Madonna -underated?

[Puppylucky]

Just watching Madonna at the BBC and reminded of all the images and musical styles she has explored over the years buy it seems to me she doesn't get the artistic credit of someone like Bowie. OK she isn't the greatest singer but she's brave and creative and was always interesting to watch and I can't help thinking she hasn't quite got the respect she deserves -particularly these days .

I agree.
Bowie slept with underaged groupies, which seems completely swept under the carpet, yet Madonna gets slatted for her sexuality (not my thing, but I don't get the hatred)

I definitely don't think she gets the credit she deserves. She's tough as nails.

She is the Queen if reinvention. I loathe the way people speak of her now she is 'old', mostly by women, they ought to be ashamed.

She’s a narcissistic, obnoxious freakshow whose latest attention-seeking ‘re-invention’ is to present herself as a poorly made-up Pete Burns impersonator.

She's incredible. Such an immense talent.

I used to really like Madonna. I remember driving my little mini in the 80s blasting out her first album on the cassette player. Always inventive, always evolving, kick ass and unapologetic. By the time she released her Ray of Light album I thought she had developed a real maturity in her music and as a person. How wrong I was. She went barmy after that album. Dressing as a 50 year old cheerleader, loads of cosmetic surgery, wearing a grill on her teeth, ever increasing attempts to 'shock'. She just seems a bit desperate now.

I grew up loving Madonna and I still think she is iconic and was a complete heroine from the 80s right up until the Music album. I wanted to be her! And I will forever have a huge admiration for her.

But I feel sad about what she has become. Yes, it’s her choice to do whatever she wants to do, and she was never going to ‘grow old gracefully’ and more power to her for that. But what she has done to her face and body is grotesque, and her music over the last 10+ years has been awful. Her social media presence is desperately hard to watch.

Having said that, she is an icon. Nobody can take the long career she has had and her huge influence on pop culture away from her. I think most people recognise that, and when she is gone, she will surely go down in history.

Madonna was massive in the 80s and she’s an icon, so no she’s never been underrated. Pop culture was all about her for many years. For me though she’s not as relevant anymore. The world and music have moved on from 1986.

I remember being shocked that someone could call themselves Madonna when she first came to fame. There wasn't the irreverence to things that there is nowadays.

I loved her as a teen, saw her in concert, had all her music and still love hearing her from back then.

Now I am sad at how she is. She doesn’t look like herself and the things she does to shock seem distasteful and desperate. Such a shame. I follow her on Instagram and feel genuinely sad when I see some of her posts.

Thin reedy little voice. Massive ego. Very much overrated.

Madonna is her real name

I think this is the problem. She's aging disgracefully you could say, which is completely overshadowing her artistic achievements unfortunately.

She's got a terrible voice (when its not auto tuned or been tinkered with in a studio) and is vastly overrated.

People always say she was the queen of 'reinvention', but she never really reinvents herself, she just copies something else. All her early stuff was copied from old Hollywood films/photographs but without the internet it wasn't that easy to see because the references weren't freely available. She buys songs rather than writes them (Ray of Light was bought, includingthe right to call herself the writer, and she won a grammy for it but she didn't write it).

I think her embarrassing antics now are spoiling her legacy. She's failing to reinvent herself as an old woman, and instead she's clinging onto being young, with cringeworthy results. She used to be so cool!

When you think of Bowie, he wasn't copying anything, he came up with his different iterations by himself. His music changed as he got older to reflect on life and reflect his experience. Madonna is still stuck on a superficial level singing about finding love and asserting herself (see also Kylie Minogue who only seems to have finding love and dancing at a disco as her topics). It's sad, because as a woman with all that life experience, it's not feeding into her music. As a result, she seems so dated. Surrounding herself with young artists and all the surgery don't help.

She is an original. She broke the mould.

But her voice is utterly average.

She gets full credit for being iconic, but not for being a singing talent.

Not underrated at all, Michelangelo certainly did some wonderful work.

I don't see her as original tbh. One of her videos (can't remember the song) is a pastiche of a Marilyn Monroe singing diamonds are a girls best friend.

She has never been ‘original’. Most artists aren’t.

Her talent was being an amazing creative magpie - taking imagery, sounds, concepts from other genres, artists, subcultures and making something fresh and new and with mass appeal out of them. She was incredible at doing this for several decades.

I also don’t think a straight comparison with Bowie has any meaning. Totally different type of artist. And as much as I love Bowie, he was always the know it all muso bloke’s critic’s choice. Madonna was never rated by those types. She was rated by many millions of fans worldwide, though, for a very very long time.

There was no-one even vaguely like her before she came along.

For better or worse - she brought sex into the mainstream.

Material Girl 😃

I don’t think this makes her unoriginal, her other videos weren’t in the style of anyone else’s.

But she was always going to - she’s Madonna!

Yeah, Debbie Harry totally didn't do that in the 70s

Her voice isn’t all that but she is a wonderful performer and definitely has ‘it’ in terms of star quality. She has made some great songs, whether she wrote them or not isn’t super relevant imo.

she’s become a bit of an old lech with all her young dancer boyfriends but I’m not sure it’s really that different to male artists her age dating young women, it’s just collectively we get the ick about women doing it.

Sorry, didn't mean that to sound as arsey as it does! Lack of sleep.