Transmissible

Growing up, I never cared for Madonna. I didn’t like her music, and I didn’t like her attitude. This was at a time when popular music meant an awful lot to me, and what of it I liked and didn’t like seemed very important. I couldn’t help noticing how many people felt very differently from me about Madonna, which made the world appear at times a confusing and unfriendly place. Friends agreed with each other, after all.

I wanted to live in a friendly world. I wanted to like people and for people to like me. I also wanted to listen to the music I liked and watch TV shows and movies and read books I liked. What I liked seemed so inextricable from who I was, and yet I found I could also be friends with someone who didn’t like what I did. It was as if what we liked didn’t matter – except that it had to matter because my feelings for my favorite songs and stories were so strong. Where, I wondered, was the truth in all this?

I thought of my feelings about taste and truth the other day when I interviewed with the novelist Farhad Dadydurjor. Farhad grew up a gay man in India, a country where homosexuality was outlawed until 2018. He described the sadness and fear of being closeted for so long, and of living in a country that seemed so hostile to who he was, where it was literally illegal for him to simply be himself.

One of the bright lights during this dark period was none other than Madonna. To see someone so immensely popular the world over openly supporting gay men and women meant a tremendous amount to him. This made perfect sense to me. There’s something highly transmissible about love. If I love a piece of music, and if the artist who created that music loves people like me, maybe the other people who loved that music might love me as well. Or maybe, if not love, at least see in our shared love of this song, how we are like each other.

I was quite moved to picture the long bright arc of Madonna’s music reaching this young man in a distant country. Maybe she sensed how she was helping and maybe she didn’t. Artists may know how to make things, but we often do not know how what we made affects the people with whom we share it.  We’re usually too busy fretting over the next thing we’re going to make, wondering if it’ll be as good as the last thing, wondering if people will like it, if it will find its place in a world where the truest thing is always love.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

William KenowerWriting, William Kenower, Madonna, Farhad Dadydujor, Taste, LoveComment