The Infinite Star: Nostalgia, Iconography, and Madonna’s “Vogue”

Abstract

Madonna’s 2012 Super Bowl medley heralded viewers with the reworked opening to her 1990 hit “Vogue.” These bars accompanied a visual spectacle featuring Madonna dressed as Cleopatra, channeled through Elizabeth Taylor. Within a minute, four parallel nostalgic narratives unfolded: audiences were reminded of a mythologized temptress/Egyptian pharaoh, a recently deceased Hollywood screen siren, a superstar’s tabloid-topping thirty-year career, and (thanks to the score and choreography) the underground Harlem ball culture that inspired the song. Mapping these figures simultaneously onto herself, Madonna embodied what Svetlana Boym (2001) termed “reflective nostalgia,” conveying a desire to “obliterate history and return to private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.” As the song reaches its 35 ^th anniversary, this article historicizes and analyzes Madonna’s many “Vogue” performances to reveal how she has used it as a site for nostalgic play to create her own enduring legacy.

This article combines Boym’s theories with Michael Dwyer’s ideas about “star legacies” as “critical affective responses” (2015) to argue that Madonna’s reimaging of “Vogue” throughout her career enacts what I call “nostalgic legacy building.” I examine the “timeless” narratives she has created to seal her iconicity by analyzing her various reworkings of the seemingly inert track alongside her embodiment of subversive historical figures. This research contributes to conversations about nostalgia’s roles in popular music performance, showing how artists can “revisit” musical texts to summon the past in performances aided by present trends and technologies to seal their infinite futures.