Word: madonna
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...just blown in from the Planet of the Creeps. Twelve-year-old girls, headphones blocking out the voices of reason, are running around wearing T shirts labeled VIRGIN, which would not have been necessary 30 years ago. The shirts offer no guarantees, moreover; they merely advertise Madonna's first, or virgin, rock tour, now thundering across the continent, and her bouncy, love- it-when-you-do-it song Like a Virgin...
...bright side of this phenomenon is that these Wanna Be's (as in "We wanna be like Madonna!") could be out somewhere stealing hubcaps. Instead, all of them, hundreds of thousands of young blossoms whose actual ages run from a low of about eight to a high of perhaps 25, are saving up their baby- sitting money to buy cross-shaped earrings and fluorescent rubber bracelets like Madonna's, white lace tights that they will cut off at the ankles and black tube skirts that, out of view of their parents, they will roll down several turns at the waist...
...Madonna Louise Ciccone, who is 26, and her Wanna Be's, such getups somehow suggest the '50s, now conceived on the evidence of old Marilyn Monroe movies to have been a quaint and fascinating though slightly tacky time, rich in flirtatious, pre-feminist sexuality. Although to her it's a joke, Madonna's "Boy Toy" belt buckle offends almost everyone except the Wanna Be's. Those who snoozed through the '50s the first time around are mystified. Some feminists clearly feel that Madonna's self-parody as an eye-batting gold digger, notably in her song Material Girl...
Kids born since the breakup of the Beatles, however, don't want to hear any of this. Can't hear anything else, at this tick of the clock except brassy, trashy, junk-jingling, stage-stomping Madonna, who has been world famous for almost two months. Just now she is the hottest draw in show biz. Michael Jackson? History. Prince? The Peloponnesian Wars. Cyndi Lauper? Last week's flash, and besides, if you wanna be like Cyndi, you have to dye your hair orange and fuchsia, and your parents freak. No, Madonna is the full moon you see at this bend...
...numbers, as they say, are spectacular. Her first album, a batch of dance tunes called simply Madonna, started slowly nearly two years ago, but now, at 2.8 million copies sold in the U.S., is closing in on triple platinum (in record-business jargon, 500,000 albums sold is gold, and 1 million is platinum). Her second, Like a Virgin, which includes five of her own songs, has gone quadruple platinum at 4.5 million copies in domestic sales, with 2.5 million more worldwide. Her singles have found 6.3 million buyers in the U.S. (or the same buyer 6.3 million times, exasperated...