Gabriel’s writing is unfussy and direct ... It’s a mark of Gabriel’s skill that she has managed to wrestle this complex, sprawling, eventful life into a book that rarely flags and conveys its subject’s wider significance without tipping into hagiography. We come to understand Madonna the person as well as Madonna the concept.
The result is an alternately fascinating and lumpy account of a singular career ... This very large book is just a bit too much ... As tends to be the case with music bios, the first third of the book, when Gabriel deftly lays out the modest roots of Madonna’s global ascendancy, is the most compelling tranche ... There is a lot to like about and learn from Madonna: A Rebel Life; the depth of your 'Madge' worship will determine whether you will go the distance with it.
One of those books you measure in pounds, not pages: almost three, which would have been more if the publisher hadn’t decided to post the endnotes and bibliography online rather than printing them ... Clichés sneak into her prose. Madonna is burning the candle at both ends, igniting a firestorm and is a lightning rod for controversy. She has never taken the road most traveled, but does take a long hard look in the mirror ... Hits its marks but rarely soars.
The Madonna that emerges from Ms. Gabriel’s pages is a force of nature ... It is a shame, therefore, that Ms. Gabriel...harbors a fondness for her subject that causes her to shy away from a more nuanced treatment of Madonna’s complications ... In Ms. Gabriel’s telling, Madonna is an uncomplicated heroine, one whose support for feminism, queer social justice and black artistic visibility renders her a straightforward but far less interesting figurehead of liberation .... The author’s accounts of Madonna’s sexual controversies are so one-sided as to elide the genuine shock they evoked at the time ... By neutering the dark sides of that desire, Madonna: A Rebel Life makes Madonna too likeable and renders her less of a rebel than she in fact is.
First, the good news: Mary Gabriel's doorstop, Madonna: A Rebel Life, is a meticulously researched, readable account of the most driven and (re)inventive pop star of our times ... Gabriel has done her homework, and then some ... So why is Madonna disappointing? In fairness to Gabriel, it's a tall order to reimagine this most famous and overexposed of celebrities. The prose is often pedestrian ... Gabriel indulges in melodrama, too ... Gabriel has written a hagiography rather than a biography, worshipful in its tone.
Suggests something comprehensive: it is eight hundred and eighty pages ... Light on author interviews and other new source material, the biography is a towering work of assemblage ... Gabriel avoids risk and complication as fervently as Madonna has sought them out, spinning modest threads of historical, political, and cultural context that are never less than perfectly apt and rarely anything more ... Though Gabriel emphasizes the relationships that have helped midwife Madonna’s work, she fails to make them intelligible: we get no sense of the artist’s grind, her habits and challenges as a songwriter, singer, producer, dancer, or director; or of how her vision and her ear have prevailed, in a decades-long evolution, through countless co-productions and genre dalliances. Old press-tour quotes on this subject are as illuminating as you might expect.
Reverent ... The volume of evidence that Gabriel amasses reveals something even greater: not just a cultural phenomenon, or even a postmodern artist transforming herself into the ultimate commodity, but a woman who intuits and manifests social change so far ahead of everyone else that she makes people profoundly uncomfortable ... Gabriel’s biography is astonishingly granular in its attention to biographical detail, and also to historical context ... Sometimes feels excessively boosterish, noting and then brushing over criticism of Madonna’s more questionable acts over the years.
Gabriel approaches the task with a rigor and ambition that matches Madonna’s ... [A] forbidding task ... What the book lacks in musical analysis, it makes up for in edifying connections to politics and art history ... Madonna’s legacy abounds, and the best sections of Gabriel’s biography are reminders ... Though Gabriel’s book contains no original interviews with the icon herself, her investigation into the Madonna archive puts us inside the psyche of a woman who has never been afraid to make people uncomfortable.
Careful ... Gabriel's book is a meticulously rendered, blow-by-blow account of Madonna's life and work, from her early childhood up until the pandemic shutdowns of early 2020 ... Notably, Gabriel didn't interview Madonna at all for A Rebel Life; it's a work of scholarship, and not an authorized biography-cum-hagiography. Still, Gabriel writes about Madonna as a hero ... Gabriel's most exuberant and evocative narratives come near the beginning of Madonna's origin tale ... There are some weird gaps in A Rebel Life. After spilling dozens of pages of ink on how closely image and action are intertwined in Madonna's work, Gabriel writes nothing about Madonna's recent cosmetic procedures, the ensuing public backlash, or the performer's response to that criticism.
Occasionally the writer strays into hagiography territory, but her claims are not without foundation ... Between describing Madonna’s albums, tours and films in pointillist detail, this doorstop of a biography provides a useful reminder of all the sociopolitical events of the past half century ... Late in the book, when Gabriel mentions the six hours of physiotherapy a day Madonna now needs to get through a tour, or about how she has to have a helping hand to climb on and off grand pianos, I felt not just exhausted, but quite emotional. God bless Queen Madge. Long may she reign.
Madonna built the house in which nearly all female artists now live: the gig as a huge theatrical spectacle. Beyoncé, Britney, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift – she kicked down the doors for them. The girl with the Boy Toy belt, dismissed as a tramp, now plays in places such as Turkey, where women’s rights are being stamped on, and turns around to reveal 'No Fear' written on her back. A Rebel Life brings home not just her obvious willpower and strength, but her fearlessness and sheer intelligence.
You wouldn’t have thought it would be possible to write a dull book about such a rich life as Madonna’s, but Mary Gabriel manages it. She also spends 800 pages managing it, which compounds the achievement ... The research is, like her subject, dogged, and yet it is completely without style. I also suspect her grasp of popular culture is something that doesn’t come naturally to her ... There are some little gems towards the beginning of the book, where Gabriel uses found quotes to build a portrait of an ambition built from the tragedy of Madonna’s mother’s death, but it is not enough to turn this into an interesting book on any level, as this doorstep of a biography then turns into a litany of diary items.
Gabriel is a wonderfully empathic writer, attuned to emotional nuances as well as the public side of her complex subject, resulting in a minutely detailed, lushly evocative portrait as Madonna’s story continues.
Drawing on extensive research, Gabriel paints a satisfyingly nuanced portrait of a trailblazing musician who never shied from controversy ... The singer’s myriad admirers won’t be disappointed.
