everything new is old again
the one about sex, time, religion, morality, and Madonna... kinda
Tucked between the In Memoriam and the Salute to 50 Years of Hip-Hop at 2023’s Grammy ceremony was a performance by Sam Smith and Kim Petras of their 2022 hit “Unholy.” Introduced by Madonna, Smith appeared bathing in red light, dressed in red leather (including a collar), surrounded by dancers dressed as the antagonist from “The Ring.” When Petras appeared on screen in a cage, she too was dressed in red leather. Just in case you still didn’t get it, Smith added a red hat with devil horns midway through.
My first thought? “God, this song is awful.” My second thought? “They can’t really think this is going to work, right?” The idea that anybody could be titillated, offended, scared, or even intrigued by red light and devil horns in 2023 seemed ridiculous to me.
I was wrong.
Despite my feeling that it was “focus grouped blasphemy” the performance set off a firestorm. For many it was another example of Hollyweird throwing their dark ways in the face of Good Christian Americans. Ted Cruz simply tweeted “This is evil” while his colleagues Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene went further, connecting the performance to the debate around abortion. The Church of Satan agreed with me, telling TMZ the performance was “nothing particularly special.” It doesn’t really matter which side you fall on though. The point of the performance was to spark a media moment and it worked.
The question was, how?
I had largely forgotten about the Grammy performance of “Unholy.” Nothing about it felt notable. That is until Sabrina Carpenter went on tour. She isn’t dressed in red leather and there are no horns but there is something worse than that. S-E-X.
For many, Sabrina Carpenter appeared on their doorstep overnight with an image all about sex. She doesn’t just sing about it, she embraces it as part of her persona. The ultimate example, so far? The “Juno” pose. At every stop of The Short n Sweet Tour, Sabrina Carpenter sings Juno and midway asks “have you ever tried this position?” before briefly imitating a sex position. There’s a new one every night.
The first time a “Juno” performance came down my twitter timeline it simply served to increase my respect for Carpenter and her creative team. The changing pose was clearly inspired by the ever changing “Nonsense” outros from her Emails I Can’t Send Tour. A lesser team would’ve encouraged Carpenter to spend a second tour doing “Nonsense” outros. Once I left my bubble, I began to see a different response in some places. Some people weren’t impressed, they were disgusted.
My favorite place to go when I’m looking for the opinions of “real people” is the dark wilderness otherwise known as Facebook. There a backlash brewed. Claims she didn’t deserve her success, that all she talks about is sex, that she was a terrible role model for children. Some of it so full of vitriol that I found myself genuinely taken aback.
Now, if you’re following her even a little closely it’s clear that Carpenter, much like her peer Chappel Roan, is doing a form of drag. After a decade plus of pop music all about perceived authenticity and stripping away the fantasy of pop stardom artists like Carpenter and Roan embrace a certain artifice. While still playing on the fetish of personal revelation in their lyrical content their presentation winks at the audience. As if to say, no matter what you may think their songs reveal about them, you are only so far behind the veil. Carpenters' poses, innuendo, and freshly flushed makeup look have little to do with actual sex and in my eyes are not particularly shocking. And yet, this brewing backlash treated them as if they were representative of moral decay. I scrolled through the comments asking myself the same thing I had while witnessing the “Unholy” backlash. How?
It was obvious to anybody with even a passing interest in pop culture why Madonna was asked to introduce the “Unholy” performance at the Grammys. If pop provocation has a face, that face is Madonna Ciccone. In the past 20 years culture has both been embarrassed by Madonna’s refusal to “grow up” and also embraced her moments previously dismissed as childish or desperate as the work of a true performance artist. While the burning crosses and Black Jesus of “Like A Prayer” lost her a Pepsi sponsorship, today they’re a crucial element of her iconography and the wider history of pop imagery. One of the most reposted Madonna clips in my orbit comes from ‘Truth or Dare’ (1991) in which the Toronto Police Morality Squad inform the singer that simulating masturbation during “Like A Virgin,” as she has the previous two nights, will result in them arresting her. Despite being visibly unnerved by the threat, the singer responds “I’m not changing my fucking show.” The same tour was described as “one of the most satanic shows in the history of humanity” by Pope John Paul II. Who better to introduce fresh blasphemy on a stage like the Grammys. Except, Madonna’s presence meant I couldn’t help but compare, and ‘Unholy’ didn’t hold up. Nor did it stand up against Lady Gaga’s consumption of the rosary while dressed as a Nun in 2010’s ‘Alejandro’ music video, or Nicki Minaj’s exorcism live on stage at the 2012 Grammy Awards.
If Madonna’s visual sensibility sprung from a Catholic upbringing, an obsession with art, and a coming of age directly tied to the sexual revolution, the “Unholy” performance seemed to spring from somewhere baser and more commercial. Not blasphemy as an examination of anything, but blasphemy for the sake of it. So desperate in its attempt to stir up controversy that all it engendered in me was annoyance. Not just annoyance at the two pop stars at the center of it, but also irritation with everyone upset at them. How could you allow something so surface level and without any real impact to get you so upset. Haven’t we all played this game before? I have much more respect for Sabrina Carpenter than I do for Sam Smith or Kim Petras, so my annoyance there is reserved mainly for her critics. To allow the very acknowledgement of sex to rile you was so passé. Again, I found myself asking… haven’t we all done this before?
The public embrace of Madonna’s previous antics is perhaps an extreme example. After all, few pop stars have ever gone as far as she has. Still, the basics of the game remain the same. First, a star provokes. Either on purpose or through some perceived actions. This moment often seems to coincide with the most commercially successful period of their career, until the backlash begins to overwhelm. Singles flop and albums underperform. The strong often refuse to yield the spotlight and go down in a blaze. The smart disappear, sometimes leaving whatever project they’re promoting in the dust. Then, for the few, comes the rebirth. Very rarely does the rebound result in a total reclamation of one’s previous stature, after all there is always fresh blood to pump up in anticipation of the next kill, but to make it through almost serves as a badge of honor. The public brought you to your knees, and you got up again.
Of course, this pattern is only obvious to those searching for it. The public do not see pop stars as existing in a lineage. They barely even see them as human. Sabrina Carpenter's exploration of sex is therefore completely separate from what, and who, came before her. Without that connection to what has come before her, her playful sexuality takes on a threatening air to those who see dangers to public morality around every corner.
We often think that what was once taboo can never be taboo again but that’s not really true. Female sexuality is still considered in and of itself shocking. In turn if a popstar were to go onstage tomorrow and simulate masturbation it would still be taboo even though Madonna did the same thing in 1990 because that person is not Madonna. To the general public the history of blasphemy in pop music is irrelevant in the face of Sam Smith’s devil horns. That was then, this is now. That is how what was once shocking remains so long after it was done the first time.
But if some things will never lose their power to shock in a society slavishly devoted to some performance of Christian values, why does it all feel so much more boring to the informed eye? Today even things that aren’t references feel like references. Sam Smith, Kim Petras, and Sabrina Carpenter aren’t directly referencing Madonna in the above examples, and yet it’s so easy to connect them. Lawsuits are filed seemingly monthly over dubious melodic connections. Still, today listening to the radio can feel like a never ending sense of déjà vu. There are stars who excite with their presence or their voices, but there is no sense of newness. Pop music, as much as it is an artform, thrives on constantly devouring whatever’s newly left of center and spitting it back out in a more commercial form. Much of the “underground” today seems just as commercial as the mainstream, just with a layer of grime consciously painted on.
Like I mentioned earlier the same Grammys where Sam Smith and Kim Petras performed “Unholy” included a segment honoring 50 years of the house party that is popularly credited with “inventing” Hip-hop as an art form. That segment also served as an acknowledgement of something. Once counterculture, rap was now just as establishment as her older sister rock n’ roll. Hip-hop was the last real music genre to be created. People will point to things like Shoegaze and Hyperpop. I would argue that a subgenre is not a new genre, and Hyperpop isn’t real. With Hip-hop now subsumed into the mainstream there is nothing left. At the moment, everything new is something old.
As long as there are moralists to offend and masses to entertain, the power of provocation will never fade. People have short memories. There will be other overtly sexual pop stars and other purposefully blasphemous performances. There will be more hits and more looks and more people attempting to chase the high of stardom. But will any of it feel new to those of us who remember what happened last month, last year, or last decade?
Doubtful.