From Cher to Lady Gaga: Madonna’s five pettiest feuds
Like any good royal monarch, Madonna takes her title as the Queen of Pop very seriously. But in perhaps a more medieval style, she also embodies the mantra of ‘off with their heads’.
As it happens, the Queen of Pop and the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland do actually have a lot in common as the slightly terrifying and inimitable overseers of their kingdoms. One is of a fictional and fantastical land, the other is of the equally fantastical but not quite as fictional scene of the music industry. Woe betide anyone who should dare to disobey the orders of the landscape’s true regal star.
All of this is to essentially say that Madonna takes up a space in the sonic leagues that can never be imitated by anyone else, but with this can often come an inflated sense of ego, along with a smattering of some of pop’s pettiest feuds. Of course, you can hardly say that she is the only pot stirrer in all of music, but in terms of frivolous fights and rather superfluous squabbles, she seems to take the crown in more ways than one.
Over the years, alongside her main focus of dominating the charts and giving true weight to the notion of global icon in every sense of the phrase, Madonna has also taken up a bit of an unerring side hustle in starting feuds with artists of every form. They could be some of her fellow pop prototypes or rising stars that she fears could soon be stealing her thunder, but between them, they all share the battle of one hurricane force: the wrath of the queen.
Five of the pettiest feuds involving Madonna explained:
Elton John
There’s a common theme to most of Madonna’s feuds that she does eventually end up burying the hatchet, with Elton John being the most recent example. This was, however, the pettiest of all feuds, which lasted decades, and began in the early 2000s when John accused the singer of lip-syncing. From that point forward, the claws were out.
Madonna’s team responded by saying that she doesn’t “spend her time trashing other artists” – a slightly rich statement if ever you’ve heard one, given the number of fights she has under her belt – but nevertheless, things spiralled. The pair flung various scathing insults back and forth over the years, and when they came face to face at Saturday Night Live earlier this year, things had the potential to turn nasty. But instead, peace prevailed – the two pop titans made up, and even posted pictures on social media together to prove it.
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga is a blonde bombshell of a woman, with an eccentric style, and with many a hit to her name – in a lot of ways, she’s like the Madonna of the 21st century. Anyone else may just see that as a simple likeness, but between the pair, it was far more of an insult. Indeed, the Queen of Pop took more than a little umbrage when she noticed the supposed similarity between Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ and her own 1989 hit ‘Express Yourself’.
Yet with potential copyright claims aside, Gaga was not about to let Madonna go without a fight. “Madonna and I are very different,” she stated in a 2016 interview, rebuking the comparison between them.
“I play a lot of instruments, I write all my own music,” she added. “I spend hours and hours a day in the studio. I’m a producer, I’m a writer. What I do is different. I’m not just rehearsing over and over again to put on a show.”
This was bound to ruffle feathers, but once again, time has proved to mature Madonna. The pair were seen together at the 2019 Oscars, and whatever was said between them, there’s not been another word since.
Boy George
“Every gay man loves Madonna and there’s no one gayer than me,” Boy George once proclaimed, but that still didn’t stop him from airing his grievances over some of his less-than-graceful skirmishes with the singer from days gone by. While he has admittedly climbed down from once calling her a “vile, hideous human being with no redeeming qualities,” it didn’t mean he was going to let bygones be bygones.
The petty root of the tension seemed to be placed in the fact that, during the 1980s, George was somewhat under the impression that he and Madonna were friends of a kind. Then, one fateful day in a hotel in New York, “Madonna arrived with Sean Penn and pretended she didn’t see me,” he recalled – and the spark was well and truly lit.
“Madonna is everything it says on the tin but she adds new ingredients every day. I know for a fact she’s too full of herself to even mention me,” George reasoned. With an uncharacteristic silence from the woman herself, it might just be true.
Janet Jackson
Romantic tensions and family domestics are never a good combination, so when Madonna decided to insult Janet Jackson while on a date with her brother, Michael Jackson, you can imagine that it didn’t necessarily go down too well. Later, when Jackson was asked about the musical similarities between her and Madonna, she slyly panned: “It’s dance music, I’ll say that, which is very similar. I think… How do I put this? I think what I do has class to it. I’ll say that.”
For her own part, Madonna roundly said she was “mystified” by Jackson’s ire towards her as she had “never met the woman”. When they did eventually come face to face, the tensions did seem to subside, but with some stern lessons learned. Never slag off people’s family members in front of them, and more importantly, don’t do it with the eyes of the world watching.
Cher
It was perhaps inevitable that the Queen of Pop and the Goddess of Pop were going to rut horns at some point, given that they are essentially vying for the same throne in pop royalty. The only consolation is that one seems to be seeking material prestige, while the other basks in a more ethereal realm. However, moving in many of the same circles at the height of both their respective fame, clashes were bound to happen. For her part, Cher called Madonna “rude” and a “spoiled brat”.
Making it clear on various occasions that there were far worse things she could potentially say, Cher always wagered her comments by adding that she had a respect for Madonna, for single-handedly dominating the pop industry in a way that no other artist, including herself, had ever done before.
As time wore on, they did appear to bury the hatchet and have been seen posing together at events – but however the solution was reached, whether it was some serious mediation or a case of divine intervention, it was nothing short of miracle work.
