No Rock And Roll Fun

MADONNA DECIDES IT'S NOT GOING TO HARM SALES TO BE SLIGHTLY ANTI-WAR: When it really mattered, in the run-up to the war, Madonna made certain she was going to be inadvertently counted, pulling her American Life video on the grounds that it might look a little anti-war. It's clearly a sign how things are changing in the US that she now feels able to make some vague anti-Bush statements in interviews, chiding him for acting in an "irresponsible" manner. Phew, that's told him - bet he's off packing his bags and writing up a handover document for Kerry on the strength of that. Her reasons for not actually bothering to say anything back before George irresponsibled several hundred Iraqi civilains to death, and irresponsibled the US army into treating prisonners like shit?

"I have children to protect and I just didn't think it was the right time."

Yes, it's never the right time to try and stop a war before it happens - best to keep your head down until the opinion polls start to show it's getting a little more unpopular and then speak up. We'd be fascinated to hear your opinions on the Invasion of Hungary, Madonna.

But let's not throw sticks at her - she's pledged to become part of the order, rather than the chaos of society. What does she mean? She clarifies it for us:

"The stance of a rebel is 'I don't care what you think'. But if it's just for the sake of upsetting the apple cart, you're not really helping people. You turn the apple cart over and then what? Then everyone's looking at an apple cart that's turned over and they're like, well, now what do I do?"

Make cider? What's perhaps the most depressing thing here is that Madonna does seem to think that rolling about in a wedding dress and being butt-fucked by Vanilla Ice for a book is in some way the same as being a rebel, and her assumption that to rebel just means smashing up societal conventions - it doesn't seem to have entered her mind for even a half-second that sometimes, actually, rebelling can be a positive, active choice. Like in Burma, or Tibet. Or even the anti-war protests that, you know, she might have wanted to have been involved in if the time had been right.

Not that she's going to be rolling about in her pants anymore, either:

The 45-year-old mother-of-two said her days of shedding her clothes on stage or in front of the camera are also over.
"I thought I was liberating mankind but, like I said, I wasn't really offering an alternative. To a certain extent I was saying 'Look, you know, why do men only get the job of objectifying women in a sexual way? I want to do it too.' There was an element of that, but there was also an element of being an exhibitionist and saying 'look at me'. It wasn't that altruistic. I can admit that."

Hmm. Clearly, the decision to change her ways was taken too late to alter the content of the current tour, then [simulated lesbian sex, pregnant girls in their knickers dancing about the Papa Don't Preach, attempting to recreate the MTV snog with Britney, etc.] Maybe next tour, eh?