R27 Ha. I assure you I am not a Madonna fanatic. Just as I wrote, I grew up with Madonna's music and Michael Jackson's music as part of the backdrop of my life. As a child, my friends and I "performed" both of their music in our neighborhood. I wasn't giving an artistic assessment of their creativity or musical ability when I said in my world MJ was a "lesser" pop star than Madonna, just an assessment of my person taste.
I did always find Michael Jackson creepy. I think the picture here might be the poster my sister had on her wall when I was in kindergarten. I found him menacing and I had a lot of nightmares about him. It probably was the Thriller video that made me feel afraid of him; as a young kid, I thought the video was a horror movie and not a music video. But the same year, I did like the Billie Jean outfit and the way the sidewalk lit up. I didn't hate MJ, but I was creeped out by him. Years later, my best friend, who was mixed race and who I assume looked up to MJ in part because of that, LOVED him, and by the time he was doing "Bad," I just found him totally repulsive because of a mix of the plastic surgery, the speaking voice that I thought was fake, and the weird hiccups he did while singing. He just seemed really twisted and dangerous to me. What can I say?
Meanwhile, what can I say? Madonna went through the opposite evolution. She was nothing special in the early stage of her career. I paid no attention to her at all during the Erotica stage because I was a kid and then adolescent and it was awkward to me that she was so sexual. But then she became more sophisticated over time, with the Babyface phase and then Ray of Light and then Evita. She was actually admirable and her transformation went from cartoonish and unimportant to something sophisticated that I unexpectedly appreciated. So to me, she was the more important of the two, with everyone calling him the King of Pop and her the Queen of Pop.
I never loved his music. It was the hiccups and the "hee! hee!!" people write about above. I liked Madonna's music. She has definitely lost my admiration as she continued to evolve. I like Confessions of a Dancefloor, but I did NOT need to see her geriatric pelvis thrusting all about. And then from that point on, it's been a gradual decline.
I never liked his persona. The soft voice, the hanging-out-with-children thing when I was a child and my mother told me to beware of creepy adult men who want to hang out with children, and then the whittling away at his face. Terrifying, actually. I really was afraid of his image throughout my life up until the point of his death.
I never liked Madonna's persona, either. I like a lot of her music. I always found her repulsive in interviews. She's entirely unlikable and has zero sense of humor. And now she is more than halfway to Michael Jackson disfigurement. I'm definitely not a "Madonnabot." But between the two, as the soundtrack to my life, she definitely is the superior pop star.
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