Maverick, yet magnificent

VINOD ADVANI

Madonna, and again no arguments about it, has a great life. A multi-millionaire, she lives in a pure white villa in Hollywood hills. At the top. Her bathrooms are the size of most bedrooms. She collects expensive painting of nudes. She drives a black Mercedes 560 SL. She dines with the likes of Donatella Versace, jets with Michael Stipes, parties with Courtney Love and does spirituality with Deepak Chopra.

She also throws one helluva dinner party. Foie gras? That's for the plebs. Caviar? Pre-natally engorged veal? Lark's tongues? Otter's noses? All that is commonplace for the merely mega rich. When you're the world's most famous person, you serve Japanese kobe beef which costs over œ 250 for a kilo gram. Even Madonna's food has a great life.

But Madonna, although always a tabloid topic, doesn't just party all night long. She works hard on her music . She works hard on her films. In 1998, she released Ray of Light, which everybody agreed was her best collection of new material since 1989's Like A Prayer. She spent quality time bringing up baby Lourdes, now 34 months old and cute to boot.

She then went to live in London to star in a film . She fancied the English Director, ten years her junior, had a baby called Rocco with him and simultaneously worked on her new album. Madonna it seems has been thoroughly infected by Britain, with its dry, particular notions of hipness and style, during her near two-year London residency. Out of this has come a more thoroughly radical-sounding album than even Ray Of Light, shaped largely by French house muso Mirwais Ahmadzai (though William Orbit's here too).

Music, the single and title track (Madonna's always telling us how much she loves music; does she worry that we don't believe her?) opens Music the album, and it's a daring gambit. Even when her voice isn't being goosed by a Vocoder, the woman in the middle of this textural disco odyssey doesn't much resemble Madonna, while the sound-focus zooms, pans and reverse-zooms. Miraculously, nothing appears to repeat itself exactly.

Familiar Madonna themes of decadence-as-spiritual-choice and dancefloor-as-magic-kingdom are in evidence.Then there are four ballads , but ballads the way Madonna does them, all four exquisite songs. Excepting for her terrible version of American Pie, this is a brave, radical and punchy album. More than ever before, in fact, this is Madonna without a safety net.

Never having been afraid of heights or some might even say depths,the question still is,why everything Madonna does is of such consuming interest to the world? From her hedges to her hairdo, her love affairs to her videos, her up-to-the minute music to her ahead-of-the-fashion persona, her hatred of her stepmother to her love of her babies - why, oh why does all this grab so much attention from so many millions?

One of her famous quotes. "On one hand, you could say I am turning men into swine, but I also have this other side of my head that is saying that I am forcing men to behave in ways that they are not supposed to do in society. If they want to wear a bra, they can wear a bra. If they want to cry, they can cry. If they want to kiss another man, they can kiss another man. I give them license to do that. My rebellion is not just against my father but against the priests and all the men who made the rules while I was growing up."

Whether Madonna deserves the attention or manipulates it shrewdly is an open question. What is plain to see from TV infotainment shows to magazine covers, is that she's got it. And knows how to keep it. Has been keeping it since 1985 when she unleashed Like A Virgin. She still uses that song in her spectacularly theatrical concert shows.

Madonna, if the final truth be told, is always re-inventing herself. This is what keeps fans interested and the media poised. She's always evolving, she never stands still. Every two years she comes up with a new look, a new attitude, a new act. And each time it's successful.When something like that happens once, OK maybe it's luck. Twice is a coincidence. Three times it's just remarkable talent. A kind of genius. Madonna's now on her seventh or eighth time.

"I want to do anything I can do to promote AIDS education, awareness, prevention" says Madonna. "I think because I am a celebrity ,a public person, I have a responsibility to be a spokeperson. Next to Hitler, AIDS is the worst thing to happen in the twentieth century. The sad thing is that it makes people even more bigoted. It gives people a reason to vent their true feelings about homosexuality."

Some could interpret her own stance as hypocritical. With her Like a Prayer album she included a sheet of facts to educate her public about AIDS, but this from a woman who's made her fortune by promoting herself as a sexually voracious vixen? Madonna is now 42. She is still using her imagination. Still being creative. Her current favourite words are 'mystic' and 'spiritual'. Shanti, Shanti she chants. So ask her and she says "I do believe that all paths lead to God. It's a shame that we end up having religious wars because many of the messages are the same. The whole idea of "Karma" and "do unto others",it's all the same. It really is."

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