Madonna opened the increasingly, almost traumatically, passé MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night surrounded by women young enough to have grown up in a world she had already remade. There was Sabrina Carpenter, 27, singing "Bring Your Love," the collaboration from Madonna’s Confessions II. Then came Charli XCX, 34, emerging from a bathroom stall for "Danceteria Afterhours," followed by a small parade of cameos that included Julia Garner, Debi Mazar, Sombr and Seth Rogen.
It was Madonna’s first VMA performance in 23 years and Madonna, 68, was certainly still Madonna. The "Queen of Pop" wore the corset and thigh-high boots that have come to define both her onstage and offstage personas. There were also bondage-clad dancers that worked well with the old mixture of sex, spectacle and provocation that Madonna is associated with.
There are many ways to read a 68-year-old pop star returning to a stage she helped make culturally important. Nostalgia is the easiest and another go-to would be vanity, but Madonna offered a more interesting possibility: perhaps longevity begins with declining to cooperate with other people’s timetable for your disappearance. It is a rule President Donald Trump appears to understand unusually well but that Madonna learned first.
Later that night, while accepting the VMA for Artist of the Year, Madonna told a story about the first time she performed at the awards, back in 1984. During "Like a Virgin," one of her stilettos came off so she dove after it and, as she moved through the air, her dress went up and her derriere was exposed. According to her own retelling, Madonna went backstage rather pleased with herself.
Her manager’s assistant had a different assessment: her "career was over." This is funny now for obvious reasons: Madonna went on to become one of the defining pop stars of the next four decades. But there is something else in the story that explains Sunday night better than any corset could. Madonna has been being told she is over almost as long as she has been Madonna.
At first, she was too vulgar. Eventually, inevitably, she became too old. Pop music kept producing replacements and Madonna kept encountering them, collaborating with them, kissing them, competing with them and occasionally collecting awards alongside them.
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