A decade ago, Madonna made a very good speech. She was collecting the 2016 Woman of the Year award from Billboard, and spoke about art, feminism, misogyny, and the mad few years when she was married to Sean Penn. She also spoke about dying. Or, rather, not dying. “People say I’m controversial, but I think the most controversial thing I have ever done is to stick around,” she said. “Michael [Jackson] is gone. Tupac is gone. Prince is gone. Whitney is gone. Amy Winehouse is gone. David Bowie is gone. But I’m still standing.”
This snippet of the speech does the rounds every few months on social media, as proof of Madonna’s self-aggrandisement. But in context, it’s quietly brutal: three of the names she mentioned hadn’t stood alongside her during her imperial phase (though she did, of course, date Tupac in the early Nineties), but the rest very much had. In fact, they were a quartet: Prince, Madonna, Whitney and MJ, four icons of the Eighties who invented the modern pop star, all but one now felled by addiction and mental illness. Madonna had outlived, and she was proud to have outlived. In pop music and beyond, it’s been the story of her life.
