For the last couple of weeks I’ve been driving around with Madonna and Cyndi Lauper in the car. It’s all a bit retro really, like stepping back into the Eighties when, for a brief while, they were rivals for the queen of pop title. What’s struck me is how Cyndi sounds warm and interesting and grown up on her new album, while Madonna is having a mid-life crisis and desperately trying to attract Gen Y shoppers.

I have to admit I’m not a die-hard fan of Madonna. I think she’s done some incredibly stupid and embarrassing things in her time and is well off the rails these days. Nevertheless, however much her biggest critics would disagree, for all her vanity and calculating behaviour, I think Ray of Light is one of the greatest albums ever recorded and believe she is one of the most significant women of the 20th Century. Of the 21st Century, not so much.

So, Madge's little bro, Christopher Ciccione, has written his autobiography, and it’s called Life with My Sister Madonna. That tells you something before you even get to the very unflattering photo of her Madgesty on the cover, looking every one of her nearly 50 years. The younger brother, by exactly 27 months, unravels the Madonna story and all its mythology with considerable interesting detail during her early years.

Interestingly, in all of this we learn very little about the author. He claims to have had a deep and loving relationship with a man named Danny that lasted ten years, but Madonna never cared for him nor got to know him and neither do we. We don’t even know what he looked like, just what he did for a job and how unhappy he was about always playing second fiddle to the Material Girl.

On the other hand the reader must endure endless pages of celebrity namedropping. The list of pop tarts, movie stars and pointless supermodels with whom Christopher has snorted cocaine (key bumps you understand, never lines) reads like a who’s who of Hollywood rehab clinic outpatients. He describes Donatella Versace, mirror and straw in hand, as “looking beautiful” and you’re left thinking “in which parallel universe?” The "A" in A-list, as you always suspected, stands for "airheads".

The most admirable thing about Madonna is that she’s done it all standing on her own two feet, a woman who knows what she wants and goes after it with single-minded determination. And she’s a slave to no man — although her brother would have us believe that’s changed since she married Guy Ritchie, who seems to be partly the catalyst for this tome.

Christopher Ciccione, on the other hand, has never grown up, stood on his own two feet and made a living for himself. In his own words he’s done everything Madonna asked or told him to do, has relied on her for employment as her interior designer, stage designer, dresser and sometimes director, not to mention under or unpaid general dog’s body, and is apparently left feeling aggrieved. The word codependent comes easily to mind.

So here he is, “Madonna’s gay brother”, with no identity of his own and well on the way to 50 himself. And to celebrate her milestone birthday he writes a “tell all” book about the woman he’s been dangling off like a parasitic mistletoe for half a century. I’m sure it’s selling by the truck load, so nothing’s really changed. However unwittingly, Madonna is still supporting her brother’s inferiority complex and in all likelihood his coke habit.

You know that saying: get a life. Preferably your own.

Comments (1)

:-P
written by Israel Henriques, July 31, 2008 - 12:13:31 am CDT

Like it or not Gavin, Madonna is the Queen :-)

PS - M and Chris do not speak anymmore, not since 2003... Though Chris said in an interview last week that she tried calling him a few times a few weeks prior to the book being released and he ignored her calls. Interesting.

21 Sleeps till I get to see the queen perform!

Thanks for writing!

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