Madonna's Hernia

You probably saw a story about it, but I'm going to tell you about anyway: Madonna apparently had surgery to cure a hernia. A minor event, in the greater scheme of things, no doubt. My God, it made me feel old, though.

I've always felt a little privileged to have been marinating in the pop culture when Madonna came out. I remember very distinctly being at a picnic -- it was called a picnic, it was called a party at a park, but it was basically a picnic -- in 1984 just after the finish of a play that I was in and just before I started high school, where a guy who was two years older than me and who was in the play and who would be the high school quarterback was standing around singing Madonna's "Holiday." (I now realize that the Go Go's' Vacation was a much better song on a similar theme.) Can you imagine a high school quarterback standing around singing something by Avril Lavigne or Ashlee Simpson (I'm not equating those two, BTW) these days? Uh, probably not.

But Madonna was a big deal. She wasn't particularly original to start -- she more or less took Deborah Harry's vibe and mixed it up with slightly updated disco music. She hit big right when videos started, probably largely because of videos. She has been a hell of a lot more durable and interesting than just about every other singer who hit it big via early videos. (Anyone know what Toni Basil is doing these days?) She clearly was intentionally outrageous to get attention -- rolling around on the ground singing "Like a Virgin," dancing around with burning crosses in the "Like a Prayer" video, the whole Sexx CD (I really wanted to type "album" there, but I have decided to leap into the 1990's) and book, the video with risque stuff in it that MTV wouldn't play before 11 p.m. or something (the one that they parodied on Wayne's World when Garth had a unit on him). Madonna, though, wasn't just trying to shock people to make money. She actually made the effort to be a better singer. She had a sense of humor (thus the participation in the Wayne's World parody). The thing that I found pretty impressive was that she was willing to publicly link herself with a lot of gay-themed things at a time when that wasn't particularly acceptable. You can view her use of "vogue" dancing as just a slick co-optation of gay culture to sell CD's, but would that kind of dancing ever gotten out into broader pop culture without Madonna? I think not.

So, anyway, I've felt a little privileged to have been around to see Madonna. Not nearly like I feel about having been around to watch the Berlin Wall fall or or to see Nelson Mandela become president of South Africa or even to watch the various sports miracles that I've seen (Doug Flutie's pass, Jack Nicklaus at the Masters in 1986, Kirk Gibson). It's just that there aren't that many people who make you consistently think, "OK, what's she going to come up with next?"

And now Madonna has a hernia.

Not one of those "sports hernias" that have become one of the cool injuries for professional athletes to have (along with microfracture surgery). Just your basic kind of hernia. The kind that Weird Al Yankovic sang about in "Livin' With A Hernia" (to the tune of James Brown's "Living in America". Heh!) Man, it was bad enough when Madonna bought the Scottish castle. Not much says unfunky like living in a castle in cold, foggy Scotland. But a hernia? Madonna? How did that happen?

What's next? Will Tom Cruise turn out to be a freak? Will Andre Agassi go bald? Will Kathleen Turner start playing parts where she pretends she was a man?