Music

Madonna, OMG, you are 50.

You have said again and again that you never read newspapers or magazines, even though you are always in newspapers and magazines, so this is in some way wasted space and energy.

Then again, she needn't be present for us to talk about her. This has always been the key element to how Madonna has spent half her life, deliberately deaf in the center of the buzz. Madonna turning 50 is not about Madonna. As ever, it's about the rest of us, who are always caught watching Madonna do whatever it is Madonna currently does, even if when whatever Madonna is doing is nothing more than growing old.

"So what are you going to do when you get older, Madonna? Are you going to be going on 50 and still get up onstage and shake your booty, like Cher? What happens when your body goes?"

"Then I'll use my mind." — From an interview with Madonna, in Vanity Fair, October 1992

Here are 50 or so disconnected thoughts for and about Madonna's half-century mark. Starting with the start, not with her actual birth (on Aug. 16, 1958) but with her entrance into the collective consciousness:

On a sweaty August morning 1.3 zillion years ago, some girls showed up at our back-to-school orientation junior year changed, with messy, bleachy, streaky hair tied in raggedy bows. Black plastic wristwatches and rubber bangles stacked around their tiny wrists. Black Ibras.

The Madonna train had left the station.

The Madonna thing came, at first blush, with so much that was good: glad rags, vintage stores, granny sunglasses, costume jewels, trench coats. The Madonna thing came with clear directives: Express yourself, be yourself, winner take all.

Though I have fears, I think truthfully I'm going to live to be a very old age. If what I've gone through hasn't killed me yet, nothing's going to. That's my (bleeping) opinion." — Madonna, to Vogue, October 1996

Nobody believed Madonna would last. No story about her ever neglects to mention that fact, the improbability of her success, the enthralling triumph of complete mediocrity.

Twenty years ago, feminist scholars went bananas trying to deconstruct her, interpret her as a text. The ivory tower vogued, as Madonna Studies showed that she was (is?) the great liberator, showing the way to sex as an irrelevancy, then sex as a relevancy, then sex as an altogether different weapon, ibid and op. cit., and on and on, until finally there was nothing more to say.

Then came the articles in Forbes, BusinessWeek, Fortune: Madonna as the extremely shrewd CEO of Herself Inc.

Then came Ladies' Home Journal, with the angle of Madonna and Child. Madonna as human V-chip, shielding her children from, of all things, ice cream and popular culture: "We're a TV- and dairy-free house," she told Ladies' Home Journal in 2005.

"Even when I was a little girl, I knew I wanted the whole world to know who I was, to love me and be affected by me." — Madonna, to People, May 13, 1985

Two out of three, not bad. We do all know her, and we are all affected by her. (Yes, we are.)

The love part is the hardest.

She wanted to be loved?

Madonna is someone you have to hate in order to love. In Madonnaworld, scoffing is a value-added experience attached to pure fandom. Just watch a Madonna fan listen to the new Madonna album for the first time. There is such instantaneous loathing and fascination. You spend a week telling all your friends how bad the new album is, then a week later you magically decide you like it.

Summer horribilis! She for whom there was never such a thing as bad publicity cannot possibly be enjoying her latest headlines, can she?

The rumors (denied) about an impending divorce from Guy Ritchie, about her luring A-Rod away from his family. Headlines about her younger brother's tell-all book, Life With My Sister Madonna, No. 2 on the New York Times list.

The book has pictures of Madonna as a teenager, wearing a dress her stepmother made. It has pictures of Thanksgiving with the Ciccones. It is devastatingly unmythological.

"Listen, once you pass 35, your age becomes part of the first sentence of anything written." — Madonna, to Out magazine, April 2006

A week or so ago, there were those death-mask pictures of Madonna, seen leaving a yoga class in London, gaunt and stranger than her normal strange, with Ginsu cheekbones and these throbbing veins snaking up and down the sinew of arms that have seen much mystical discipline. Every magazine in the checkout line desperately seeking sutures: What happened to her face?!

Experts are called in, diagrams are made, and nobody seems to say, well, she's 50 you know. She'll be dead someday. We all will.

When you get to heaven, what's the DJ playing? "Ray of Light"?

Maybe, if you're a Madonna anti-fan fan, you'll get there and you'll hear those synthesized chimes from the opening of "Lucky Star," and it's a Friday night at the lake, and it is always 1980-something, and it happens all over again.