Madonna’s Rebel Heart. If the internet is our modern religion, then Madonna is its Old Testament God — the booming, all-powerful, and unapologetically prickly creator of the overshare. You know that whole stance of artful, defiant narcissism that’s now practiced daily by anybody with a social media profile? Madonna basically invented that. In the early ’80s, before she was actually famous, she’d traipse around the Lower East Side in tattered lace and jelly bracelets, insisting to anyone who’d listen that someday she’d be bigger than Jesus. She believed the dream enough for it to come true. In retrospect, her particular kind of personal-branding pluck seems distinctly millennial, cut through with that now-familiar combination of round-the-clock business savvy and genuine, honest-to-God self-love. The first time we see her onscreen in Desperately Seeking Susan, she’s lying on her back, frowning seductively at the Polaroid camera … [Read more...] about Madonna Sounds Current — and Empty —