Why Madonna Has Made Me So Mad—Once Again

Unlike gazillions of people across the globe for the past four decades, I never had much use for Madonna. I’m an indie-rock geek with blues and country leanings, so her dance-pop didn’t do a thing for me. Although I considered her a beautiful woman (still do—her plastic surgery team deserves a medal), my blonde bombshell role models were Debbie Harry and Dolly Parton. If anything, I found her blatant opportunism minimally annoying—the way she’d co-opt an offbeat trend and turn it into acceptably outrageous fodder for MTV. But, hey, a Material Girl’s got to make a buck, right? Still, ever since I began writing about entertainment, I sought to avoid Madonna. I figured, she gets enough attention, she doesn’t need any from me.

So why am I giving it to her now? Because with “God Control,” her new video (which you can watch below), Madonna has finally gotten a rise out of me. The eight-minute-plus opus opens with a club marquee reading WE NEED TO WAKE UP and a warning that the clip to come is disturbing. Then the shooting and the screaming starts, accompanied by a disco beat and synth strings, in what unfolds as a reenactment of the mass murder at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, where 49 people were killed and 53 others wounded in 2018.