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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: January 16, 1993
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Saturday Night Live, “Harvey Keitel / Madonna” (Season 18, Episode 11)
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Madonna had a rough go of it in 1993. After a decade’s worth of pop dominance and tantalizing the country with her sexuality and gender/religious politics, it was time for the backlash, and what better occasion for it than with a coffee-table book about sex and an album called Erotica hitting the marketplace? Erotica ended up being Madonna’s first album that didn’t hit #1 since her debut, and Sex became an international punchline. America has always been weird about its relationship with sex in pop culture, and Madonna bore the brunt of that in 1993, and I don’t want to pile on when I think she’s gotten too much shit for this period in her career anyway.
All that said: Madonna really showed her ass on Saturday Night Live in January of ’93, it just had nothing to do with sex (or Sex). Things started so well! She was phenomenal in the cold-open sketch about Bill Clinton’s inauguration, appearing as “herself,” but as a more sexualized, infantilized, Marilyn Monroe-ified version of herself, playing up her image and skewering it at the same time. She performed her cover of “Fever,” which, then as now, was aggressively good enough. And then for her second song, it was the underrated “Bad Girl.” At the end of the performance, Madonna pulled out an 8×10 photo of Joey Buttafucco — who was at that point a tabloid fixture for the Amy Fisher scandal — squinted at the camera, shouted “Fight the real enemy!” and tore the photo up in a mock fit of indignation.
This was, of course, an intentional callback to Sinead O’Connor’s infamous SNL performance three months earlier, when she said those very same words while tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II. O’Connor’s gesture was one of protest — during her song (a cover of Bob Marley’s “War”), O’Connor railed against child abuse in the Catholic Church. It would be another decade before the child-abuse allegations against the Church really began to take hold — check out a little movie called Spotlight about that — and it turns out that O’Connor was years ahead of that particular curve. This was political speech that actually carried risk with it; you can tell, because O’Connor reaped a whirlwind of shit for it. And then Madonna went and mocked her on SNL; this was after she had told the Irish Times, “I think there is a better way to present her ideas rather than ripping up an image that means a lot to other people.”
To reiterate: MADONNA said that Sinead O’Connor was wrong for desecrating an image that is meaningful to Catholics in order to make a political point. This Madonna:
It’s by far the bullshittiest thing Madonna has ever done, including the rap bridge in “American Life.” She’s still the best, but this was the worst.
