MTV and what we now recognise as star ‘brands’ saved the music industry, or at least postponed its demise, by turning music into an accessory to visuals. Al Teller, who ran Columbia and CBS Records from 1981 to 1988, noted that ‘the biggest win’ for a music company in the MTV era was to ‘develop superstar careers’.1 For solo women stars hoping to reach new markets, or launch new careers, MTV represented a marriage made in heaven: MTV needed content, the new pop playbook had yet to be written, and this seemingly rebellious outlet promised liberation – or at least mass exposure – for them in the midst of the ongoing battle for gender equality. MTV’s first big solo stars, Cyndi Lauper and Madonna, who were both young and white, bent the short-form music video to their will, greasing the gears for Tina Turner and other charismatic, videogenic stars eager to transcend tired notions of gender and transform ideas of what an aspirational woman could be, do, or look like.
But as the industry moved away from artist development (the practice of investing in artists, albums, and tours over years to build sustainable careers) and towards shorter-term video and brand development, appearance quickly assumed dominance. The visual medium made visual demands, especially of women, who had ‘always felt the pressure to look decorative or pleasing’, but were now expected to please a ‘mass gaze’, a meta-level, coordinated male gaze, which increased this pressure ‘tenfold’.2 Art had taken a hard turn into commerce, and videogenic women now promised the best returns for labels, which functioned as artists’ banks and advertising agencies. Given that MTV itself was ‘one nearly continuous advertisement’, which merely featured ‘different kinds of ads’ throughout the day and night, the challenge became finding content that would resonate.3
Videogenic stars who met the appearance criteria dominated those ad positions and had the option of engaging taboo subjects to spark audience excitement. Cyndi Lauper released ‘She Bop’, an ode to female masturbation and pleasure in 1983, and at the first annual MTV Video Awards Show the following year, Madonna shocked audiences when she ‘writhed around in a giant wedding dress, pantomimed masturbating and sang, “It feels so good inside”’.4
Eighties stars asserted the power of the single, the sound bite, and the ad. Madonna excelled in all three, using them to make once-and-still-dreaded female power erotic and sexy. Many of today’s power moves trace back to Madonna, the artist who, perhaps more than any other, authored the pop star playbook for modern times. Madonna’s brand prioritised linear or successive reinvention around a core theme (sexual adventure),5 and created ‘a whole new set of feminine subject positions’ for other stars to inhabit and explore.6 She also challenged popular culture to reconsider where its boundaries belonged.7
This chapter considers the influence and lasting effects of MTV and superstar branding on current mainstream women solo artists – now known as person brands or corporeal brands8 – particularly with regard to how they build and maintain personal narratives, fight back against abuse and exploitation, and recover from crisis. These ideas will be explored using case studies, artist examples, and four recurring themes: The human sacrifice of being a pop star;9 the sharing of narratives about abuse and exploitation; the recasting of the hot mess as a survivor;10 and the exploration of taboo subjects and identities. In telling these stories, a clear link will emerge between past and present stars and how they have navigated these themes across several decades.
Tina Turner: The Power of the Branded Self, the Survivor Narrative, and the Redemptive Comeback
In some ways, MTV was really nothing new.11 Sound had already met image – to powerful effect – on television decades before, in live appearances on shows like The Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand, on music-centred television programmes like The Monkees and The Partridge Family, and on variety shows such as Soul Train, Solid Gold, and Saturday Night Live. But in this new environment, a different kind of storytelling emerged, with solo women leading the charge. Some stars sought to build in protection as they told their stories, creating branded selves to absorb the anticipated body blows associated with female daring. Cyndi Lauper turned herself, with the help of her handlers, into a cartoon in the video for ‘She Bop’, presumably so she could say she was just having a laugh, though she was clearly arguing in favour of female pleasure. Janet Jackson used cheeky humour and choreographed spectacles to encourage audiences to amplify the punchline (‘Ms. Jackson if you nasty’) while her songs explored heteronormative power dynamics and women’s need for autonomy and control. These strategies of loading subversive messages of resistance into gender-normative packaging worked – and stuck.12 Both Lauper and Jackson experienced spikes in recognition in 2016 when ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’ came back as ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun(damental) Rights’ signs at the Women’s March, and Jackson’s ‘Nasty’ went viral in meme form after Donald Trump dismissed presidential nominee Hillary Clinton as ‘such a nasty woman’. The lesson learned and passed onto future stars was this: Conform to gender expectations and you can resist, as long as you seem playful, and you maintain an image of youth, femininity, and desirability. (Think of Dolly Parton’s ‘9 to 5’ – and her overall brand presentation throughout her career – as an example of this theory in action.)
The branded self was also a new mechanism for sharing and selling gendered and sexualised violence and exploitation, as numerous scholars, such as Susan Bordo, have suggested through their examinations of Madonna’s videos.13 But traditional forms of power-based domination, such as domestic abuse and sexual violence, had plagued stars’ careers long before MTV. The new music channel gave bold stars a worldwide platform to engage with these issues creatively, with the potential for unprecedented reach and impact.14 Tina Turner provides a compelling example of an artist whose backstory, image, and resulting brand catapulted her to unprecedented success on MTV. Turner had literally sacrificed everything she had, including her physical safety, to pursue her dream. After enduring years of abuse at the hands of her husband and manager, Ike Turner, Tina broke free and became a star.15 Her solo debut, Private Dancer (1984), served as a fiery, defiant declaration of independence, earning her multiple hit singles and videos, three Grammys, and international recognition and acclaim. (Turner quickly capitalised on these opportunities, venturing into the wider entertainment business with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.)
As an industry veteran in the midst of a major comeback, Turner used personal narratives to propel her performances, and to resonate with audiences hungry for justice via sing-along empowerment anthems. In her wonderfully campy ‘Private Dancer’ video, Turner draws parallels between sex work and pop stardom, roasting the ethics, integrity, and short-term, transactional focus of music-industry players. ‘I’m your private dancer, dancer for money’, she sings; ‘Do what you want me to do’. Then, acknowledging music’s new subservience to spectatorship, she concedes: ‘And any old music will do’. It is worth noting that the lyrics to ‘Private Dancer’ were penned by Mark Knopfler, lead singer of Dire Straits, whose song ‘Money For Nothing’, was an MTV smash despite its open hostility towards MTV and its effects on the industry.16 Predictably, internalising the channel’s formula catapulted Knopfler and his band to wider mainstream success and greater critical acclaim than ever before. Knopfler sold ‘Private Dancer’ to a more reliable (woman) narrator, but in ‘Money For Nothing’ he cast himself as the prostituted protagonist, sickened by the ‘little faggot(s)’17 who sell out with ease to make their ‘money for nothing’.18 This telling epithet suggests that acquiescing to exploitation is for women, men who play the game are feminine or gay, and sexism and homophobia pervade the industry.
‘Better Be Good To Me’ finds Turner, the industry’s first middle-aged sex symbol, in a black leather bodysuit, staring down the camera. She is grounded in her new expectations – she ‘has no use’ for what her love interest ‘loosely call(s) the truth’ and that she doesn’t ‘have the time for (his) overloaded lies’. Towards the end of the video, she literally grabs a white man (‘The Man?’) in a comic turn, and demands: ‘Why can’t you be good to me?’ In ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’, Turner struts through the city – presumably to show off her famous legs – and collects interested glances from those she passes. But she’s not interested, dismissing love as ‘a second-hand emotion’, and ‘a sweet old-fashioned notion’ and opting to prioritise her ‘own protection’ instead, at least for the moment. The title of this song also became the title to Turner’s biopic, released in 1993.
Sinéad O’Connor: The Cycle of Abuse, Rebellion, Sacrifice, and Recovery
While MTV and brand building empowered artists such as Turner, giving them new levels of exposure and creative agency via branding, it disempowered or erased others; especially those who refused to even pretend to play by the new rules. The precipitous rise and savage takedown of Sinéad O’Connor perhaps best captures the perils of being a solo woman pop star in the ‘ring of spectatorship’ in which stars are ‘plumped for the slaughter, then primed for the comeback’.19 Through O’Connor’s story we see the four aforementioned themes in action, and find that ‘one of the biggest challenges for a woman in pop is to express herself from the core’.20
From the beginning of her career, O’Connor was clear she ‘didn’t want to be a fucking pop star’, but did want to be ‘a protest singer’.21 Ensign Records founder Nigel Grainge signed O’Connor precisely because she was a serious artist who didn’t play by the rules, but then dared to suggest an image change. O’Connor rebelled:
Nigel and Chris … suggested to me that I grow my hair really long and start wearing mini-skirts and thigh boots and get all sexed up, and that really wasn’t me. Not that I’ve any objection to that, but I didn’t wanna sell myself on my physicality … I went and got it [her head] shaved.22
This had immediate implications for her brand when she hit the market with The Lion and the Cobra (1987), which was recorded while she was pregnant. Framed as an ‘androgynous pixie’ who was a ‘striking contrast to the sexual potency of the reigning pop diva, Madonna’,23 O’Connor successfully differentiated herself from the beginning. Her look endured for more complicated and personal reasons. ‘In the pagan tradition, they say the goddess has four faces. In one the goddess is shaven headed’, she said. ‘When the goddess is being her true self, she has no sexuality the way that men perceive earthly sexuality. But her sexuality comes from her soul.’ Her photographer combined these notions, observing that hearing O’Connor’s voice was ‘like being French kissed by the angels’.24
When O’Connor’s album was released in the UK, its cover depicted shaven-headed Sinéad, crossing her wrists across her chest as if protecting herself from a punch, and with her mouth wide open, suggesting a scream, or a cobra about to strike. Her eyes look in the direction of her presumed attacker. When it was released in the United States and Canada, the cover was edited, presumably to make her more gender-normative, and thus palatable to less forgiving markets. O’Connor’s mouth is closed, her eyes are cast down at the ground, and her expression suggests defeat. Her arms still form an ‘X’ across her chest, but now O’Connor looks passive, as if she has resigned herself to being hit without fighting back. She also appears to have a black eye. One explanation for the difference could be that female passivity was expected to sell better than female rage.
In writing about Blondie, rock critic Lester Bangs described the dynamics between powerful woman stars and their male admirers in a way that might shed light on the strategy behind the more acquiescent positioning on the US cover.25
I think if most guys in America could somehow get their fave-rave poster girl in bed and have total license to do whatever they wanted with this legendary body for one afternoon, at least seventy-five percent of the guys in the country would beat her up.26
Writer Cheryl Cline responded to Bangs’ observation, noting the fact ‘[that] a powerful woman brings out a desire in men to conquer her – if not to actually beat her into submission, then to bring her under his sway in some other way – is hardly a novel idea’.27 Cline also suggested that the increasing popularity and acceptance of eroticised male domination was emboldening men to be more direct about such desires. ‘Ten or twelve years before, Janis Joplin brought out similar reactions in male writers’, she wrote. But they expressed fantasies about ‘being the guy who comforted a “sad”, “hurt” Janis after she’d been brutalised by some other cad – or by the hard life of a rebel girl’.28
O’Connor’s second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, was released in 1990. O’Connor appeared in a video for its breakout hit, a cover of Prince’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, two days after ending her romantic relationship with Fachtna O’Ceallaigh, who was also her manager. In the video, striking for its simplicity and vulnerability on the heels of ’80s excess, O’Connor’s face appears in close-up, set against a black background. There is nothing between O’Connor and the audience – no pretence, no eighties effects, no big hair – and she has such a harrowing story to tell that she actually begins crying. (O’Connor maintains that her tears were real and shed for her mother, who died in 1986, when O’Connor was nineteen). Writing for the New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich captured the rare, revealing, meta-narrative of the video: ‘“This is all of my humanity”, her face seems to say. “Don’t you dare look away”’.29
O’Connor’s next single, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ (1990), maintained this intense connection, exploring the trials of fame and criticism, post-partum depression, gaslighting, abuse and exploitation, male impunity and female ‘hysteria’, mental health, reality versus perception, and the consequences of truth telling: ‘They laugh cause they know they’re untouchable, not because what I said was wrong’. And audiences loved it, until they didn’t.
O’Connor began to rebel strenuously against her rising fame, and by 1991, her brand was morphing from powerful protest singer to compassionate-but-exasperating contrarian. After rejecting four Grammy nominations – and one Grammy win – O’Connor did battle with a New Jersey concert venue to prevent the American National Anthem from being played before her performance. This angered Frank Sinatra, who called her a ‘stupid broad’ and said he’d like to ‘kick her ass’.30
Then, in 1992, O’Connor released her third album, Am I Not Your Girl, which featured covers of jazz standards, not the pop hits fans had come to expect. The album was considered commercial suicide by fans and critics alike; and some paying close attention even wondered if its release was designed to stall O’Connor’s career, and put her in self-imposed exile. Her behaviour on Saturday Night Live (SNL) on 3 October 1992 solidified growing perceptions of O’Connor as difficult, cantankerous, and disrespectful. She sang Bob Marley’s ‘War’ – an odd choice given that it was not on the album she was there to promote – adapting the lyrics to focus on child abuse. As she sang the word ‘evil’, she held up a photo of Pope John Paul II, ripped it apart, and shouted ‘fight the real enemy’.31
Without sufficient context for her rage and actions – O’Connor was a child abuse survivor who was deeply committed to God but enraged at the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church for covering up priests’ crimes against children – the backlash was immediate and violent. During Joe Pesci’s opening monologue on SNL the following week, he held up the same photo, explaining he had taped it back together, and then destroyed a photo of O’Connor, saying that if he had been hosting the previous week, he would have given her ‘such a smack’.32 Music industry mogul Jonathan King, told Billboard that O’Connor needed a spanking.33 (King was later convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault on teenaged boys and sentenced to seven years in prison.)34
Thirteen days after O’Connor’s fateful appearance on SNL, she performed at Bob Dylan’s thirtieth anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden. When she took the stage, she heard ‘a thundering mixture of cheers and jeers’ that sounded, to her, like good and evil warring.35 Although the sound made her ‘want to puke’, O’Connor doubled down, screaming ‘War’ to be heard above the crowd. Then she glared defiantly at the audience, walked off stage, and hugged legendary songwriter Kris Kristofferson, who had been asked to remove her from the stage, but had declined in solidarity. After this incident, O’Connor announced she was quitting her music career at twenty-five. A VH1 documentary explained the paradox: ‘Sinéad may have had the “profile of a pop star”, but she also had “the low self-esteem of a child abuse victim”’.36 O’Connor sank into a ‘life-threatening depression’ for seven years following the event, and tried to kill herself eight times in one year.37 Reflecting back on her actions, O’Connor acknowledges she could have contextualised her anger more effectively for audiences, but remains convinced she did the right thing.
O’Connor returned to music two years later, releasing Universal Mother in 1994, Gospel Oak in 1997, and Faith and Courage in 2010. She credits God with giving her the voice that enabled her comeback and recovery. ‘That voice is what lifted me out of hell’, she said. ‘Like if I had not sung, god only knows, I’d be Kurt Cobain now’.38 Retrospectively, she’s proud she spoke her truth on SNL. ‘If that’s all I ever did on Planet Earth, I would be happy’, O’Connor said in 2013. ‘I am really proud that I got to be that person.’39 O’Connor converted to Islam in 2018, and took the name Shuhada Sadaqat in 2019. Shuhada is an Arabic name meaning ‘witnesses’ or ‘martyrs’.
Alanis Morissette: The Connections Between Emotional Pain, Pop Stardom, and Mental Health
O’Connor’s work opened up space for emerging pop and indie artists who wanted to use their platforms to share disappointment, express rage, and hold men accountable. PJ Harvey’s Dry (1992) and Rid of Me (1992) and Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville (1993) made women’s anger palpable in indie rock circles – and in critical reviews in mainstream outlets – amplifying the ideas espoused via the more DIY riot grrrl movement.40 With Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill (1995), such themes exploded into the mainstream, became popular, and got audiences talking.41 But mainstream success came with unexpected consequences.42 In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Morissette revealed she pursued fame to cure her emotional pain, believing: ‘I will be less lonely, and I will be understood, and I will be loved. And that love will go in and heal any of the broken parts.’43 Instead, fame exacerbated underlying issues, led to PTSD,44 and ‘one dimensionalised’ her brand, first typecasting her as angry woman. She recalled:
I have not always been direct with my anger in my relationships, which is part of why I’d write about it in my songs because I had such fear around expressing anger as a woman. I thought I would be retaliated against or physically hit or vilified. Anger has been a really big deal for women: how can we express it without feeling that, as the physically weaker sex, we won’t get killed. The alpha-woman was burned at the stake and had her head chopped off in days of old.45
Morissette described feeling particularly vulnerable and violated when excited fans would try to cut bits of her hair or skin off as souvenirs.46 Scholar Kathryn Lofton places such moments in context, explaining: ‘Transforming flesh into commodity has a long history, a history that includes far less voluntary formats of commodification than those experienced by Britney Spears … But to make something that is human something that is marketable … is, undeniably, a procedure of atomisation, valuation, and dehumanisation.’47 By building human brands to be short-term, highly lucrative, and then disposable, the industry facilitates this dehumanisation, and ensures stars who are women can only be so powerful for so long. Once woman superstar brands are shunned or shut down, so too are their platforms, until a subsequent generation of stars notice the same cultural issues decades later and get in formation to try to fix them. But if each successive group of stars reinvents the wheel, it spins furiously but makes little progress.
As O’Connor and Morissette work to heal their personal selves from past pain and trauma,48 their brands are also being rehabilitated by peers and audiences eager to celebrate the fearless contributions they made in less empathetic times.49 In Variety, singer Kay Hanley admitted feeling jealous and threatened by Morissette’s fearlessness. ‘Her singing was guttural, primal, unconventional, terrifying, real … her lyricised revenge, fist-pumping catharsis’, Hanley wrote. ‘I didn’t understand how to write the way Alanis was writing and I found her authenticity deeply upsetting.’50
Fiona Apple: The Necessity of Setting Self-Protective Career Boundaries
Aspiring stars who watched O’Connor be sacrificed, and Morissette be bashed despite – or because of – her popularity, could read the tea leaves. Some opted out of the branded pop star game to preserve their sanity and longevity. One artist who intuited the value of self-preservation from O’Connor is Fiona Apple, who wrote her solo debut, Tidal (1996), when she was seventeen, and released it when she was eighteen. Her natural trajectory was quick and clear; pop stardom. (She scored three hit singles, earned instant acclaim and popularity, and her album went platinum.) She also won the Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance for ‘Criminal’ in 1996 and the MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist in a Video for ‘Sleep to Dream’ in 1997. But when critics accused her of glorifying child pornography in her ‘Criminal’ video, and of looking too young and emaciated, she fired back, revealing painful personal reasons for wanting to stay slim.51
Apple quickly encoded the industry’s terms and rejected them; just saying no to top-level fame. She made herself difficult to market, releasing a sophomore effort with a ninety-word title and behaving aggressively at awards shows, calling the world and the industry ‘bullshit’.52 Her actions created a career ceiling; her music would never again be as popular or mainstream as it was on Tidal. She could retreat to the music-first world of the indie star, but perhaps this choice paid other dividends with respect to mental health and career longevity, so her choice should be more appropriately understood as a victory, not a defeat.
Apple’s third album, the knowingly titled Extraordinary Machine (2005), found her embracing her choices and her humanity: ‘I am likely to miss the main event’, she sings on ‘Better Version of Me’, ‘if I stop to cry or complain again’. Buoyed by her choice and exhausted by the ‘folderol’ and ‘hauling over coals’, she continues: ‘So I will keep a deliberate pace’, she sings, ‘let the damned breeze dry my face’. After O’Connor posted a video of herself crying in the midst of a psychiatric episode (on Facebook on 5 August 2017), Apple responded with two videos. In the first, Apple calls O’Connor her ‘hero’ and offers her support, and in the second, she screams and thrashes along to a live performance of ‘Mandinka’, erupting into applause at the end.53
Gaining Awareness, Giving Credit Where It’s Due, and Building Upon Past Sacrifices
Janet Jackson dominated the pop charts alongside Madonna throughout the mid-to-late 1980s, and was still so resonant in 2004, she was tapped to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show with Justin Timberlake. During the performance, Timberlake ripped Jackson’s top, revealing a strategically covered nipple, for 9/16 of a second, to 143 million television viewers.54 This ‘wardrobe malfunction’, also known as ‘Nipplegate’, resulted in Jackson being banned from the Grammys that year, while Timberlake was permitted to attend and perform.55 Jackson’s songs and videos were also banned by Clear Channel Communications, which controlled MTV, CBS, and many radio stations, compromising Damita Jo (2004), which became Jackson’s worst-selling album since 1984. As Billboard summarised: ‘Jackson was made a public example of; the new millennium’s modern witch put on trial.’ In 2017, Timberlake was invited to perform at the Super Bowl again, and did.56 Black feminist critic Janell Hobson, amongst others, identified the intersecting racism and sexism that sacrificed Jackson, a black woman, but absolved Timberlake, a white man.57 Such stories, once marginalised, have become mainstream.
Stefani Germanotta had humbler beginnings than Jackson, Apple, and O’Connor, but, after being dropped by Def Jam after only three months on its roster, Germanotta went all in, creating one of the best-known pop brands of all-time: Lady Gaga.58 Drawing on Madonna’s visuals and choreographed spectacles (‘Born This Way’), Turner’s narratives of sexual abuse and exploitation (‘Bad Romance’), and O’Connor’s taboo-violating silence-breaking about sexual abuse (‘Til It Happens to You’), Gaga adapted Madonna’s pop star playbook and extended its vision. Madonna fought powerfully for gay rights, and Gaga effectively ‘queered the mainstream’.59 This made it safer for numerous high-profile pop stars, such as Miley Cyrus, Halsey, Kesha, Janelle Monáe, and Hayley Kiyoko, to come out and provide better multidimensional representation for their industry peers and queer audiences.60
Beyoncé followed a similar trajectory, leveraging Jackson’s choreographed-spectacle-as-protest idea, Tina Turner’s survivor narratives, and Madonna’s boss-bitch business acumen, to effectively become an industry unto herself. With these moves, Beyoncé pushed back against male dominance and white supremacy, and gained cultural power rather than losing it.61 Beyoncé’s approach has been dynamic and immersive reinvention, around her overarching brand theme of complicated, resistant, and self-affirming black womanhood. (Beyoncé’s approach also put Madonna’s call for continuous brand reinvention on an accelerated timeline). While clearly liberating for some fans, this branding strategy was also optimised for demanding followers who had been trained by social media, streaming services, and Amazon.com to expect instant gratification.
Conclusion: Surviving, Speaking Out, Finding Support, and Sticking Around …
The human sacrifices of being a post-MTV pop star are abundant and clear: there’s no privacy, fans expect full-time access to stars’ lives, and if fans don’t like something a star does, she might be destroyed as quickly as she was embraced. For those daring to share personal or professional narratives about abuse and exploitation, or exhibiting real, human signs of struggle in their private lives, the likelihood of fierce rejection, humiliation, and backlash increases exponentially. But Turner, O’Connor, and Morissette had the courage not only to share their experiences, but also to keep talking about them, despite the vitriol they inspired. They are pop stars who bottomed out and survived, showing others that such a trajectory was possible.
The stars featured in this chapter articulated women’s desires, ambitions, identities, and sources of anger and rage in highly compelling ways and then made their resulting need for respect, autonomy, and justice seem not only fair, but obvious. These stars sacrificed their own comfort and well-being to build a safer platform for those coming up behind them to explore similar themes of exploitation and abuse, cultural taboos, and underexplored dimensions of identity. The careers of Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Kesha, Demi Lovato, and Billie Eilish would be unimaginable without them. Pop stars tacitly agree to serve as our representational proxies through their songs and performances. If we appreciate their efforts, we should reciprocate with love, support, respect, and a determination to change the sexist culture that continually demands their sacrifice. ‘People say I’m controversial’, Madonna told a crowd of industry insiders at the Billboard Women in Music Event in 2016. ‘But I think the most controversial thing I have ever done is to stick around.’62
