ABSTRACT
“The vast majority of people who like Madonna are over 30 and frankly, we've moved on from Madonna,” stated George Ergatoudis, the forty-seven-year-old male head of music at BBC1 in 2015. He determined that Madonna’s initial single off of 2015’s Rebel Heart would receive no airtime. The decision was based solely on Madonna’s age and the age of her perceived audience. This ageist assumption takes for granted that Madonna’s contribution to popular music is ineluctably past—and thus could no longer appeal to a new, younger fan base. It measures her persona against two seemingly incompatible standards: how a pop singer should look, sound, or behave, and how a fifty-eight-year-old white woman should conduct herself while aging appropriately. These contradictory demands raise important questions, addressed in this chapter, about Western popular culture’s relationship to its aging icons, particularly women over thirty-five, and how they manage to negotiate its norms more or less successfully. After all, despite the constant call from critics that she retire, Madonna persists, and this persisting itself may represent her greatest challenge to the genre of pop and its culture.
