Steven Meisel yet totally gross everywhere else (oh yeah, the shape-shifting thing, our bad), if she really, seriously thinks a Casablanca remake will earn her a shot at an Oscar, and of course, who the fuck she thinks she is. You can read the article, in its gruesome entirety, on VanityFair.com
*those = us
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