Madonna poster article
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Madonna – American Life.
By JP Webber, Music on Posters editor.
Pop posters are generally dominated by glamour and usually the gaze of the superstar looking out at you as your heart melts (teenage girls/boy bands) or your loins stir (males from puberty to infinity/Beyonce or Christina or J Lo etc.). God knows Madonna has put out enough of these images, plus a whole lot more, so it’s one of the less stereotypical posters that we’re thankfully looking at here.
Every now and then pop stars feel the need to try and be serious and persuade everyone that they’re capable of doing something other than just getting into the charts. When this happens you have to have some serious looking publicity to go with it, hence posters like this one. Madonna’s face still dominates of course, but for once she’s not a sex object, temptress or dominatrix (at least not overtly). So what is going on here? Not so easy to unravel.
Why not start with the title? American Life. Okay, we can see that there are elements of the American flag on the poster, but what is it supposed to mean – if anything – in relation to American life? There are two stars, almost top left, and then just below it looks as though two stripes have been torn away. Might these be the two red stripes that we find on Madonna’s face?
What could the stripes mean? Do they represent blood, scars, badly placed lipstick – war paint, perhaps. The stripes of the American flag made–over onto Madonna’s face as war paint? Possibly… that might say something about American life, past and present. You’ll have noticed by now that I’ve slipped in a very famous image of Che Guevara. Notice any similarity? If nothing else there’s certainly a similarity of style. But why copy it? What does this add to the mix? We all know that Guevara was a Cuban revolutionary, is Madonna about to invade Cuba?
The main point of Madonna’s poster is that she wants to confer a degree of seriousness to her CD. It’s called American life and this poster suggests that she’s got something to say on the subject – some of which might be controversial, with just the slightest hint of a revolutionary idea, perhaps. She’s also hi-jacked a famous image knowing that it will catch a lot of eyes and hopefully sell more records. Do you hear Che turning in his grave?
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