Is it both? Is there a balance? Is there a cycle?
* * *
There is definitely a cycle; there needs to be a balance for social stability.
Keeping that balance takes a lot of familial and community Tough Love.

“Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”

? Alexander Pope

It gets slippery from there on down…

The first minute is surprisingly nice and even politically incorrect. How dare she violate the separation between church and football. The rest is a little trashy and sexually charged, but overall much better than the Shakira/Lopez performance IMHO.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2020/02/03/super-bowl-halftime-why-jennifer-lopez-shakiras-performance-empowering/4643848002/

Note that this reviewer praises Shakira’s belly dancing. I wonder if she knows that belly dancing was used by slave girls and concubines (I’m not really sure where the dividing line is, so don’t ask me) to garner their master’s favor. I doubt it. (Don’t get me wrong — I love to watch belly dancing, but at least I know what it’s all about.)

As far as Madonna is concerned, she went to Michigan as a dance major. Need I say more? Go green! Go white!

Madonna (whom I’ve always found coldly repellent…)

That’s because she is coldly repellent. The reaction is in you, but it’s a reaction to something objectively present in her.

Some folk are insensate to this aspect of Madonna; they suffer from a kind of tone-deafness. Intuitive awareness of What’s Wrong With Madonna naturally varies from person to person, but any person’s natural awareness can be destroyed over time by repeated exposure to ugly, meaningless, brutalist, joyless stimuli. (If you’d done nothing but drink acid for years, you’d no longer be able to taste food properly. Same thing.)

Neo, I’d guess you’re still sensitive because your tastes have been sufficiently-educated by exposure to good ballet, music that features real melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic interest, skillfully-rendered representational art, attractive buildings, and the like. Maybe even good poetry and literature.

In short, you have sufficient prior exposure to the transcendentals (truth, goodness, and beauty) that you can still see, hear, and in a certain intellectual sense, smell what’s wrong with Madonna.

Not that I’d know, but would the same thing happen today? Are there any critics that matter? I suspect that the industry is too far down the tubes to care about any of that. The producers know how to manufacture a positive media buzz (e.g. Jeb Bush) so who cares.

Neo is correct that Madonna was one of the artists who really commercialized sex in pop music. Some of it was a little interesting to me in terms of the concepts she was pushing, but the music did not do much for me. And except for the first few years, she was always very unemotional.

Being unemotional worked well in the film Desperately Seeking Susan (nice work by director Susan Seidelman) because of the contrast with Rosanna Arquette’s highly overwrought character, but that same lack of emotion no doubt killed the movie “Swept Away.” I never saw it, but it nearly destroyed the director’s (Madonna’s husband) career.