Madonna has constructed her 40-year profession on many issues, however controversy has been chief amongst them. From difficult sexual and gender taboos, to talking out about AIDS lengthy earlier than it was acceptable to take action, to even preventing with the literal Vatican, the artist has by no means shied away from being provocative or political.
Till, that’s, when she truly did again in 2003. That yr, the now 64-year-old pop queen shocked the media and her fandom alike by being the alternative of provocative, bowing to outrage and controversy and censoring her personal work.
Madonna pulled her 2003 video for ‘American Life’ amid worries that it endangered her kids.
Madonna’s 2003 album “American Life” was an offended, woeful rumination on celeb tradition, American politics, and “the American Dream” within the quick life-changing aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror assaults. The video for the track “American Life” was meant to take the album’s idea a step additional, by protesting President George W. Bush’s march towards the Iraq Warfare.
Madonna’s ‘American Life’ video sparked outrage earlier than it was ever launched.
Particulars of the video’s idea first started showing in late 2002 and early 2003, when the talk over the proposed Iraq Warfare was at its highest. The video, Madonna introduced, would characteristic a darkish and twisted “Warfare on Terror”-themed style present that turns into more and more violent and unsettling because it goes alongside.
The celeb look-alikes within the entrance row gleefully chortle alongside on the ever extra macabre spectacle, whereas video backdrops present extremely graphic information footage from earlier wars. In the meantime, Madonna and a cabal of feminine commandos gate-crash the style present and angrily power the assembled crowd to get up.
The notorious ending sees Madonna hurl a grenade {that a} George W. Bush look-alike makes use of to mild a cigar he shares with Saddam Hussein. Madonna meant to spotlight how nobody appeared to be taking “the catastrophic repercussions and horrors” of the proposed Iraq Warfare critically.
From the vantage level of 2023, it is not possible to argue that Madonna did not have a degree. Shell-shocked by the horror of September 11, even many liberal Individuals and Democratic politicians supported the Iraq Warfare, regardless of Iraq having nothing to do with the 9/11 assaults. As started to be revealed a yr later, the Bush Administration offered the Iraq Warfare to the American individuals on fully false pretenses.
However amid the post-9/11 mourning and worry, talking out in opposition to the warfare and President Bush was broadly thought of unforgivably unpatriotic and disrespectful, and Madonna’s “American Life” video idea sparked quick outrage and backlash—a lot in order that The New York Occasions declared it the factor that will lastly finish Madonna’s then-20-year profession.
Madonna outraged many followers by pulling the ‘American Life’ video days after the Iraq Warfare started out of respect for the US navy.
The video was finally changed with a unexpectedly thrown-together music video during which she merely lip-syncs to the track.
Days earlier than, Natalie Maines, lead singer of The Chicks (then generally known as The Dixie Chicks) had criticized George W. Bush in an anti-war assertion at a live performance, and a stunning backlash, together with boycotts and televised CD burnings, erupted.
Followers and a few within the media accused Madonna of pulling the “American Life” video as a result of she did not need to “be Dixie Chicked,” and was afraid the backlash would hobble her album gross sales (which it did certainly find yourself doing). However Madonna denied this was true in an interview with Matt Lauer, insisting she did it as a result of she feared the general public “would misconstrue…that I used to be slagging on President Bush…[or] that I used to be making mild of what’s occurring to the troopers in Iraq, which I’m not.”
“Issues are so severe and persons are so unstable that they’re not gonna see irony, they’re not gonna see subtlety, they’re not gonna see the message,” she went on to say.
In latest interviews for the twentieth anniversary of Madonna’s “American Life” video, its director Jonas Akerlund has confirmed this was certainly the case—and he maintains they made the best alternative by pulling it. However in 2005, Madonna revealed there was extra behind the choice.
Madonna later revealed she pulled the ‘American Life’ video as a result of she was afraid for her kids’s security.
In a 2005 interview across the launch of her subsequent album “Confessions On a Dance Flooring,” Madonna admitted that fears of “being Dixie Chicked” have been certainly prime of thoughts when she determined to tug the “American Life” video—however not as a result of she was frightened about album gross sales.
As revealed of their 2006 documentary, The Chicks had confronted credible demise threats, together with threats to their kids, forcing them to rent round the clock safety.
An identical worry consolidated Madonna’s determination to desert the video.
“I used to be able to struggle,” she informed Spanish-language newspaper El Pais of MTV’s insistence on censoring Madonna’s “American Life” video. “However there got here a time once I remembered that I had a household,” she mentioned, referencing her daughter Lourdes Leon, now 26, and Rocco Ritchie, now 22. (She later adopted son David Banda and daughter Mercy James, each 17, and twins Stella and Estere, now 10.)
“I noticed what the Dixie Chicks suffered once they mentioned they have been ashamed to be from the identical state as President Bush. Fairly merely, they grew to become probably the most hated girls within the US and I made a decision that my two kids weren’t going to undergo that state of affairs.”
Madonna has by no means shied from controversy since, and has continued to carry out “American Life” on tour regardless of its flop standing. However she was in all probability proper to guard her kids again in 2003—as any mom in her place would have. And given all that has occurred within the 20 years since, that ought to be a sobering thought for all of us.
John Sundholm is a information and leisure author who covers popular culture, social justice and human curiosity matters.
