I got three paragraphs into Madonna’s Harper’s Bazaar cover interview – for the November issue – and my eye started twitching. It’s not that Madonna’s words are unremarkable or uninteresting. It’s that Madonna is 55 going on 15. It’s like she’s permanently an angst-ridden teenager. The whole piece is written in the first person, like this is how Madonna writes or talks directly to us – you can read the whole piece here. She goes on and on about how she realized at a very young age that she was and is a “rebel” and that knowledge made her “dangerous” in the eyes of people for the status quo. She goes on and on about that and she repeats the word “daring” (about herself) a million times. Anyway, some highlights:

People usually choose “truth” when it’s their turn because you can tell a lie about yourself and no one will be the wiser, but when you are dared to do something, you have to actually do it. And doing something daring is a rather scary proposition for most people. Yet for some strange reason, it has become my raison d’être.

If I can’t be daring in my work or the way I live my life, then I don’t really see the point of being on this planet.

…Most people thought I was strange. I didn’t have many friends; I might not have had any friends. But it all turned out good in the end, because when you aren’t popular and you don’t have a social life, it gives you more time to focus on your future. And for me, that was going to New York to become a REAL artist. To be able to express myself in a city of nonconformists. To revel and shimmy and shake in a world and be surrounded by daring people.

New York wasn’t everything I thought it would be. It did not welcome me with open arms. The first year, I was held up at gunpoint. Raped on the roof of a building I was dragged up to with a knife in my back, and had my apartment broken into three times. I don’t know why; I had nothing of value after they took my radio the first time.

…Trying to be a professional dancer, paying my rent by posing nude for art classes, staring at people staring at me naked. Daring them to think of me as anything but a form they were trying to capture with their pencils and charcoal. I was defiant. Hell-bent on surviving. On making it. But it was hard and it was lonely, and I had to dare myself every day to keep going. Sometimes I would play the victim and cry in my shoe box of a bedroom with a window that faced a wall, watching the pigeons shit on my windowsill. And I wondered if it was all worth it, but then I would pull myself together and look at a postcard of Frida Kahlo taped to my wall, and the sight of her mustache consoled me. Because she was an artist who didn’t care what people thought. I admired her. She was daring. People gave her a hard time. Life gave her a hard time. If she could do it, then so could I.

At 35, I was divorced and looking for love in all the wrong places. I decided that I needed to be more than a girl with gold teeth and gangster boyfriends. More than a sexual provocateur imploring girls not to go for second-best baby. I began to search for meaning and a real sense of purpose in life. I wanted to be a mother, but I realized that just because I was a freedom fighter didn’t mean I was qualified to raise a child. I decided I needed to have a spiritual life. That’s when I discovered Kabbalah…. They say that when the student is ready, the teacher appears, and I’m afraid that cliché applied to me as well. That was the next daring period of my life.

When I was 45, I was married again, with two children and living in England. I consider moving to a foreign country to be a very daring act. It wasn’t easy for me. Just because we speak the same language doesn’t mean we speak the same language. I didn’t understand that there was still a class system. I didn’t understand pub culture. I didn’t understand that being openly ambitious was frowned upon. Once again I felt alone. But I stuck it out and I found my way, and I grew to love English wit, Georgian architecture, sticky toffee pudding, and the English countryside. There is nothing more beautiful than the English countryside.

Then I decided that I had an embarrassment of riches and that there were too many children in the world without parents or families to love them. I applied to an international adoption agency and went through all the bureaucracy, testing, and waiting that everyone else goes through when they adopt. As fate would have it, in the middle of this process a woman reached out to me from a small country in Africa called Malawi, and told me about the millions of children orphaned by AIDS. Before you could say “Zikomo Kwambiri,” I was in the airport in Lilongwe heading to an orphanage in Mchinji, where I met my son David. And that was the beginning of another daring chapter of my life. I didn’t know that trying to adopt a child was going to land me in another s–t storm. But it did. I was accused of kidnapping, child trafficking, using my celebrity muscle to jump ahead in the line, bribing government officials, witchcraft, you name it. Certainly I had done something illegal!

Ten years later, here I am, divorced and living in New York. I have been blessed with four amazing children. I try to teach them to think outside the box. To be daring. To choose to do things because they are the right thing to do, not because everybody else is doing them. I have started making films, which is probably the most challenging and rewarding thing I have ever done. I am building schools for girls in Islamic countries and studying the Qur’an. I think it is important to study all the holy books. As my friend Yaman always tells me, a good Muslim is a good Jew, and a good Jew is a good Christian, and so forth. I couldn’t agree more. To some people this is a very daring thought.

[From Harper’s Bazaar]

Good Lord. SO DARING. The rape story is the part that is getting the most attention, and seriously, poor Madonna on that count. But the rest of it is just… annoying and cringeworthy. She’s still trying to prove that she was the original nonconformist, that she’s still an angsty teenager and she still appears to angsty teenagers. And to what end? What is all this daring nonconformity all about? It’s just about Madonna. She doesn’t have anything interesting to say about life or love or music or politics. She just wants to “shock” you with how “daring” she is and that’s the message in and of itself. It’s tissue-paper nonconformity, disposable rebellion that no one would notice if Madonna wasn’t so good at self-promoting her own DARING lifestyle.

Here are the Photoshop Disaster pics from her Terry Richardson shoot. Look at her cleavage. SO DARING. I’m shocked she didn’t wear her DARING GRILLZ.

Photos courtesy of Harper’s Bazaar.