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1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1960-1969, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1970-1979, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1980-1989, Music, Popular music, Biography and memoirs, Biography, Americas, North America, USA
Vol. 14 No. 8 · 23 April 1992
page 16 | 2664 words
Plain girl’s revenge made flesh
Hilary Mantel
- Madonna Unauthorised by Christopher Andersen
Joseph, 279 pp, £14.99, December 1991, ISBN 0 7181 3536 9
Christopher Andersen’s book begins, as it should, with the prodigal, the violent, the gross. But what do you expect? Madonna’s wedding was different from other people’s. The plans were made in secrecy, and backed by armed force. ‘Even the caterer ... was kept in the dark until the last minute.’ You also, you may protest, have been to weddings where the caterer has seemed to be taken by surprise. But we are not talking here about a cock-up with the vol-au-vents. We are talking about something on the lines of Belshazzar’s feast: but more lavish, and more portentous.
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Letters
Vol. 14 No. 11 · 11 June 1992
From John Street
Anyone reading Hilary Mantel’s piece on Christopher Andersen’s Madonna biography (LRB, 23 April) might be forgiven for wondering what Madonna did and how she came to deserve the book and the review. They might deduce that she was a star whose fame was derived exclusively from a combination of sleeze and ambition. Only a very close reading might uncover the fact that she sang, but it would not reveal what she sang or how it sounded. And yet surely no account of her fame can escape her music. Image, attitude and marketing are clearly part of ‘Madonna’, but to ignore the records seems perverse, if not unusual.
Hilary Mantel writes about Madonna with the kind of sneer that is reserved, it seems, only for pop performers. Articles in the LRB on rock artists like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen have, by contrast, bordered on the reverential, while pieces on classical performers (Nicholas Spice on Gould and Brendel) are helpful and analytical. It is not obvious that such differences of treatment can be justified. It certainly is not true that pop defies enlightening analysis. The musicologist Susan McClary has, for instance, done for Madonna, in Feminine Endings, what Mantel tails to do: explain her music.
John Street
Norwich
