Madonna takes on frightening world with new album “Madame X”
In a new interview with Reuters filmed at the press junket in London the other day, Madonna discusses the political themes on her new album – gun control, poverty and the marginalized, her desire to “fight back” in what she sees as a frightening modern world, and how she was horrified by moves to restrict LGTBQ and women’s rights, namely in her native United States.
If you’re talking about the far right and the rights that are being taken away from, say the LGBTQ community or women’s rights … obviously I am traumatized and horrified.
About her charity work in Malawi:
There’s still an enormous amount of poverty in Malawi and the rate of HIV has gone down considerably but it’s not disappeared. (There are) all the problems that are recurring in America because of new legislation so I am going to have to keep fighting for the same things.
On how she feels about the state of the world:
It’s pretty frightening, yes, it’s pretty scary … There is stuff going on everywhere in the world. When you think about the amount of people who have died, been killed, have been wounded, whose lives have been changed irrevocably because of the lack of gun control in America, it’s such a huge, huge problem. I care deeply about it so I couldn’t not write about it.
These are crazy times because we fought really hard for a lot of these freedoms and now it seems like they are all systematically being taken away …It doesn’t make me feel hopeless. It just makes me want to fight back.
About Madame X as a “chameleon”.
Every song is a reflection of Madame X. Sometimes she’s a freedom fighter, sometimes she’s a cha cha instructor, sometimes she’s longing for love, sometimes she’s feeling nostalgic.
Sometimes she’s thinking about all the people in the world who are suffering, who don’t have a voice and who need a voice and feels a sense of responsibility for those people.
I’m incredibly grateful …to have been able to be successful for so long and to be able to be in a position that I am, to continue to create, to have the freedom to speak my mind and to feel inspired and creative.
I’ll keep speaking my mind, hopefully in an as artistic a way as possible because I do like to be political but I like to do it in a poetic way.
Read the full story – which includes a video interview – on Reuters.com.
