Feeling depressed? Stressed? Irritated? Madonna, Queen of Pop™ and #Relatable Content, is too.
The “Love Tried to Welcome Me” icon is hard at work juggling her duties as a Portuguese soccer mom, a MDNA Skin peddler alongside a problematic, meme-stealing Fat Jew, and a musician recording her fourteenth studio album with the magical Mirwais of American Life and Music fame.
In the middle of all this, she decided to post a particularly candid WhatsApp screenshot (!) of a stream of consciousness on Thursday evening (June 14) that feels simultaneously relatable and sad.
“I waste too much time on idiots. Fools. Laziness. If all I was doing was being creative that would be different. But that is never the case. I do the work of 10 people. I micromanage people and situations all day because others don’t do their job. We live in a world where people are now conditioned to work as little as possible to make the most amount of money or simply not work at all. It’s why the suicide rate is climbing everyday. Seemingly successful people. There is no sense of community. People are disconnected from nature. There is no spiritual life. There is only fame.”
If even M-Dolla herself can’t get no satisfaction, what hope have we mere mortals?
This is hardly the first time she’s expressed impatience for the unmoved and unmotivated: “I’m tired of waiting on you,” she once scolded us while doing the splits in a pink leotard. Hell, she was telling us to get up, sing and do our thing from the beginning. She is nothing if not consistent with her messaging.
As far as micromanaging is concerned, there are plenty of business matters that might have her feeling stressed – or maybe, she’s venting from the recording studio.
We’ve seen her lashing out against the modern method of writing camps, both during the Rebel Heart press junkets and, more recently, in Guy Oseary‘s Instagram comment section. Why? Because there’s no focus, she says – everyone’s buzzing around and no one sits down for more than a few minutes at a time, and she feels as though the process is totally fragmented compared to the earlier records she wrote with just one or two producers.
“I need to make a connection,” she yearned on Ray of Light.
But in a way, it’s deeply reassuring to know that even Madonna goes through it and feels Katharine_McPhee_-_Over_It.mp3 sometimes.
All this talk about work ethic, about spirituality, about discipline (wow, it just keeps circling back to that for me this year) – is not (just) because she’s a controlling bitch: these things are crucial in driving the demons away. Create something! Meditate! Put down the fucking phone and walk outside! Prepare for a podcast recommendation in 3, 2…
I listened to a podcast! It’s called Attention Please. I actually don’t remember what it was about. (Kidding.) It’s about productivity, and how we are quite literally not biologically programmed as humans to deal with this Brave New World of “multi-tasking,” incessant notifications and the fleeting gratification of social media – all of that kind of stuff. It was similarly relatable and horrifying!
I’m not offering quick-fix solutions to the concerns raised by Her Madgesty, despite the fact that this website seems to be slowly transitioning to self-help as of late. It just prompted an “oh wow, same” response. Maybe you feel that, too.
All I can say, just to circle back to the music, is…for fuck’s sake: please let these thoughts and emotions come out in the recording studio. Yes, we (well, at least I) loved the agism-be-damned Rebel Heart bangers like “Bitch I’m Madonna,” but this one rant alone reads like the stuff of American Life/Music 2.0 – a particularly introspective time in Her Holy Madgesty’s discography. (For real, it reads like a continuation of “Love Profusion” and “Easy Ride.”)
Speak on it, Miss Ciccone! Or, better yet, sing. We’re still listening.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BjseRMFhVy1/?taken-by=madonna
Photo credit: @Madonna
