Show Business: Madonna Rocks the Land

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They could be right. When the Madonna show detonates at about 9 p.m., after a forgettable 30 minutes by a raunchy rap band called the Beastie Boys, the strongest impression is of being back in the '60s, listening to the Shirelles. This is no girl group; Madonna's two backup dancers are male and masculine. But they are small and unmenacing, dressed cheerfully in handpainted jeans and jackets, and when they frisk about the stage with Madonna the mood is light and childish. She wears spiked boots, black fishnet tights and a hip-slung miniskirt below her winking belly button. A loose- fitting hand-painted jacket swings free now and then to show a lacy purple shirt and the trademark black bra. She has a floppy purple rag tied in her hair. The costume is sexy, and light as she is, at 5 ft. 4 1/2 in. and 118 lbs., her body is lush. But her movements to Holiday are skipping and prancing steps, mischievous kid stuff.

The show turns darker and funkier, with a lot of smoke bombs and jungle-queen strutting in silhouette, toward something like a 14-year-old's florid conception of adult sexuality. Madonna comes onstage with a big portable stereo boom box and goes into a routine that sounds like the dirty jokes that eighth-graders giggle over. "Every lady has a box," she says. "My box is special. Because it makes music. But it has to be turned on." Adults wince, but the youngsters love it. "I like the way she handles herself, sort of take it or leave it," says Kim Thomson, 17, a Wanna Be in Houston. "She's sexy but she doesn't need men, really. She's kind of there by herself." Says Teresa Hajdik, also 17: "She gives us ideas. It's really women's lib, not being afraid of what guys think."

What the guys think is sometimes seriously scrambled. Madonna comes onstage dressed in an elaborate bare-midriff wedding gown to do Like a Virgin, the first of two high-spirited production numbers that close the show. "Will you marry me?" she asks the audience. "Yes Yes!" everyone screams. And in Dallas, one lovesick adolescent male stands up and yells, "I wanna have your babies!" Madonna sings, as she sashays about the stage, "You make me feel" -- hip thrust -- "like a virgin" -- belly roll -- "touched for the very first time." Mocking virginity, mocking sex, mocking, some might say, the solemn temple of rock 'n' roll itself.

Then she is back for her best number, carried onstage in a reclining posture by her backup dancers, looking like Madam Recamier in her salon, twirling a long rope of pearls and camping a mile a minute. "This is," she sings to a pop reggae beat, "a material world. And I am" pause "a material girl." Luxuriating in materialism, poking fun at greediness -- she is performing for adolescents who feel deprived if their cars don't have quadraphonic cassette players -- Madonna is singing that she is available to the highest bidder, then denying that. And at the end, she pulls wads of fake banknotes out of the top of her dress and tosses them all to the audience. Do the Wanna Be's see materialism glorified here, or mocked? Of course, they see both, and see no contradiction.