This Is Not the Life I Ordered - I Confess: Madge Rocks

 I grew up in the 80s. I remember the first time I heard (and ‘saw’) Madonna's “Borderline” on MTV in or about 1983 and I thought it was one of the best songs by someone new to me that I’d ever heard. And the video was a real story, unlike some of the more abstract, arty, somewhat phantasmagoric videos of my favorite artists of the time like Duran Duran and Talking Heads and New Order.  About the time of Like a Virgin the album two years later, she was so popular that in my increasingly alt rock sensibility I’d become too cool to for it. By 1985, her music and her videos and her name were so ubiquitous in the culture that you didn’t have to admit you liked Madonna or not. It was like liking or not liking the weather. When she performed “Holiday” at Live Aid that year, many of my family members were watching and thought she was covering someone else’s song – someone Black. A lot of older Black people I knew had thought that it was a Black artist who made “Holiday.” It was the rare song by a non-Black artist that played fairly regularly on Detroit’s iconic FM 98 WJLB and it segued perfectly with Aretha and Anita and Luther and Prince and Michael on that radio station at the salon where my mother worked, and where I was a sweeper and shampoo boy for my entire adolescence. She was just that much of a part of the atmosphere. She crossed cultures easily and without affect. It wasn’t a statement. It was just her music. (And she was a Detroit girl, from Rochester, a suburb of the Motor City not far from the one I grew up in.) Tthat would go on through the rest of the decade and a half through Ray of Light, which I think of as her iconic years. 

For the next 13 years, I respected her as an artist, but I wasn’t what I would call a fan. Every now and then a track would catch my attention (“Oh, Father” and “Vogue”) but I was too into the Smiths and the Cure and Depeche Mode and New Order and the like to really indulge. (Or, more accurately, admit I indulged.) There was her Marilyn Monroe stage, her Evita stage, her sexual exploitation phase. She was fascinating as hell, but to me her persona eclipsed anything she was putting out, despite its continuing chart-topping ubiquity. 

Then “Deeper and Deeper” came out – and so, coincidently at the same time, did I. My latent love of, well, a lot of things, revealed to me a love of disco, and my integration into house and techno was a perfect trifecta for a new pledge in the fraternity of gay life, back then a truly marginalized community, but one with the hubris of the talented outlier than the victim. Being gay in 1994 was dangerous, mysterious, controversial – but also intriguing and chic. Sexy. Stylish. It was Versace and South Beach, Miami and all that. Marriage wasn’t the battle – staying alive and avoiding “the virus” was. But it still didn’t make me a fan, but rather an adjacent admirer of her come-up-from-nothing-Detroit girl achievement as a global icon. A great performer with a determined finger on the cultural barometer. Her music was easily integrated into the house music Zeitgeist of the time and her look and attitude was co-opted by gay culture – or was it the other way around? That, probably, is more like it – and she had become such a supernova by the time I’d moved to New York City in the middle-late 90s that, when Ray of Light came out, she seemed to will herself into less mainstream accessibility with that album because it fit so perfectly with the times for a certain downtown demimonde in a track list with outfits like Massive Attack, Air, Portishead, and Kruder and Dorfmeister that were, for a certain type of young person in a major city, the soundtrack of life itself. The other side of the 90s from the people who watched shows like “Friends”. She wasn’t just famous or sexy – she’d become cool in a way that attracted people who had been too cool to like Madonna. Or, more realistically, to admit they did. Ray of Light soared and, for a long time, she plateaued there. 

Hence, after that ablum I stopped paying attention. She slipped into the background for me as I became more immersed in electronic music as, ironically, she seemed to try desperately to insert herself into that milieu. But I never really got her Mirwais period. It didn’t sound like I thought she wanted her music to sound. I imagined I knew what she was going for (louche raves in London) but it didn’t fit. Madonna, despite herself, seemed simply too big and not nuanced enough as an artist to belong in electronica’s eclectic, understated atmosphere. 

And then “Confessions on the Dancefloor” came out and I was tuned in and turned out. “Hung Up” was and still is one of her best bangers. “Sorry” was an unnecessary apology – it was just fine. But “Get Together” was – and still is to me – the best track she’d come out with since 1993’s“Deeper and Deeper.” 

And now here I am listening to “Confessions II,” which warrants all the hype it’s getting. It’s the kind of album I know – because I know my reaction to music I love – that will sound better and better with more listens, like the sex with a casual lover you aren’t prepared to fall in love with but whose unnameable, irresistible idiosyncrasy just sneaks up on you and rocks your world. 

I can’t break down what songs I like most or like least yet. It’s all one song to me right now. Right now, it reminds me of two albums that excited me on first listen (the Beatles’ Abbey Road and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique) but that I couldn’t put my finger on where or what in the giant sauce made it taste so good. Sorry for the mixed metaphor, but for me a mixed metaphor seems appropriate for this album for a lot of reasons. One, it’s Abbey Road and Paul’s Boutique comparison might seem as odd as comparing those two in the first place. But these were albums that had great singles but, truly, to be appreciated, had to be heard from start to finish. They had a narrative and the more familiar one became with the narrative, the more you could hear the next song about to start if you were only hearing one track. (I have to add the Smiths’ Louder Than Bombs to that as well, but that was more of a later compilation, a sister to Hateful of the Hallow.) When these kinds of – increasingly rare– albums are finished for the first time it feels like finishing a novel. You miss it, you want to read it again, you need to unpack what you just experienced.

Abbey Road was the Beatles’ last recording (although released just before their last album, Let It Be). I hope this isn’t Madonna’s because I don’t think she can live without making music and I want her to live a long life. But if she decided to lay this down as the final page of her musical legacy, what a story has been told – and lived – by this incredible human being. I’m so glad I grew up with her.

This Is Not the Life I Ordered -- We Really Are All the Same After All

 There are some good ones on both sides that get a bad rap because good, decent, empathetic, human-loving people are the real minority in this country.

I used to hate it when wt people would tell me "You're not like the other ones." But I also knew what they meant, and shamefully, privately agreed even. For I knew how disingenuous of me it was to pretend I didn't get what they meant just because being proud to be bk was something forced onto me no matter how revolted I often was by some of my communities' cultural attributes. Similarly, there are a lot of people I could say that about who are wt in today's unabashed racism renaissance. Simply, there are some of us that they like and there are some of them that we like. To quote a broken clock, "There are good people on both sides." We need to find a way to integrate these two communities and leave the ones no one likes on both sides somewhere else. Ideally together with their guns, their Jesus, and their h*nky-tonk accents. Because evangelist country bumpkin h*lllbillies and churchy, basic bks/ghetto rats are so much alike it's the biggest irony of racism in this country. They sound alike, they worship alike, they even kind of look alike if you erase skin color. (Anyone else notice that?) I can't count how many times I've thought that looking at clips of MAGA rallies on television and thinking of the kinds of willfully ignorant Jesus freaks and country bumpkins that are equally present in the bk community.

At the end of the day, we need to stop equating certain values and cultural norms with phenotypical traits. If only both groups would stop perpetuating the very same stereotypes and then pointing at the other without realizing that the great majority of Americans are exactly the same, regardless of color.

This Is Not the LIfe I Ordered -- Aging and Courtesy Sex: Charity Begins at Home

 So instead of drinking my anxiety away, lately I’ve been having quite a lot of sex. Meeting guys not only online, but at the gym and even on the street while running errands and hooking up with them at my place or theirs. But yesterday, for the first time in my life, I had “courtesy sex” with a hookup who came over, having aged about 15 years since the photos he shared with me online. In person, I can only hope I was able to mask the disappointment when I opened the door of my apartment and allowed him to cross the threshold. 

Immediately, my mind calculated multiple plausible excuses to get him out of here and find someone hotter — and younger! I felt like a dick but come on… his decade or older pictures were basically lies. Having gotten spoiled after over a decade plus of bedding gorgeous guys 15-30 years younger than I am, sleeping with a middle aged man who left vanity with the era of print newspaper seemed entirely out of the question. But I was horny as fuck and he was here, and he was hungry. So instead of making up an excuse to veil my disappointment, I decided to just fuck the guy, who btw could not stop telling me how handsome he thought I was. Today, I quickly decided, I get to be the prize. So I took this guy, who may have been my age, maybe slightly older (profile says 44), or quite possibly a little younger, who looked like he had never seen the inside of a gym in his life, whose “pecs” were like a middle aged woman’s sagging tits, but whose plump buttocks still stood high (he was part South Asian so maybe it was that?), and I turned him over like an omelet and fucked him to the best of my ability and generosity. I pretended to be a whore, a sexy Mandingo male hooker, bathing in his moans and other expressions of much needed and long awaited pleasure and fucked him as long as I could before the intrusive thoughts about his sagging tits and homely face took over and his request to be turned over missionary style made me realize that I could never truly be a whore, not as a total top, and when I finally could no longer sustain my erection I blamed it on the condom he requested I wear, being the man of his times, a pre-Prep era, he was. But I gave him ten minutes of Mandingo from heaven. And he made me feel like the most beautiful man he had slept with since the turn of the digital era.

At the end of it all, while waiting for a hotter and much younger dude to come over from Astoria, Queens, that would actually be worth my nut, I felt proud of my generosity. That is, before I was suddenly stricken by the most revolting intrusive thought of all: How long would it be before I’m the benefactor of someone’s ageist charity fuck? 

This is Not the Life I Ordered -- God Forbid, a Politician Gives a Thoughtful, Unprepared Response

 In response to the article "AOC's Munich Stumble Is a Warnign to the Left: : https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/aocs-munich-stumble-is-a-warning-to-the-left.html?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=s1&utm_campaign=nym

The left doing what it does best, eating its own.

Sure, I respect that our "side" can critique itself. After all, one of the most repelling traits of the conservative/MAGA crowd is that they're not only hypocrites who will criticize the other side for doing (usually a lesser version of) exactly the thing they have done or will eventually do, but they almost never call each other out, even in the most egregious and obvious circumstances. They don't talk outside of the house, if you wll, very much. They defend, deflect, and deter against all threats. They shrug off inelegance and ineloquence like a colleague's public flatulation one is too polite to acknowledge awareness. But Dems and libs? We see one of ours fuck up and we go blasting it in our own media platforms because, as the adults in the room, so to speak, we hold ourselves to a higher standard than the other side.

And here we have one of the most unapologetically left-leaning media platforms, New York mag, telling the world that AOC not only farted in Munich, but that she shit the bed. That she should never be a contender for the White House.

Yes, AOC (who I have conflicting feelings about but overall like and respect) was clumsy and seemed unprepared in her response to this question about Taiwan and China. And as a woman and a POC, she's already a target so any legitimate stumble is going to, well, garner exactly the attention it's getting. But, were she a man or a wyte person or both, would her stuttering just seem like someone searching for the right words? Or would clear and blatant unpreparedness be forgiveable? And were she a conservative figure, would this even be news? From the president on down, many of the representatives in the conservative party proudly flaunt their ignorance. Geography, history, culture, language, their ignorance traverses all areas of international or multicultural details, let alone pedantics, and it's almost as if there's some kind of pride in flaunting their ignorance of anything outside of wyte American Christian culture, a dog-whistle of their prideful xenophobia. Liberals, on the other hand, are supposed to be the smarty pantses, the culture vultures, the multilingual, scientific oriented world-travelers who somehow find the time to finish every issue of the New Yorker and the Economist, along with the dailies and their corresponding podcasts, primed and ready even in REM sleep to answer any question about any historical fact or current conflict -- with footnotes-- or risk looking like, heaven forbid, they don't know everything. And as a WOC, the whiff of "See, this is what happens when they get the opportunities they're always asking for or lamenting about not getting" turns on full stank.

AOC didn't have an answer ready. Which meant, God forbid, she had to think about it as we waited in real time to watch her think through a question about a complicated situation, as opposed to having a prepared soundbite ready at the gate. Sorry, but I'll take the ums and uhs over mindless drivel any day.

Because she was thinking. And we watched her think for 20 seconds before she delivered an answer that was worthy of the question.