This paper explores ambiguities of political resistance and anti-war protest in Madonna’s music video, `American Life’. We begin by tracing the history of the making, promotion and eventual withdrawal of the video in the context of the military build-up and media campaign that preceded the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. In these opening sections, we focus in particular on the (perhaps deliberately generated) controversy surrounding the work, and its problematic relation- ship with contemporary corporate mass media. We then proceed to describe the visual contents of the video, and present three distinct readings of it: first, as a gesture of overt protest against the war; second, as a work that is unaware of the manner in which its signifying textures unwittingly and covertly celebrate the culture it would critique, thus nullifying its overt subversive gesture; and third, as a work that is in fact far more politically resistant than it knows, through an uncanny form of protest that is dependent upon this very complicity.
Music, Corporate Power, and Unending War
Due to the extreme concentration of ownership of the mass media in recent years, the culture industry has become a major site of centralized power in the 21st century. Recorded music, for example, is the most concentrated global media market today: four leading firms are estimated to control between 80 to 90 percent of the global market. Since the passing of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, radio too has become vertically concentrated and horizontally integrated to an unprecedented degree. Today, Clear Channel is the world’s largest broadcaster, concert promoter, and billboard advertising firm. Given the circle of mutual assistance between these corporations and government (via campaign contributions and the like, which in turn assure corporate leverage over the political process), the distinction between official State policy and corporate interest becomes increasingly porous. Censorship of musical expression has taken on subtler, more nefarious forms in this new world of mergers and acquisitions, governments as affiliates of international businesses, and corporations larger than entire nations. With close readings of two popular hits in the wake of the Iraq War of 2003, attempts to acknowledge the weight of the new developments in musical production and consumption, which in turn reflect a mutation in capitalism after the Cold War.