The singer Madonna always wanted to become: “He changed my life”
By the very etymology of Madonna, she is a religious experience of her very own kind. Singular, unmistakable, and other-worldly.
That is, if your choice of sacred text is pop songs and club bangers, of course. But in some respects, this somewhat benign label is fairly reductive to the impact that Madonna has had as a whole. This is a woman who set out on a dream in 1978 to make herself the world’s biggest star, and now at 67 years old, she’s still living it.
Yet it has to be said: you don’t get to that goddess status without someone showing you that a heavenly musical inhabitance is possible in the first place. For those teachings, you could pick any number of ethereal rock and roll stars within a lineup. But for the future Queen of Pop, there was one mythic creature who changed her life forever.
The word creature is important here because David Bowie never existed in a space that was entirely human. He was part god, part alien, part animal, and perhaps part something that no one of our mere mortal species could identify. When she saw him live, Madonna immediately recognised that what was standing in front of her was like nothing on Earth.
“He changed my life,” she said in no uncertain terms. “It was the first concert I ever went to. I remember just being frozen. Rigid. Like, staring up at this creature thinking, ‘Oh my God, he’s everything’.” There’s that word again, creature: it proves that no matter whose eyes it was coming from, no one’s perception of Bowie was that he was completely average.
Describing the rainbow spectrum of everything the Starman ever was, Madonna added, “He’s male and female and beautiful and elegant and poetic and funny and ironic and… other-worldly,” with tears even pricking in her eyes at the thought. Someone so real and energetic, but at the same time unknowable and unspecified, was perhaps the greatest muse of all.
For the budding singer, that was all the flash of inspiration she ever needed. “I recognised myself in him somehow, and he gave me license to dream a different future for myself,” she said, with no conception of how that night from when she was 15 years old would remain integral to the course of the rest of her life.
But Bowie was omniscient, ready and watching every step of the way. Although they never overtly worked together, it was telling that he trusted her to accept his induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 on his behalf, similar to how she belted out ‘Rebel Rebel’ every night on tour as a tribute after he died.
It spoke to the legacy of a pair who realised their own weirdness and supposed outcast status in society, but instead of creeping into the shadows, they decided to embrace it and emblazon it across the rest of the world. For every freakish kid who was ever out there, here was the example of two people who made it their greatest strength and changed the world all the more for it.
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