Could popular music spawn a more morally and politically repulsive personality than Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone?

I was a ten-year-old when Bill Hayley's "Rock Around the Clock" became a big hit in Australia. The years following were the pristine period of pop and rock music with unforgettable teenage songs and personalities, among whom were Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, the Everley Brothers, Ricky Nelson, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Roy Orbison. They were songs and personalities that appealed to the innocence of fifties kids, and presented no problems for most parents. How times and popular music have changed.

It seemed that it took no time for pop and rock music to justify the claim that it had become a sleazy world of sordid sex, drink and drugs, peopled by the externally glamorous but internally void. Incitement to brutality and violence would be added in the last decade of the 20th century. But to my mind nobody better exemplifies the way and the extent to which teenagers and teenage music have been degraded than the person who calls herself "Madonna".

As sordid and sleazy as the world of pop and rock music has become, most people could recognise it for what it unashamedly is. The difference with Madonna is that she has been, as a foremost representative of the PC-class, at the vanguard of the campaign to turn notions of what was once good into bad, and notions of what was bad into good. Her concerts (her medium) have been explicitly propagandist, featuring the worst examples of PC-class smear, nastiness and slander. Everybody knows that her major target is the Catholic Church. Any way of offending Catholics, and demonising the Church could never be too horrible or outlandish. It is a mystery to me that parents of teenagers could send their children off to her concerts to have their minds putrefied with her political hatred.

Madonna is not a naturally attractive person - and nobody can be blamed for that. But all the promotional props, all the fashions, all the publicity churned out by an army of PR whores cannot improve the look of despair that continually imposes itself on all the outward glitter. And it's all glitter. There is nothing below or inside the gigantic ego except the darkness she tries to obliterate with all the externals - and the hatreds generated by her essentially materialist view of life, hatreds that continually demonstrate what a grotesque hypocrite she is. Hypocrisy, that's the great virtue of her class.

To demonstrate all that I am claiming, Madonna laid into Sarah Palin yet again during her latest concert calling her "Sarah f..king Palin". It came in rave about the audience being invited to "her party" to which Sarah Palin was shut out. It's significant and indicative of what I'm saying that the Madonna's usual obnoxiousness was preceded by calls for the audience to give her a cheer. "I'm working my arse off for you..." she appealed. "My ego needs it...I'm feeling insecure..." There you have it: the empty despairing Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone.

A clip from the concert can be viewed on The Huffington Post, a champion in PC nastiness and hatred. Madonna goes off on Sarah Palin

comments: gerardwilson@dodo.com.au