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YOU’VE BEEN SANCTIFIED
AND I’VE BEEN TRIED
GUILTY BY ASSOCIATION
YOU’VE BEEN CANONIZED
AND I’VE BEEN FRIED
GUILTY BY ASSOCIATION

First she broke my heart.

Then she got me angry.

Now, she’s silently seeking forgiveness but in silence there can be no forgiveness.

We need to talk.

She needs to talk.

Not talking is giving up.

And if she wants me to give up, I will not fight it.

Madonna recently posted that crazy video of a homophobic lunatic (and I say that because this woman believes that cysts are the result of us having sex with demons in our dreams) in which she denounced the need for masks, a video also shared by Trump. Instagram deleted it for being false information, then she re-posted it again, only to have it taken down a second time. Then there was radio silence, after which she started posted videos as if nothing had happened.

After a righteous firestorm of negative responses, Madonna has still not addressed it. That’s not good, and the fact that someone who once acted so intelligently could be so duped and then so defiant about it is a disheartening statement on how far humanity has fallen. As each hour passed in which she ignored it and pretended it never happened, I felt us fall further apart from one another.

Those hours hurt.

Those hours stung.

Those hours worked to change my life-long love of Madonna.

It still feels wrong to listen to her music. I still have a sour taste in my mouth after everything, and so I haven’t heard anything by her in days – which is rather an unprecedented development. By aligning herself with conspiracy theorists and wacky doctors, not to mention the evil of something like Trump, all the joy I once felt in hearing her songs suddenly drained from the experience. (Thank God for Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’ right now.)

I’m working through it.

Working to reconcile how to find that joy in her music again despite her personal failings and faults. I believe in forgiveness, but I need her to say she’s sorry.

She wrote a fucking song about it – it shouldn’t be that difficult.

She’s fucked up before.

But she owned it then.

This feels different.

And that makes it sadder.

2020 takes and takes and takes, degrading and destroying everything we once considered stable and unbreakable, every last thing on which we thought we could always count and rely.

I was originally going to post Madonna and Joe Henry’s version of ‘Guilty By Association’ because that’s such a fitting song, but that feels wrong. And so I take her voice out of the equation, giving you the original writer’s version of it, silencing Madonna’s foolish nonsense and misinformation, her dangerous stubbornness, her death-defying lunacy.

For now, I mourn the mistake. I mourn the madness. I mourn the disgust I feel at it, and the level of my reaction, wondering if it’s all too much. Mostly, though, I mourn the fact that right now I cannot locate the joy in her music – the joy and celebration I’ve always felt, from her saddest songs to her most silly and exuberant. That joy has slipped away. And though my opinion makes no difference to her, if a lifelong fan like me is this disillusioned, I don’t see this faring well for her future or her legacy, and that’s a fucking shame.