Hail to the Queen of Pop: why we should all thank Madonna as she hits 65

Madonna performs onstage during the 2019 Billboard Music Awards at MGM Grand Garden Arena on May 1, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

Maybe in the future, August 16 will be known as Madonna Day, commemorating a trailblazing woman who refused to go quietly. 

This August 16, she’ll turn 65, and having just survived a stint in intensive care, is set to embark on a world tour commemorating her four decades of pop, seven Grammys and 300m record sales.

The 35-city Celebration tour has been postponed to give her a chance to recover from a serious infection requiring hospitalisation, but her management has emphasised a rescheduling of the tour rather than its cancellation. 

She’s not one to sit at home. The idea of Madonna being anything other than invincible is laughable.

It’s this refusal to sit at home that has made her the target of so much criticism, particularly in recent times as she commits the cardinal female sin of ageing.

While the most significant members of her 80s pop peers haven’t survived — Prince, George Michael, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson — she continues sledge-hammering forward, and continues to get sledge-hammered by the media. 

Yet her reinventions remain unabated. Even if you don’t rate her musically, it’s her sheer staying power — in a world that saves its greatest disgust for ageing women — that is so remarkable.

Most recently this disgust was unleashed at the 65th Grammys in February, when Madonna introduced Sam Smith and Kim Petras — the latter being the first trans artist to win the award. 

But the story became not about Petras, but about Madonna’s face, sculpted with fillers, unlined, unnatural. 

Madonna arrives for the premiere of Ron Howard's The Beatles: Eight Days A Week - The Touring Years at the Odeon Leicester Square in London.

Imagine if she’d done natural, with 64-year-old wrinkles and sagging. No matter which option she chooses, the word ‘unrecognisable’ is screamed at her — because she no longer resembles her 20-something self.

“Once again I am caught in the glare of ageism and misogyny that permeates the world we live in,” she responded on Instagram. “A world that refuses to celebrate women past the age of 45 and feels the need to punish her if she continues to be strong-willed, hard-working, and adventurous.

She added she has “never apologised for any of the creative choices I have made nor the way that I look or dress and I’m not going to start”.

“I have been degraded by the media since the beginning of my career but I understand that this is all a test and I am happy to do the trailblazing so that all the women behind me can have an easier time in the years to come,” she said.

Madonna in the 1980s

While midlife women have become more culturally visible thanks to a growing refusal not to be culturally invisible, presenting as a female sexual being in your 60s is a trail that is still being blazed almost exclusively by Madonna. 

She has moved the dial on what Amy Schumer calls our Last Fuckable Day. 

Yes, Debbie Harry turned 78 a week after performing at Glastonbury, but Harry has always presented a froideur that kept us at an adoring distance while Madonna remains in our faces, challenging our perceptions around sexuality, freedom and ageing, while remaining terminally unapologetic about it.

Perhaps the nearest comparison to the levels of ire and dismissal she has drawn over the decades (before ageism became the latest brick to hurl at her) would be Sinead O’Connor, except we have never been able to use mental health fragility to dismiss Madonna. 

Or any kind of fragility — unlike her peers, she has never succumbed to addiction, mental collapse, burnout, unauthorised sex videos, or unscripted scandal. 

She’s powerfully in control, and that’s why people hate her — there’s no vulnerability. No cracks. We prefer our female superstars a bit broken. A bit Britney. Or cute like Kylie. Just not 60-something and sexual.

We all know the Madonna story. Born into a Catholic family of eight siblings in Michigan in 1958, losing her mother to cancer when she was six, moving to New York in 1978 to make it as a dancer, living on popcorn and her wits. 

Instead, she made it as a pop star with some fabulous dance moves, releasing her first pop album — Madonna — in 1983, before going on to become the world’s best-selling female artist of all time. 

She’s since released 14 studio albums, collaborating with some of the world’s best producers, from William Orbit on Ray of Light, to Stuart Price on Confessions, to Mirwais on Madame X. Her shows — expensive, complicated, breath-taking — are legendary.

Pop icon Madonna (centre) performs on stage with Colombian singer Maluma (out of frame) during his concert "Medallo in the Map", in Medellin, Colombia, on April 30, 2022.

BRASH, OVERT SEXUALITY

While her fanbase comprises largely of Gen X women and gay men, her haters are legion, and span her four decades in the public eye, from ex-popes to Piers Morgan. 

It began with her brash, overt sexuality when she was still categorised as young and hot; the Vatican denounced her several time for blasphemy, starting in 1989 when she released ‘Like A Prayer’, and for all the faux crucifix masturbation during 1990s Blond Ambition tour.

When she married British filmmaker Guy Ritchie, she was derided for adopting, temporarily, an English lady-of-the-manor persona; when she adopted, permanently, four children from Malawi, she was almost accused of abduction. 

Doing motherhood — she has six children — resulted in almost constant criticism from a media frustrated by a lack of anything else to throw at her. 

Politically, she has always been a vocal LGBTQ supporter, even when her own brother Christopher wrote a bitchy tell-all, she remained undaunted. 

Her most recent collaboration has been with Sam Smith on a track titled ‘Vulgar’, causing conniptions in conservative America. 

She suggested the Trump White House should be blown up — not literally, but you get the idea. You can see how she’d rile the patriarchy, the evangelicals.

But it is her approach to ageing which has drawn the most sustained and widespread criticism, led by media outlets such as the Daily Mail that wonder why she can’t age ‘gracefully’ like Jamie Lee Curtis or Andie McDowell. 

(The implication being that all women, whether you’re an actor or a sales assistant or Madonna, should age the same.) 

Madonna attends The 57th Annual GRAMMY Awards at the STAPLES Center on February 8, 2015 in Los Angeles, California.

She has not morphed into a Vegas performer in matronly sequins; she is still all fishnets and muscle, pounding away with a crew of dancers young enough to be her grandchildren. 

Which in itself sounds like an insult, while it’s actually a compliment. Imagine being that fit.

While we allow old men to be sexual — literally in the case of 83-year-old new father Al Pacino, or the gyrating Mick Jagger, 80 this month — we reserve a special kind of disgust for post-menopausal women presenting as anything other than asexual. 

Glamorous, yes, fabulous, fine, but sexually alive? Absolutely not. And this is the trail Madonna continues to blaze.

Madonna on the set of her 'Ray of Light' video, September 12, 1998.

So instead of tutting about her unnatural face, or her refusal to get off the stage, maybe one day she’ll get the cultural recognition she deserves — not as a pop star, of which there are millions, but as a one-woman boundary-pusher who, from the moment she made bra straps and belly buttons not just visible but fashionable 40 years ago, encouraged all women to be more themselves, and less who they are instructed to be. 

For that, we should thank her. And be glad she has no plans to do anything but carry on being herself.

“I look forward to many more years of subversive behaviour,” she says. “Pushing boundaries — standing up to the patriarchy — and most of all enjoying my life.”

Happy birthday, Madge.