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Reply to "Swept Away"

I always wanted to be a self-sucker. Then I could take a Holiday and bring back all of those happy days. Instantly.

I've had my ups and downs with her, but I fully admit there was a time in my life when I absolutely LIVED for her. (during the Blonde Ambition era) That's not the case anymore, but hey she's popped my cherry over the years.

As a teenager back in Denver, Madonna's first album, released when I was in highschool, conjured up all my life-long fantasies of being a New Yorker with its whole underground club scene filled with fascinating, freaky people straight off the pages of Interview magazine (at the time a much better read). While "Holiday" and "Burning Up" and "Physical Attraction" were first happening, friends would come back from trips to New York with citings of Madonna, Grace Jones and others ... I so badly wanted to be a part of it all. I later turned against her for a while when her second, more pop/commercial album came out because -- although I loved "Like A Virgin" -- I thought she'd gone too mainstream and teeny bopper and so her whole cool New York club credibility was shot in my mind. Likewise I pretty much hated the True Blue/Barbara Mandrell hair period, though I appreciate it more now. But then the release of Desperately Seeking Susan and "Get Into the Groove" brought me straight back to her again, all those weird New York locales in the movie etc and I even took courage from her Susan character when I came to New York with nothing but a couple of suit cases and $90 in my pocket (okay, I had one close friend who had moved here first).

After that I forgot about her for a while, then came Blonde Ambition which completely blew me away. The stagewear, the songs, the production numbers, the "Vogue" video -- it was all too much. I was obsessed. At the time I thought it was hot that she took those vogueing queens off the piers and threw them in the face of middle America, though of course in retrospect it meant the death of that subculture more or less. Throughout the 90s there were ups and downs, but if for nothing else other than teen nostalgia (but there are other reasons) Madonna even now still qualifies for a place on my pin-up wall, alongside my other treasured icons like Grace Jones, Annie Lennox, Boy George, Bowie, the Stones, the Beatles, Tina Turner, Stevie, James Bond, the Supremes and all the rest.

But that new song American Life does suck. And of course I still think she's a cunt.
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