Baby, one more time: why Madonna, Britney Spears and Taylor Swift are all on a nostalgia trip

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With retrospective tours, memoirs and rerecordings, three definitive US pop superstars are reclaiming their legacies. Why now – and is the past a trap?

as pop’s most infamous boundary-pusher finally surrendering to nostalgia. “I am excited to explore as many songs as possible in hopes to give my fans the show they have been waiting for,” she said in a statement that didn’t exactly abound with excitement. But, by the time she mounted the first dates in London this month, three months delayed by a bacterial infection that nearly killed her, the show had taken on a different hue: less what fans have been waiting for than what they almost lost.

Conceived prior to her illness, the Celebration tour was already pitched as a memorial, hymning a grimy 70s NYC downtown subsumed by gentrification, the generation of artists lost to Aids, Madonna’s late MTV-era icons Prince and Michael Jackson, and her own mother, who died of breast cancer when she was five years old. No matter how many dancers flankedon stage, the 65-year-old star cut an implicitly lonely figure – the last of a dying breed.

They have also inarguably been able to achieve these shifts in perception because, as white celebrities, they benefit from far greater re-interpretive leeway than their Black peers, most of whom remain focused on innovation rather than retrospectives:only looked back to give Black, queer culture its due, part of her ongoing project to re-establish Black cultural legacies.A cynic might add that Swift’s rerecording project came about at an apposite time.

Beyond the monetary spoils of reliving her past, hindsight has brought Swift moral vindication: the exploitative power dynamics of formative relationships now transparently evident; even clumsily trying to rectify her internalised teenage misogyny by defanging her slut-shaming rager Better Than Revenge, from the rerecording of her 2010 album, with new, softer lyrics.

‘She is a snake – in the most positive way!’ How Taylor Swift became the world’s biggest pop star, againNo one understands that tending your past means stealing from your future like Spears does. In the latter half of the conservatorship – which lasted– she was contractually bound to endure her greatest successes in a five-year Las Vegas residency. Unable to escape, she started to give lacklustre performances on purpose “to punish the people who held me captive”, she writes.

 

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