Madonna De-Materialized Analysis/Humor It's hard to be nice to Madonna Veronica Ciccone -- nice as in kind, empathetic, and generous. Docile qualities aren't part of her mind set. But maybe it's too easy to be unkind to her. Here's a woman who has held courageously to her convictions -- and, no matter how silly they are, apparently they have staying power -- as does she. Madonna made a sensation in the eighties with a blend of dance and song music called disco. She took on a quasi-pornogaphic public image, an image better suited to a Magdalen than to a Madonna. All the same, everybody wanted to be just like her. In the nineties, she took the high road to recording fame -- on tours, into the movies, and into the music recording business. She now owns a recording company called Maverick that draws big stars like Alanis Morisette. Recently, she signed a contract with Warners that will most likely keep her recordings on the market well into the millennium. She won four Grammies in 1998, and her new album, "Ray of Light," topped the charts. Madonna pushes forty-two, and looks it. Now, that isn't nice. But nice and "me philosophy" aren't compatible. Nice and career don't blend. And nice isn't sexy. Nice is for public relations, which can be turned on and off. Nice is for cocker spaniels, though brat packers would rather run with graffiti artists, or fascist wannabe's (Evita?). And being a pit bull never seems to hurt anyone's career -- including former hubby's, Sean Penn. Madonna, the so-called material girl, came out of her times, the eighties, which gave materiality to sex, perhaps because sex was beginning to have entertainment value, and yet was so much like romance. Madonna became the fantasy in the double lives of yuppies, the stripper-artist who could be counted on for a limo spin between stock-market swings. In the eighties and nineties, American music and dance learned to mimic Broadway, and to supplement drugs. The hippies may have felt there was a spirituality to sex and drugs, but for material people, the sex and drugs were a basic part of the economic formula. Madonna served as a stop-valve, as a tolerated excess at the place of more dangerous depravity. Excess can be heady, while honest politics or art are downright subversive. Madonna would reinvent herself every forty days like a start-up corporation. Her clownery could be patienced, because her money-making zeal and faith in her career showed that her heart was in the right place. Her music and stagecraft, slavishly borrowed like Andy Warhol icons, shone like embezzled funds in a shylock's pot of gold. She eventually became a leading indicator of collective bad taste. Madonna was also the woman who said it was okay to cross gender lines, to love yourself, or to love no-one, and yet still have sex. You have to admire her moxie, if nothing else. But Madonna's days of hell-raising may be over. She currently embraces motherhood and Nirvana. She owns $200 million and has responsibilities. She reads the Cabala, and plays at being a geisha. Oh gosh-ah -- is that really a change in costume? After several abortions, she gave birth to daughter Lourdes, fathered by ex personal trainer, Carlos Leon. Lourdes must be quite a handful. This could explain why Mom has been abstaining from high-profile liaisons dangereuses. June 28, 1999