On the heels of last week’s vid, in which a very young pre-stardom Courtney rocks the Boy Toy look pretty hard in one of her outfit changes, this clip fast forwards to 1995, to a notorious MTV interview disrupted by flying cosmetics – coming face to face with the Material Girl herself (who by now was in her Bedtime Stories phase), catching her very off-guard in the process, and completely stealing her interview. Look how hungry those cameras are to soak up every last drop of drama, and does she ever deliver, right down to the last ass-over-teakettle second.
I have a love/hate/love thing about Courtney – from my impressions over the years (I still have yet to read Poppy’s biography, it’s sitting right here on my to-read shelf!) she’s a very complex character, not someone who comes along very often in the pantheon of female superstars – but I adore her for totally being *not* groomed into mainstream celebrity, and refusing to play the media game during the 90’s. She’s just so raw, and even though her life has gotten to be a mess, she’s still a hell of a lot more interesting than most of the women coming out of the Hollywood machine.
And I love how Kurt Loder just melts into the background, hilariously lost behind these women.
It’s Tuesday, it’s raining, and I feel like something fabulous.
It’s 20 years later and the electricity of this performance still gives me chills – the dandies, the synchronized fan-cracking, the screams when Madonna makes her appearance. “Vogue” brought to life by a bunch of perfectly powdered French aristocrats – history’s first poseurs – it’s divine.
And just because I’m getting so goddamned tired of her – forgive me, pumpkins, but I really do not understand the phenomenon of Lady Gaga. I feel like I’m constantly being told how amazing! inventive! insane! she is but I just can’t get all worked up over a corporate product. Which is what she is to me – someone very carefully cultivated and contrived at great expense, a predictably outrageous appearance clad in 24/7 couture, a walking commercial for mediocre tunes. It feels like the bar has dropped so low for decent pop music that the world will fall all over itself at the first sign of any flavor whatsoever. Especially when we’ve seen all this already. Madonna did it all first, and she did it better. And you could argue that Madonna too was a carefully cultivated commercial, but I don’t see Gaga running out to play a pregnant teenager figuring out how to tell her father she’s keeping her baby. Or walking down the street, noshing on a bag of Cheetos. She’s not that human.
But, maybe it’s that the next generation badly wants an icon of their own – especially when they’re living in an unrelenting 80’s revival, and they’re tired of cultural hand-me-downs. And that’s understandable. But I’ll pass. I’m much too enamored of divas who aren’t above airing out their pits in a Greyhound bathroom – and making it look sexy as hell while they’re doing it, too.
