Dear Madonna,
Hey gal. Loved you on Letterman! Ha, martinis with pizza, you kill us. And on SNL! We happen to think you’re way too famous to have to remember lines, anyway. We’re writing you this open letter because we just happened to read a quote from you in this week’s Rolling Stone. You said, “I’ve never been a good judge of what things are going to be huge or not. The songs that I think are the most retarded songs I’ve written, like ‘Cherish’ and ‘Sorry,’ a pretty big hit off my last album, end up being the biggest hits. ‘Into the Groove’ is another song I feel retarded singing, but everybody seems to like it.” Then, a while back, you maybe called your ex-husband Guy Ritchie “emotionally retarded” at a concert in front of thousands of people.
Not to get all preachy and PC on you, but we think maybe it’s time for you to stop using the word “retarded” so much. We know, we know, you don’t mean to malign developmentally disabled people. It’s just an expression! But really, at the end of the day, it’s just not that cool of an expression. Like, it’s so uncool that even Lindsay Lohan, a train-wreck twentysomething who is so far below you in the ranks of pop culture that you may not even know who she is, vowed to stop saying it. And Madge, that was before you even really started using it. Where’ve you been?
Recently, your ex-husband referred to you as “retarded, too.” Which pretty much tells us that your kids Lourdes, Guy, David, and Mercy James are probably hearing the word at home, and might go on to use it in school — which is where, if they were normal kids, they might run into other children who are actually developmentally disabled, whose feelings might be hurt, which is one of the main reasons there’s a backlash against that word. Thankfully for your kids and those kids, the Ritchie-Ciccone brood doesn’t go to public school, but the point remains. It doesn’t make you sound hip and young, it makes you sound old and out of touch.
Love and crotch grabs,
Daily Intel
P.S.“Cherish” and “Get Into the Groove” are not retarded, any way you slice it. We’re not going to fight you on “Sorry.”
Madonna Looks Back [RS]
