Gun control, poverty and the marginalized, Madonna’s new album “Madame X” sees the Queen of Pop wanting to “fight back” in what she sees as a frightening modern world.
In an interview with Reuters, Madonna also said she was horrified by moves to restrict LGTBQ and women’s rights, namely in her native United States.
“If you’re talking about the far right and the rights that are being taken away from, say the LGBTQ community or women’s rights … obviously I am traumatized and horrified,” Madonna said.
A longtime campaigner for the LGTBQ community and known for her charity work in Malawi, Madonna, 60, said she would keep fighting for those causes.
“There’s still an enormous amount of poverty in Malawi and the rate of HIV has gone down considerably but it’s not disappeared,” she said. “(There are) all the problems that are recurring in America because of new legislation so I am going to have to keep fighting for the same things.”
On her 14th studio album, Madonna addresses U.S. gun control laws and uses a snippet of a speech by school shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez in the rousing single “I Rise”, a song she says aims to give a voice to marginalized people.
“Dark Ballet”, a piano ballad infused with electronic pop, was inspired by Joan of Arc and references a world “up in flames”, while in “Killers Who Are Partying” she sings about the poor, exploited children as well as a woman raped.
“It’s pretty frightening, yes, it’s pretty scary … There is stuff going on everywhere in the world,” she said when asked how she felt about the state of the world.
“When you think about the amount of people who have died, been killed, have been wounded, whose lives have been changed irrevocably because of the lack of gun control in America, it’s such a huge, huge problem.
“I care deeply about it so I couldn’t not write about it,” she said.
She also said she took issue with some U.S. states restricting abortion rights.
“These are crazy times because we fought really hard for a lot of these freedoms and now it seems like they are all systematically being taken away …It doesn’t make me feel hopeless. It just makes me want to fight back.”
