Madonna in the B**** I'm Madonna music video.
Remember when Madonna used to push boundaries? She did it at awards shows, in interviews and especially in music videos. She burned crosses in Like a Prayer, gyrated in white lace for Like a Virgin.
Offensive? Maybe. But also original and artistic. Her surreal video for Bedtime Story, directed by Mark Romanek, is part of MOMA's permanent collection; auteur David Fincher filmed Vogue, a spectacular tribute to old Hollywood glamour and the raging dance-club scene of the 1980s.
Watch the Vogue music video by Madonna:
So what happened?
Madonna's media push for her latest album, the middling Rebel Heart, has been a parade of miscalculations. She's trying hard, for sure, using social media and all that stuff to keep up with the whippersnappers. It hasn't worked. Take the Instagram campaign where she photoshopped the faces of historic icons into the same black-wire masks she wore on the album cover art. Turned out no one much cared to see Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. done up in crypto-S&M gear.
Madge, who has historically basked in every iota of controversy, responded to the furor in an unexpectedly banal way: She offered up a half-hearted apology. And then she pressed on, releasing the video for her single Living for Love on Snapchat, because that's where the kids hang out these days.
Madonna appears to be putting less thought into her messages than their delivery mechanisms. What do the music and videos matter as long as they're served up in bite-sized pixels that youngsters love to consume?
And that's especially clear in her sad new video for B**** I'm Madonna.
Madonna teased the video with a poster, touting the big A-listers who would be making cameos: Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus and Rita Ora.
With its black-white-and-red color scheme, the poster looked an awful lot like the ones Taylor Swift released ahead of her Bad Blood video premiere. Swift similarly took pains to namedrop the stars she had recruited (Cindy Crawford, Cara Delevingne, Selena Gomez, Mariska Hargitay, Lena Dunham and Hailee Steinfeld, among others).
Bad Blood was inspired by a feud Swift had with Perry, and the video was a millionaire's version of a grade school taunt: Oh, you want to mess with me? Then you'll have to mess with my powerful friends, too.
Watch the Bad Blood music video by Taylor Swift:
Madonna's ambitions for her video are no less obvious, but they're a lot less persuasive.
She wants to get in on the #SquadGoals trend, showing off her alliances with a powerful posse.
But she's not convincing anyone. Aside from Chris Rock and Rita Ora, the other A-listers don't even show up in the same frame as Madonna. Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry agreed to lip-sync the words "B****, I'm Madonna," but they're not even in the same room. Neither is Kanye West who appears for a fraction of a second. Their clips were obviously spliced in. Even Minaj, who is featured on the track, appears only through a television screen.
The faux-camaraderie feels even faker given how many of these stars, like Madonna, also proselytize for Tidal, Jay-Z's much-ridiculed new streaming music service. Madonna's video debuted exclusively on Tidal, so only members could watch her strut and sing in her animal print mini-dress - at least, until a copy showed up on YouTube.
So what is this video? A promotional tool for Tidal? Madonna's desperate bid to be part of the zeitgeist? Whatever it is, it feels empty, desperate and wholly unoriginal - a sad development for an artist who used to refuse to conform.
Watch the B**** I'm Madonna music video by Madonna - Warning: song contains explicit language: