HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MADONNA
BEAUX HOMMES celebrates an artist who made creative rebellion a way of life
Today, August 16, BEAUX HOMMES wishes a very happy birthday to Madonna.
There are successful artists. There are famous artists. And then there are the rare artists who change the vocabulary available to everybody who comes after them.
Madonna belongs to that last group.
For the leadership team and staff of BEAUX HOMMES, Madonna represents something particularly important: the courage to create without waiting for permission.
That idea is woven into the DNA of our magazine.
We celebrate beauty. We celebrate men and women. We celebrate straight, gay and bisexual people. We celebrate fashion, bodies, art, music, film, travel, sexuality, humor, science fiction, history, politics and ideas. Sometimes those things fit comfortably together. Sometimes they collide. We rather like the collision.
Madonna understood the creative possibilities of collision decades ago.
She brought pop music into conversation with high fashion, underground culture, photography, dance, cinema, religion, sexuality, queer culture, feminism and contemporary art. She understood that the image surrounding a song could become part of the song—and that an artist could use clothes, bodies, choreography, typography, photography and controversy as pieces of one enormous creative language.
That matters to us.
THE TEMPLATE OF CREATIVE REBELLION
If we had to describe Madonna’s influence in one phrase, it would be this:
She became a template for creative rebellion.
Not rebellion merely for the pleasure of shocking people. Creative rebellion is something more interesting.
It is looking at the rules governing your field and asking:
Who made these rules?
Why am I following them?
And what happens if I make something else?
Madonna repeatedly asked those questions.
She changed her sound. She changed her clothes. She changed collaborators. She changed visual languages. She moved between glamorous and severe, romantic and confrontational, sacred and profane, mainstream and underground.
Most importantly, she refused the idea that reinvention somehow made an artist less authentic.
For Madonna, reinvention became authenticity.
That lesson remains enormously valuable to anyone trying to make something original.
SHE MADE THE VISUALS MATTER
BEAUX HOMMES is intensely visual, so perhaps this is one reason we feel such an affinity with her work.
Madonna never treated photography, fashion or video as decoration added after the “real” work was finished. The visual presentation was part of the work.
Think about how dramatically different her worlds have been.
The streetwise downtown energy of the early years.
The Old Hollywood glamour.
The religious imagery and provocation of Like a Prayer.
The monochrome erotic sophistication surrounding Vogue and Erotica.
The strange, spiritual, futuristic beauty of Ray of Light.
The cowboy iconography of Music.
Again and again, she built worlds.
And she taught generations of creative people that you were allowed to tear down yesterday’s world and construct another one tomorrow.
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SHE UNDERSTOOD THE POWER OF BEAUTY
Madonna also understood something BEAUX HOMMES believes deeply: beauty can have ideas behind it.
A beautiful photograph doesn’t have to be intellectually empty. A muscular body doesn’t have to be intellectually empty. Fashion doesn’t have to be intellectually empty. Sexuality doesn’t have to be intellectually empty.
Beauty can make you look—and then the artist can decide what you’re going to encounter once she has your attention.
Madonna has spent much of her career playing with exactly that exchange.
She made people look.
Then she made them argue.
AND SHE REFUSED TO DISAPPEAR
There is another reason her birthday deserves celebrating.
Madonna was born in 1958. She turns 68 today.
For decades, popular culture has maintained an especially unforgiving relationship with women and aging. Women are encouraged to be beautiful but punished for appearing concerned with beauty; encouraged to be sexy but informed that sexuality comes with an expiration date; celebrated when young and then expected to surrender cultural territory gracefully.
Madonna has never seemed particularly interested in surrendering anything.
People can debate individual albums, performances, costumes, photographs or decisions—and they certainly do. But there is something radical about a woman who has spent more than four decades in global popular culture continuing to insist:
I am still here. I am still creating. I am still changing. And I will decide what my age looks like.
You don’t have to agree with every choice to admire the audacity.
WHAT SHE MEANS TO HER FANS
For millions of fans, however, Madonna’s importance goes beyond records and fashion.
She arrived in people’s lives when many of them were trying to understand who they were.
For women, she demonstrated an extraordinary degree of control over her ambition, image and sexuality.
For gay men, she became one of popular culture’s most visible longtime allies during years when AIDS devastated communities and too many powerful institutions responded with silence, fear or indifference.
For queer audiences more broadly, she brought people, imagery and cultural references that had often existed at society’s margins into millions of living rooms.
For outsiders of every variety, there was another message:
You can invent yourself.
Perhaps that is Madonna’s greatest gift to her fans.
Not be like me.
But:
Become more completely yourself.
WHAT SHE MEANS TO BEAUX HOMMES
Our magazine isn’t interested in creating one definition of beauty, masculinity, femininity, sexuality, art or culture.
We’re interested in opening doors.
That inevitably puts us in debt to artists who opened doors before us.
Madonna kicked down quite a few.
Her career reminds our leadership team, our staff and our creative collaborators that a publication should never become so comfortable with its own identity that it becomes afraid to surprise its audience.
Try the strange idea.
Mix things that supposedly don’t belong together.
Let high culture meet pop culture.
Let beauty meet intellect.
Let sexuality meet humor.
Let men admire men.
Let women admire men.
Let people argue.
Let the next issue look completely different from the previous one.
And above all:
Don’t ask everybody’s permission before creating something new.
That is a philosophy BEAUX HOMMES understands very well.
So today we raise a glass to the woman from Michigan who went to New York, helped rewrite the rules of global pop culture and somehow made the world spend the next four decades wondering what she would do next.
There are easier ways to build a career.
But then, easy was never really the point.
Happy 68th Birthday, Madonna.
Thank you for the music.
Thank you for the images.
Thank you for the arguments.
Thank you for the doors you opened.
And thank you for reminding creative people everywhere that sometimes the most interesting response to a boundary is simply to cross it.
With love from the leadership team, staff, artists, writers and readers of BEAUX HOMMES.
Keep creating. Keep changing. Keep rebelling.
Happy Birthday, Madonna.