April 5th - Uptown Magazine
Madonna searches for Molly, finds herself embroiled in a brand-new controversy
Madonna has been tuned into underground electronic music culture since the early days of her career, so it’s no surprise that her new album is called MDNA and that she’s trying to capitalize on the growth of the genre over the past couple years. She recently took to the stage at Ultra in Miami, one of the largest electronic dance music events in North America, to introduce Avicii, who will perform at the MTS Centre on May 27.
While critics have long complained that Madonna borrows ideas from underground dance culture and repackages them for the masses, it was her reference to Molly (a slang term for the drug MDMA) at the annual festival in Florida that ruffled the feathers of artists such as Deadmau5 and music critics such as Spin’s Philip Sherburne who wrote, “what’s disappointing about Madonna’s drug talk is how incredibly artless it feels, like a takeaway from a focus group put together by Madonna, Inc. to find out what the kids are into these days. She sounded like Mitt Romney rhapsodizing over the height of trees in Michigan, only slightly more on-message. More tasteless, still, dropping the code word ‘Molly’ was a sly way of reminding us that her new album, MDNA, also references the drug; she might as well have been saying, ‘How many of you are going to do, um, buy my album next week?’ Subtle, she ain’t.”
While everyone pointed fingers at M.I.A. and her stunt at the Superbowl, this seems to be an even more obvious and disingenuous way to appear edgy while trying to connect with youth culture and grasping to stay relevant. If that wasn’t bad enough, Madonna actually wore a shirt with her album’s name on it, just in case festival-goers were too high to put all the pieces together.
This isn’t the first time electronic artists have had beefs with Madonna, either for the way she acts or her appropriation of electronic music culture for her own gains. Even as far back as 1996, artists who tried working with the Material Girl were calling her out. After a falling out with the Queen of Pop, house producer Junior Vasquez got back at her by releasing a searing club track built around an answering machine message from Madge and a sample repeating “If Madonna calls, I’m not here.”
If Deadmau5 or some random bedroom producer doesn’t do a remix of Vasquez’s track or sample Madonna on the mic at Ultra, the Internet has failed us all.
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