Women, Action & the Media

Madge was all clear on those fronts last night, but there’s plenty more to poke at for a deeper meaning, mostly her collaboration, if we want to call it that, with M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj, arguably the two most important female rappers right now. The lead single from her new album “MDNA” is a song called “Give Me All Your Luvin,” featuring Minaj and M.I.A. Minaj’s first full-length album, “Pink Friday,” was released last year, with ubiquitous summer single “Super Bass” hitting #3 on the Billboard charts, and guest verses on most popular hiphop tracks in the last year. M.I.A. made a name for herself first as an indie-rap cover girl before her Clash-sampling single “Paper Planes” went triple platinum. These two women are current, sartorially adventurous and always controversial; why aren’t they headlining the Super Bowl, rather than chanting “L-U-V Madonna!” and waving pom-poms? Is it because they’re both brown?

Madonna’s never been shy about cultural appropriation. “Vogue,” one of her most enduring hits, is about a dance craze created in underground dance clubs by queer folks of color. In “La Isla Bonita,” she sings a “Spanish lullaby” over Cuban drums, about a passionate Latin love affair. In the “Give Me All Your Luvin” video, she uses Minaj and M.I.A. almost in the way Gwen Stefani used the Harajuku girls; the idea is that she seems cool and worldly and “with it” by association, while they stand mostly idle, cheering her on. She, as many white artists who have come before her, is interested in the kind of authenticity that gets conflated with traditionally black cultural spaces like hip-hop. Madonna’s choice of Sri Lankan-British M.I.A. and Trinidadian-American Minaj also makes the collaboration, and therefore Madge herself, appear global in scale.

They too are benefiting from this exchange, however, and boy, does Madonna know it. Not only does she reference many of her past hits in the song, but at one point in the video for “Give Me All Your Luvin,” she, M.I.A. and Minaj are all dressed like Madonna-doing-Marilyn-in-1984. There’s another moment where she is clutching a plastic babydoll to her leopard-print bra, miming breastfeeding, perhaps a metaphor for the stardom she’s nurturing. In part and parcel with her appropriations, Madonna is known as a constant cultural innovator, and she bestows enormous institutional clout on fresh starlets via her “weird annexation of other lady singers,” as Natasha Vargas-Cooper put it. Performing at the Super Bowl could potentially be a hugely validating moment for both M.I.A. and Minaj, who, despite their popularity, are both unlikely to have been given a spot if it weren’t alongside her Madgesty. They reacted to this newly bestowed stature in ways consistent with their public personas. Minaj, all enthusiasm and cleavage in the music video, advertised the spot in the video for her most recent single, “Stupid Hoe”; M.I.A., the erstwhile queen of “rebel” cool, has a demeanor which moves from bored to petulant through “Give Me All Your Luvin,” and as you may have heard, gave the camera the middle finger at the Super Bowl. For all the conversation about Madonna being upstaged by this flip of the bird, she’s really been given the stamp of cool disrespectability by her association with such a devil-may-care attitude, without having to publicly apologize for it.

There are lots of questions to ask here: Will this give any of their new albums a sales boost? Will they be pitted against each other by tabloids in future weeks? Will either new sort of cred (“street” for Madonna, “institutional” for M.I.A./Minaj) stick? Is the brand of femininity being put forth by any/all of these artists a consistent or positive one? Will the massive attention given to this half-time show ensure more female artists at future Super Bowls? And, besides the Giants, who won? Is it Madonna, for staying young and hip by association? M.I.A., for being “uncompromising” in the face of “selling out“? Minaj, for playing along so nicely? Did any of the three actually accomplish these things?

This was, for me, the most entertaining Super Bowl half-time show since Prince knocked it out of the park in 2007. I think that this appearance is going to give Minaj and M.I.A. a mainstream visibility different than they’ve experienced before. They may have to battle to keep their personas intact, if that’s what they want, but maybe Madonna’s taught them a valuable lesson in evolving to stay afloat. As for the rest of us, the responsibility is to then hold them all accountable: to buy or not buy their new records, to request more diverse performers at the Super Bowl, and to see what they all come up with next.