Madonna
On sale
10th October 2023
Price: £14.99
A SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN AND DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR
With her arrival on the music scene in the early 1980s, Madonna generated nothing short of an explosion.
But she was more than just a pop star. Fans gravitated to her as an emblem of a new age, one in which feminism could feel fresh and relevant to the next generation. Amid the scourge of the AIDS crisis, she brought queer identities into the mainstream and refused to separate her music from her political activism. As an artist, she pushed countless boundaries with provocative and visionary music, videos, films and live performances that changed culture globally.
Deftly tracing Madonna’s story from her Michigan roots to her rise to super-stardom, master biographer Mary Gabriel captures the dramatic life and enduring influence of one of the greatest artists of our time.
With her arrival on the music scene in the early 1980s, Madonna generated nothing short of an explosion.
But she was more than just a pop star. Fans gravitated to her as an emblem of a new age, one in which feminism could feel fresh and relevant to the next generation. Amid the scourge of the AIDS crisis, she brought queer identities into the mainstream and refused to separate her music from her political activism. As an artist, she pushed countless boundaries with provocative and visionary music, videos, films and live performances that changed culture globally.
Deftly tracing Madonna’s story from her Michigan roots to her rise to super-stardom, master biographer Mary Gabriel captures the dramatic life and enduring influence of one of the greatest artists of our time.
Reviews
Mary Gabriel has dared to write a biography of a woman with whom the entire world is on a first-name basis. Here, she reveals Madonna as a rock-and-roll suffragette, managing the stress test of her personal life and using the power of music to bring about social change. Exquisitely detailed in her storytelling, Gabriel convinces us that we all still vogue in the House of Madonna
Mary Gabriel's astonishing book with its pointillist detail feels fresh, surprising, vital, and necessary. It's thrilling to be reminded of how brave Madonna has been-to a fault! It doesn't matter where it springs from, because the results are the same: a singular, towering career that changed the culture
Mary Gabriel eloquently tells the engrossing story of how Madonna combined music, dance, art, fashion, theater and pop stardom to develop a completely contemporary way to be an artist. It chronicles how her embrace of the artistic vanguard transformed popular culture
Madonna built the house in which nearly all female artists now live . . . A Rebel Life brings home not just her obvious willpower and strength, but her fearlessness and sheer intelligence
This meticulous study puts the shape-shifting star in proper context . . . It's a mark of Gabriel's skill that she has managed to wrestle this complex, sprawling, eventful life into a book that rarely flags and conveys its subject's wider significance without tipping into hagiography