I went for a walk with the dog earlier today and searched in my thoughts for when I actually noticed it for the first time.
The memories flew past, as they do when the legs walk on their own - places, rooms, events - and then suddenly it stood there, sharp and whole - the very first time I felt that peculiar sensation of looking around and thinking -
"Did I buy a ticket for this? I mean... for THIS?" - but I squinted one eye, missed with the other and scratched the beard I didn't have back then.
I had come for a pop show, and that's what I got - lights, dance, the world's biggest production. But in the middle of it all, the screens changed character, and suddenly I stood among tens of thousands of dancing people and saw war, famine and burning cities roll across the canvases, politicians cut together with dictators, sermons about rising up and acting.
It was the kabbalah years, so the sacred lay in everything - the red string around the wrist, Hebrew letters on the screens, and finally a Like a Prayer remix with texts from the world's religions rolling past.
I had come to get the wildest pop concert that year - and suddenly stood in a worship service I hadn't signed up for.
And the tour didn't end just anywhere. I remember that too. Three weeks later she put the full stop on history's biggest solo tour - not in London, not in New York, but in Tel Aviv.
Two evenings in HaYarkon Park, with full intent, a few months after the Gaza war, while demands for cancellation rained down on her. I worried about none of it back then. I barely registered it - but now look at it in the rearview mirror as a turning point where I registered a change.
She didn't cancel. She made Israel the finale. And she continued her career as if nothing had happened - because nothing HAD happened.
Try to imagine that in 2026.
You can't.
Today, opening acts get thrown off tours for far less, and large parts of the cultural world cannot say the country's name without "boycott" standing in front - or without first having invested in the season's designer keffiyeh, so everyone can see where the heart sits.
The frame is recognisable - a Gaza war a few months back, a world in uproar, demands that the artist choose sides. The situation is the same. The answer is the opposite.
And if that sounds like a feeling, then take a name from this summer -
Boy George. Buddhist, queer icon, anything but right-wing. He visited the Nova exhibition in London, met the parents of one of the murdered and wrote one song in memory of the young people who were hunted, mutilated, raped, slaughtered and abducted while they danced at a music festival.
The song is called We Will Dance Again. His own long-time label boss refused to touch it, and then that collaboration was over. He left his role in Jesus Christ Superstar at London Palladium while the storm raged, and old friends publicly called the song *propaganda for genocide.* His own reckoning was simple - he chose to stand by his Jewish friends, and that costs him people in his life.
Imagine that. A song about dancing again - for people who died while they danced - could not be released in 2026.
Regardless. It wasn't Madonna who was strange that evening. She was just early.
Because the feeling from the Park - "did I buy a ticket for this?" - has since become the entire basic condition for everything that used to be the entertainment industry. An industry that quite frankly doesn't have much *entertainment* left in it.
You buy a ticket for football and get a statement about gender before kickoff. You turn on an old film and first get a warning that the past contains attitudes you must be protected against. You buy shoes and get an opinion about climate and your CO2 footprint in the box. And your workplace has acquired holy days, colours, endless amounts of flag days and confessions that no one has ever asked for or voted on.
There is soon not a single room left where you're just a spectator and can enjoy being present. Just being Human. Every room has gotten an altar, and the sermon runs, regardless of what you came for.
Every room is occupied. Occupied. Colonised. Taken hostage.
By the Inverted World.
"But... I just want to work, boss?"
That's what a Human sounds like who still believes the rooms are neutral.
Because the sacred didn't disappear when we carried it out of the church. It moved to where we still came - and it took everything the church had with it - the sin, the guilt, the confession, the expulsion. Only one thing was left on the steps.
The forgiveness.
And then the decisive thing, what that evening in the Park back then proves - the sermon's content can be turned 180 degrees in seventeen years, without anyone having decided it, without a vote, without anyone afterwards being able to explain when or exactly why.
What is preached FOR in one decade is preached AGAINST in the next - with exactly the same self-evidence, by exactly the same voices.
And something that can do that has never been Conscience.
End. Because Conscience cannot be reprogrammed.
Choreography can.
❤️🔥🪽
And yes yes, of course! Of course I sang along to Like a Prayer like everyone else. That's how it works, after all.
I am, after all, a "little Barbie doll" inside, as a young guy christened me in a comment thread the other day. 😅🤷🏼♂️
But you knew that already.
