Botticelli, His Muse, and the Medici Family
In art history, it has long been purported that he used noblewoman Simonetta Vespucci as a model throughout his oeuvre. An in-depth exploration of this legend reveals truths versus fictions, the culture and politics of 15th-century Florence, and Botticelli's glorious artistry.
The Florentine Master
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Forbes
a day ago
- Forbes
Madonna's New Album Doubles Her Career No. 1s Total
It's been more than half a decade since Madonna last released a new album, and as fans wait for her teased Confessions on a Dance Floor 2, which the singer has been hinting at for months, she's finding ways to keep her following engaged. Her latest set, Veronica Electronica, is a remix project built around the songs from Ray of Light, one of her most acclaimed albums. The project is clearly aimed at only the most die-hard Madonna superfans, and thankfully there are enough of those, so the remix effort becomes a quick win as it debuts. Madonna Scores Her Second No. 1 Dance Album Veronica Electronica opens at No. 1 on the Official Dance Albums chart this week. The singer manages a somewhat surprising achievement, as the project marks Madonna's second leader on the tally, which ranks the bestselling dance-only collections in the United Kingdom. The new release also becomes her third top 10 and fifth overall win on the genre-specific ranking. Two Decades Since Her First Dance Albums Leader Madonna first ruled the Official Dance Albums chart in 2005 with Confessions on a Dance Floor. That blockbuster opened in first place and went on to spend 13 weeks at the summit, powered by singles like 'Hung Up' and 'Sorry.' Almost exactly two decade later, she's back in charge with another dance-focused effort. Top 10 Debuts Across Multiple Rankings Beyond its triumph on the dance chart, Veronica Electronica starts inside the top 10 on four other U.K. tallies. It launches at No. 3 on both the Official Album Downloads and the Official Vinyl Albums charts simultaneously. The set also kicks off at No. 5 on both the Official Albums Sales list and the Official Physical Albums ranking as the remixed set becomes a fast top five win on multiple tallies. Madonna's Milestone New Album On the main Official Albums chart, Veronica Electronica opens at No. 23. While it doesn't break into the highest tier on that competitive ranking, its arrival still helps the superstar reach a special milestone, as it's Madonna's thirtieth career placement on the tally.
Cosmopolitan
3 days ago
- Cosmopolitan
Madonna's July 1987 Cosmopolitan Cover Story in Full
Six decades ago, legendary editor Helen Gurley Brown took a stuffy literary magazine and transformed it into an audacious cultural tome. Cosmopolitan has kept evolving since, leading conversations with a sharp, provocative approach that's helped define entire eras of womanhood. One thing that's remained constant: our iconic cover stories, featuring definitive interviews with the leading stars of the time. Join us in revisiting the most classic ones—with their original headlines and exact wording, for better or worse, intact—for a hit of nostalgia and a deep dive into how celebrity has also evolved over the years. Madonna stands in the lobby of one of New York's fancy East Side hotels. She is a study in black, black jacket, black skirt, black mood. 'I'm here less than twenty-four hours,' she wails, 'and I go running in the Park, and when I get back to my room, my jewelry's gone!' She seems smaller in person than she looks on film or tape. The skin is porcelain, the eyes as blue as the sapphires that glittered in her stolen bracelet. 'Sean just bought that bracelet for me,' she says, and sighs. 'They took my engagement ring at the last hotel I was at.' Maybe one day she'll learn to put her valuables in the safe; then again, maybe not. I've heard 'Papa Don't Preach.' I don't want to be the one to tell Madonna what she ought to do. Her husband, the actor Sean Penn, isn't of a mind to lecture her either. Over the phone from Los Angeles (where he's making the film Colors under Dennis Hopper's direction), he promises he'll replace the bracelet. Still, there is more frustration in the offing. Sean reports that nobody will be able to take Madonna's car to the shop. Why not? Because she's got the keys with her. Later, over lunch, she describes the car. Her husband, the demon giver, bought it for her twenty-seventh birthday. 'It's a white-and-coral fifty-six convertible Thunderbird. Absolutely beautiful.' So why does it have to go into the shop? 'Because,' she says, 'I ran into something while I was talking on the phone.' A car phone? She grins. 'Yeah,' she says. 'Kind of disgusting.' The black mood has passed. Madonna has the gift—and it's one gift her husband didn't buy her—of self-mockery. You can see and hear her laughing at herself on the video version of her 1985 live concert tour. The titles come up on the screen—MADONNA. LIVE. THE VIRGIN TOUR—and over them Madonna chants in a pseudo-Brooklyn accent: 'I went to Noo Yawk...I din know anybody, I wanted to dance, I wanted to sing...I wanted to make people happy, I wanted to be famous, I wanted everybody to love me, I wanted to be a star, I worked very hard and my dream came true.' The real joke is, her dream did come true. Now she's so famous she can't eat her asparagus without strangers interrupting. Even the staff of the elegant hotel dining room gets into the act. 'The chef would like an autograph for his daughter,' says the maître d'. 'Okay,' Madonna says, 'but you gotta give me a lot of cookies. You know, those really thin wafer cookies?' The maître d' is amused. 'But the autograph is not for me, it's for the chef.' 'Well, then,' says Madonna, scrawling her name on a piece of paper, 'tell the chef to give me a lot of cookies.' Dreamer, dancer, singer, actress (coming next month: Who's That Girl with Griffin Dunne), cookie eater, she may just be the biggest star in the entertainment world today. Her first album (Madonna), made in 1983, sold over six million copies, her second (Like a Virgin) sold fourteen million, her third (True Blue) has yielded three number one singles—'Papa Don't Preach,' 'Live to Tell,' and 'Open Your Heart.' She is also the only female vocalist—so far—to have had five number one hits in the eighties. Many people may have been surprised by this. Madonna wasn't one of them. She is bored with rehashing the old stories, she doesn't want to talk about coming to New York in 1978 with thirty-five dollars in her pocket, she doesn't want to hear how she stepped on the fingers of every man who offered her a hand up on her way to the top. She never, she says, slept with anybody just because he could do something for her. 'Whatever I learned or got from a man or a boyfriend, they got plenty from me. I don't feel like I ever took advantage of anyone.' (This would appear to be true. Steve Bray, a musician she picked up in a disco when she was seventeen, is still writing songs with her, eleven years later.) That she always had ambition, and that many whom she left behind are resentful, she doesn't deny. 'You can't succeed unless you move,' she says, 'and you can't take the whole world with you.' She's been moving from the day she was born Madonna Louise Ciccone, in Bay City, Michigan, the oldest girl in a family of six children. Her father was an engineer at Chrysler. When Madonna was six years old, her mother, for whom she was named, died of cancer. When she was eight years old, her father married again. Both of these events infuriated Madonna, who perceived herself as abandoned. She says her mother's death left her with 'a certain kind of loneliness, an incredible longing for something. If I hadn't had that emptiness, I wouldn't have been so driven.' Needing to be noticed, she made waves. At parochial school, she rebelled against the drab uniforms and flashed bright-colored underpants. In high school, she flirted—stuffing her bra, painting on lipstick an inch thick—and danced, and at seventeen, she won a dance scholarship to the University of Michigan. But Michigan couldn't hold her. After a few semesters, she headed for New York, where she did some dancing (she was in an Alvin Ailey company), some modeling (the specter came back to haunt her later), and some going hungry. She once said she picked through garbage cans searching for abandoned french fries. It may be true, and if it isn't, who cares? Madonna has always known how to make a good story better. She learned to play several instruments and worked in 'loft and garage bands.' Pure rock didn't satisfy her (she was a disco fanatic, she wanted to make music people would dance to), so she kept moving, searching for the perfect sound. At one point, she took a side trip to Paris, because a manager said he could make her another Piaf. He couldn't. Or at least he didn't, and Madonna returned to the Apple to begin her real push. She wrote songs, and she recorded tracks—original music on tapes—and took them around to dance clubs and got disc jockeys to play them, while she sang along, live. 'You could almost feel like you were a star, when you were singing to tracks for five thousand screaming maniacs at the Paradise Garage,' says Liz Rosenberg, Madonna's friend, and a Warner Brothers Records vice president. Madonna agrees. 'To me that was the world. That's what I loved, nightclubs and discotheques. And then when the mass audience started catching on to who I was, it was like, Oh, I guess that wasn't the whole world.' Even after her debut album for Sire Records, it took a year before anybody outside the clubs paid attention. Madonna was not discouraged. She went to David Bowie's record producer and convinced him to produce her second album. She got a part in the movie Desperately Seeking Susan, and she embarked on a twenty-eight-city concert tour. The little girls who came to the shows wore fingerless gloves, crucifixes, and bustiers, and tied their hair with chiffon rags in slavish imitation of their idol. 'They got the humor part of it,' she says. 'For so long, people had been telling girls, 'You have to dress to be nondescript. You have to look masculine if you want to be in control.' And here was someone being sexy and having fun and dressing up and doing exactly what those little girls wanted to do. And making all the decisions, and having power and success.' That year—1985—Time magazine put Madonna on a cover. The headline read, WHY SHE'S HOT. Not to be outdone in the heat department, Penthouse and Playboy rushed into print with naked pictures shot back when Madonna (looking more plucked chicken than wanton) scrounged for her supper by posing for 'art' photographers. Then an English magazine, expounding on the fickle nature of popularity, wrote that 'fear and loathing have come very quickly to Madonna.' Had she, in fact, felt loathed? 'Very definitely,' she says. 'The people who adored me were the children who understood where I was coming from. The people who loathed me didn't get it, and my success pissed them off. There's a lot of idiots in the world, and anyway, it makes for more interesting articles. Wouldn't you rather read an article about a slut than a plain-Jane wallflower? I know I would. Anyway, I think it would be kind of boring if everyone really just loved me a hundred percent.' On August 16, 1985, Madonna married Sean Penn, who loved her a hundred percent, and whose passion for privacy was as fierce as her passion for being cheered in public. Opposites attract, and if a girl who has lived by the maxim 'Hey, look at me!' wants a boy who would just as soon dig a moat around their house, that's their business. The couple first met on the set where Madonna was making her 'Material Girl' video. 'The director was a friend of Sean's, and she knew that he sort of had a crush on me and she said, 'Hey, I'm working on Madonna's video, do you want to I come and meet her?' 'So I was standing up at the top of these steps, waiting—they were doing some lighting—and I looked down and noticed this guy in a leather jacket and sunglasses kind of standing in the corner, looking at me. And I realized it was Sean Penn, and I immediately had this fantasy that we were going to meet and fall in love and get married. Which is exactly what happened.' 'I came down the steps and walked right by, very cold, I just said, 'Hi.' And he kept hanging around. Hours had gone by, and it had gotten dark, and I saw him poke his head around the corner again, and I was like, Oh, you're still here? So I went outside to talk to him.' 'There were people everywhere, so it was hard for us to have this conversation, but we were just kind of throwing questions at each other and being really provocative. I had given flowers to everybody in the cast and the crew of the video, all the guys, and I had one left. So when Sean was leaving, I said, 'Wait, I have something for you.' And I ran upstairs and I got this rose for him.' Though it started out romantic, the relationship has had its gritty moments. 'It's a roller coaster,' Madonna says of marriage, and Shanghai Surprise, the movie she and Sean made together, had to be a low point for the honeymooners. They got terrible press, partly because of Sean's penchant for knocking down the odd photographer, partly because critics thought Shanghai Surprise was a lousy movie, and Madonna made a lousy missionary, and she and Sean had no more chemistry between them than two plates of mashed potatoes. 'A hellish nightmare,' is the way Madonna describes the experience. 'I thought it was a great script, and the idea of going to Shanghai was exciting to me, and the idea of working with my husband was exciting to me because he's a great actor. But sometimes everything goes wrong. The director turned out not to know what he was doing, we were on a ship without a captain, and we were so miserable while we were working that I'm sure it shows. 'Some of the tensions were on the set, some were because of the paparazzi. Sean's whole image was sort of blown up into this impossible person out of control. And then when the movie finally got finished—if it was directed poorly, you can't imagine how poorly it was edited. It was a great learning experience, that's all I can say.' One of the things she learned was never to let herself get into such a situation again. In the record world, she has lots to say about what she—and everyone else on a Madonna record—does, and from now on, she plans to work the same way in the movie business. She says she is not interested in being a tyrant, 'collaborating is what I like,' but she admits she is a very demanding collaborator. 'The musicians yell at me because when they take a meal break, I'm looking at my watch the whole time. 'Okay, thirty minutes is up, get back in the room.' I hate taking breaks, people come back lethargic, the energy's down. I mean, I bring my soy milk and my apple and my rice chips to the studio, and I just want to keep working straight through.' Having been rendered somewhat cautious by Shanghai Surprise, Madonna didn't leap to say yes when James Foley (who had directed Sean in At Close Range) brought her the script that subsequently became the movie Who's That Girl—a romantic comedy in which she plays a character much like the one in Desperately Seeking Susan. 'I said, 'I like it, but it needs a lot of work.' We went through several writers and several revisions of the script, until it was just the way we wanted.' Director Foley is convinced Madonna was born to be a movie star. 'The form is big enough, she was made for wide-screen Technicolor. And she is precociously talented. Every time I would say, 'Action!' what she would do made me giggle with excitement. She's very instinctual, what comes out is unencumbered by analysis. Who's That Girl was for me technically difficult, we shot a lot on the streets of New York and L.A., but she helped. Everyone on a crew observes the tone the star sets, and she emanated such a sense of ease and dignity it filtered clear down to the caterer. She's curious as hell too—about lights, scripts, people's names.' Carol Lees, Madonna's sidekick at Siren Films—Madonna has had her own production company since last June—says her boss works 'forty hours a day. She's got her hands in everything. She'll screen a movie by a director she might want to hire, and if she likes it, we'll have dinner with that director. She complains she has too much work, it's interfering with her career. 'I wish I could get my career going,' she says. 'We have a bungalow—it's all pink-and-purple leopard print—at Universal, where she has a development deal and we look for projects for her to act in and for us to produce together. She's in a special position, she has a little bit of clout because of the success of her music. 'She has an incredibly strong persona, like an old-fashioned movie star, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn. I don't think she's going to be like Meryl Streep, German one week, Polish the next.' But does Madonna look at Meryl Streep and say, 'I could never do that,' or does she say, 'I could do that better'? 'I look at Meryl Streep and I say she's a fine actress,' Madonna says. 'And I'm different. I think I'm a good actress, and I'm going to get better.' As dopey as she finds the Meryl Streep question, the Marilyn Monroe question irritates her even more. Asked if she thinks of herself as another Marilyn, she bristles, 'If I didn't have blond hair, I don't know what people would do for comparisons.' But Madonna, dear, didn't you imitate Marilyn in your 'Material Girl' video? 'She's been imitated by a lot of people,' Madonna says. 'Marilyn Monroe was a victim, and I'm not. I know what I'm doing, and what I want. If I make mistakes, or fall into traps, they're mine, not Marilyn Monroe's.' Guts, you think. She's right when she says she's nothing like Marilyn, who tried to please, to placate, to be loved and, therefore, saved through the grace of some man. Madonna saves herself. Coming to New York as a kid, living in the East Village, going to Paris with strangers, she had no fear. Wrong, she says. 'I had plenty of fear. Fear was my catalyst. It was the desire to get through all those things—I kept saying, Okay, this is hard, this is scary, but I'm going to make it—that kept me going.' Is there anything she's still scared of? 'Oh, God, yeah, but it's personal.' She's quiet for a moment. Then: 'The truth scares me,' she says. 'Being alone scares me. Failure scares me. Dying scares me. I don't think in that sense I'm different from anyone else.' But her life is different from anyone else's. Carol Lees recalls leaving a restaurant one night with Madonna and having a pack of photographers materialize out of the dark, and turn on their floods and flashes. 'There was this white light on her platinum hair and her translucent face, and I have this image of this little vulnerable person, all white face and hair, waving good-bye. Sometimes you'd give your right arm to be Madonna, sometimes, you just want to take her in your arms and say, 'Oh, you poor thing.' At least I can get in my car and not have guys chasing me down the freeway.' When guys start chasing Madonna down the freeway or anyplace else, her husband, as has been noted, is inclined to fight back. Just last February, he was fined and put on a year's probation for knocking a songwriter off a chair in a nightclub. He thought the songwriter had been trying to kiss Madonna. In April, during a break in the filming of Colors, he punched an extra who had been taking pictures of him and Robert Duvall, which attack caused city prosecutors to issue a warning for Penn's arrest, charging him with violating probation. Is it fun to have your husband break cameras and whomp strangers while trying to protect you? 'No,' Madonna says, 'It's not fun. But I've been dealing with the media since the very beginning of my career, and Sean never really had to. I wanted it, and I was sort of ready to deal with it and he wasn't. That's all there is to it. I would rather see some sort of harmony taking place than all the violence—and when I say violence, I don't mean necessarily hitting, but people screaming and tugging at you, I don't like any of that.' Still, she isn't ready to hire an army to shield her from press and public. 'I've just pretty much made up my mind that I'm going to live as normal a life as possible, so I don't go around in limousines, I don't have bodyguards. I like to be pretty low key. I think when you have all that flash sort of stuff, it draws attention to you. When I'm shopping, and people in the stores say, 'Oh, can we have your autograph?' I give them autographs. If I had a bodyguard, the bodyguard would get rid of them, but then he'd follow me everywhere. 'If I'm on tour, or making a movie, and people know where l am, they can bother me, but it's never so much that I feel I can't go on living, or I'm a prisoner. There's a balance. You know, sometimes you get things if you don't have other things.' The things Madonna does have are considerable. One of them is a Spanish-style villa in a canyon in Malibu surrounded by fifty acres. 'We have a big gate,' she says, 'so it's pretty private, and we have a view of the ocean, and great mountains in the backyard. It's wonderful, but until I got married, I never thought I would live in California, out by the ocean. I mean, I'm from the Midwest. And I lived in New York City for ten years. 'It's great to be up there away from the madness of everything, but then I miss New York. So I come and get a taste of it, get everything stolen, get my nerves racked, get splashed by taxicabs, and then I go back to the nice weather.' Sean's family also lives in Malibu, where Sean grew up. 'We see his parents probably once a week,' Madonna says. 'They're great. They live right near the ocean, on a big bluff. We bring Hank down there to play with their dog.' Hank, part wolf, part Akita, is the newest member of the younger Penns' entourage. 'I hate dogs,' Madonna says. 'At least, I hated dogs. But I always have to confront things I hate, walk into things that bother me. And this woman who was doing Griffin Dunne's hair on Who's That Girl told me, 'Oh, my dog just had puppies.' And she's showing everybody pictures, and I saw these little puppies, and they were so cute, and Sean was always saying, 'Oh, I wish we could get a dog.' 'I was always saying, 'No, yuck, I don't want a dog, it's too much responsibility. They pee in the house, and they get dog hair on your clothes.' You know, it's like having a kid, only kids wear diapers, and later on in life they learn how to say decipherable words.' 'But I saw these pictures, and I thought, that would probably be a great thing to do, buy Sean a dog. So I went and picked one out and brought it home to him. I said, 'Come outside, there's somebody out here wants to meet you.' When he saw this dog, he looked like he was going to start crying. Hank is going to be absolutely huge, like a bear, but when we got him, he was a little ball of fur. It was like I'd just had a baby, and Sean saw it and just like died over it. He took it everywhere with him, he wanted to sleep with it, and I was like, uh, what have I done?' The Penns do not have a large domestic staff. A cleaning lady comes in a couple of times a week, and every once in a while, Madonna finds herself in the laundry room washing clothes, or at the sink. 'I like washing dishes,' she says. 'I have this cleaning impulse sometimes. I think I got it from my stepmother, who cleaned everything in sight all the time.' The stepmother of whom Madonna was once resentful is now accepted by her; she attributes the improved relationship to her own growing up. 'Ever since I was ten years old, I wanted to leave my house, get out, be my own person. And my father was not at all behind me when I came to New York. To him, it was the unknown, and I had no money and I had no job. And I was angry at him for not being supportive of me, and for a long time, I lost contact with my family. 'I think it's because coming from such a big family, I had to share everything and I wanted to establish my identity and be separate. Now I've grown close to them again, which is great.' In 1985, Madonna says, her father finally got an idea of what she does for a living. When the Virgin tour came to Detroit, she put him in the act. 'I said, 'Dad, I want you to come on and act like you did when I was little. You want me to get off that stage because you think I'm being naughty. Now really yank me, because I'm going to give you a fight.' 'Well, he came on, and he pulled me so hard, he almost dismembered me. When we got off, I fell down on the floor laughing. But he was completely unfazed by it all. My father is not easily impressed.' Or shocked, either, one assumes, considering the way his little girl used to take on—and put on—the whole uptight world. She told reporters crucifixes were fun because they had naked men on them—'I thought it was funny,' she says—and she wore safety pins in her pierced ears, and a buckle on her belt that said 'Boy Toy.' She no longer dresses like that. In the last couple of years, Madonna has changed her style, along with her body. She jogs, she works out, she eats fruits and vegetables—'I've been a vegetarian for years'—and worries her lawyer. 'I had lunch with him, and he's like, 'You've lost weight, my daughter's going to be so upset. You finally gave girls who are voluptuous a new lease on life, don't get any skinnier, okay?'' Foolish lawyer. If Madonna wants to get skinnier, she will get skinnier. Her music won't stay the same, either. 'I'm changing as a songwriter, and as a person. I'm not going to stay the same, and the voice will change too.' Considering the incredible popularity of the voice, is Madonna miffed that she's never won a Grammy? She says not. 'I don't like those award ceremonies. They're boring, and they don't mean anything. I mean, if you think about the people who get awards, they're not the people I would have thought deserved them. When you come right down to it, pitting people's products against each other, it's so weird. Because everything's good in its own way. If I got an award, I'd probably be really grateful and everything. On the other hand, I don't know.' Madonna and Sean Penn were married by a priest, which would seem to indicate a serious commitment. ('I think the church pretty much stays with you,' she says. 'Whatever was drilled into you when you were growing up, whatever your picture of God was, I think you die with that image in your head.') Still, right from the start, there have been rumors that the marriage was in trouble—columnist Liz Smith wrote Sean might be 'Sean with the wind'—but if this is the case, Madonna is a genius actress. Because when she speaks of her husband, she sounds like a woman in love. 'I was crazy about him from the beginning,' she says. 'He has the most captivating, intelligent look in his eyes. And he seemed to know so many things about me, we liked so many of the same things, I felt he was my family already.' Does she worry that it may affect the marriage if she continues to be an enormous star and he, despite the esteem in which his talent is held, continues to work in movies more honored than attended? 'I think the problems that would arise from something like that are inescapable,' she says. 'But I think you learn to deal with insecurity and feeling threatened. I think the longer we're together, and the more we grow to love each other, the more stable we'll feel. And if I start not doing well, or whatever it is that happens, we'll have that basis of strength. I can't say nothing will ever go wrong, but I would hope that ultimately our love would be stronger than anything that happens on the outside.' Madonna says she and Sean have changed each other. 'I'm an impulsive person, and he thinks about things for a long time. And he broods, and he's very suspicious in a lot of ways, and I'm trusting and gullible. He's made me more tolerant. I think I've helped him to be funny.' Does Madonna want a baby? 'I would love to have a child,' she says. 'But once I had it, I would probably be very anxious to get back to work.' When she first blazed on to the music scene, and into the public consciousness, people said she was too hot not to cool down, that she would burn out. She hasn't, but just for the sake of discourse, if everything she's achieved were to disappear tomorrow, would the ride have been worth it? 'Oh, yeah,' she says. 'Definitely.' July 1987 editor's note: As we go to press, media reports indicate that the Sean Penn–Madonna marriage is over and that Madonna has filed for divorce.
Buzz Feed
4 days ago
- Buzz Feed
34 Wildly Cringe-Worthy Celeb Moments
At the 2009 MTV VMAs, Lil Mama shocked everyone when she got up onstage and started dancing during Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' performance. Apparently, it was her grandma's birthday, so she was in a celebratory mood. "I'm from New York City. So when the song [kicked] up... I got excited, and I went up there," she later said, noting that she was sober. The video's hard to watch — Lil Mama kind of awkwardly walks up to the performers and dances a bit, then copies their ending pose. Oh, and this is after Beyoncé pulls her back, trying to stop her from going onstage. Speaking of the VMAs — when accepting MTV's Video Vanguard Award, Katy Perry made some people cringe after giving a speech about the "noise" female artists deal with, joking about her period and bringing up criticisms after she cut her hair short. This might've been fine, and haircuts kind of pale in comparison to rampant sexual assault and intimidation in the music industry. Let's not forget that Perry is actively still working with Dr. Luke, who fellow star Kesha accused of rape (the two reached a settlement last year). In fact, Dr. Luke worked with Perry on her new song "Women's World," which is supposed to be an empowering feminist anthem. Though, this, too, ended up being a cringe moment for Perry, with fans near-universally panning the song and accompanying video as surface-level feminism as seen through the male gaze. Perry later claimed it was "satire." Madonna has had a lottttt of cringe moments. In one recent example, at one of Madonna's concerts, she spoke about her mother's death. She then began singing — and stopped to chastise someone in the audience for not paying enough attention to her. Pointing him out, she said, "Look at him. See, he's wearing like barely nothing. Him! The guy with the T-shirt and chains that looks like he wants to get f**ked right now." She continued, "I just want to point out that while I was singing my heart out about the loss of my mother he was looking around at the crowd … not at me. I'm just pointing out that I f**king pay attention, so you need to pay attention young man! You're going to destroy your ego, right now." At another concert, Madonna reportedly chastised a fan for sitting during the show, saying, "What are you doing sitting down over there?" Walking forward and apparently realizing the person was in a wheelchair, Madonna said, "Oh, okay. Politically incorrect. Sorry about that. I'm glad you're here." According to a fan, "There's a part where during the show she asks everyone to stand up. It's not about who's sitting/standing during the entire show. Just 1 section she asks for participation. And this time she embarrassed herself." Celebs can be super weird about activism in general, and I have to bring up a few more examples. Like, um, the time AnnaLynne McCord wrote a poem to Vladimir Putin about how things would be different if she were his mother. It's an odd response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, to say the least. I genuinely will never forget David Guetta's tribute to George Floyd, and not for a good reason. While livestreaming a DJ set for COVID relief, Guetta said he'd "made a special record in honor of George Floyd," adding "shoutout to his family" before playing an EDM mashup of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and the Hamster Dance song. He then started dancing. I don't know what it is with white celebrities and George Floyd, but Guetta was not the only one to do something weird. did Heather Morris (y'know, from Glee) take to Instagram to share an interpretive dance piece she'd choreographed in Floyd's honor? Similarly, Lili Reinhart made some fans cringe when she posted a nude photo on Instagram with a caption about Breonna Taylor. "Now that my sideboob has gotten your attention, Breonna Taylor's murderers have not been arrested," she wrote. "Demand justice." She later apologized, writing, "I've always tried to use my platform for good. And speak up about things that are important to me. I also can admit when I make a mistake and I made a mistake with my caption. It was never my intent to insult anyone and I'm truly sorry to those that were offended." She continued in a second tweet, "I've tried very hard to be honest on my IGTV lives that I'm still learning and trying to be better. But I understand that my caption came off as tone deaf. I truly had good intentions and did not think it through that it could come off as insensitive." Another cringe-worthy example of a celeb trying to do good — and disastrously failing — was when Alyssa Milano tweeted, "I'm trans. I'm a person of color. I'm an immigrant. I'm a lesbian. I'm a gay man. I'm the disabled. I'm everything." Milano — who is none of the above, quickly started receiving backlash. "I'm glad this tweet invoked conversation. I'm so sorry it offended some. I see you and hear you," she wrote after backlash. Another example? When Tom Hiddleston used his acceptance speech at the Golden Globes to talk about the impact his TV show had on aid workers in South Sudan, leading to some accusing him of trivializing the issue and having an inflated sense of importance. After backlash, Hiddleston apologized on Facebook, writing, "I just wanted to say…I completely agree that my speech at the Golden Globes last night was inelegantly expressed. In truth, I was very nervous, and my words came out wrong. Sincerely, my only intention was to salute the incredible bravery and courage of the men and women who work so tirelessly for UNICEF UK, Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and World Food Programme, and the children of South Sudan, who continue to find hope and joy in the most difficult conditions. I apologise that my nerves got the better of me." In another attempt at allyship, I guess, Mark Ruffalo once inexplicably tweeted that "I said a prayer the other day and when God answered me back she was a Black Woman." Look, I get it. Celebs are trying to say something important and profound. It always land. Like when Kelly Osbourne clearly thought she was making a powerful statement about the value of immigrants on The ended up suggesting immigrants are necessary because they clean toilets. After the controversy, Osbourne said she'd made a "poor choice of words" but said she would "not apologize for being racist as I am NOT." Later, she called the moment "the most cringe moment of my entire life" and "the worst thing I've ever done," clarifying she meant, "This whole country is built on immigrants, and if you stop people from coming into this country who do the jobs that make this country exist and thrive and flourish, who's going to do all the jobs that you don't want to do yourself?" I'm starting to think that celebs should sometimes quiet, y'know? Like, remember when Lena Dunham said that she wished she'd had an abortion? Speaking on her podcast about visiting a Planned Parenthood in Texas, she said she was asked to share her abortion story. "I sort of jumped. 'I haven't had an abortion.' ... I wanted to make it really clear to her that as much as I was going out and fighting for other women's options, I myself had never had an abortion. And I realized then that even I was carrying within myself stigma around this issue. ... It was an important moment for me then to realize that I had internalized some of what society was throwing at us. And I had to put it in the garbage." She continued, "Now I can say that I still haven't had an abortion, but I wish I had." After backlash, Dunham apologized, saying, "I truly hope a distasteful joke on my part won't diminish the amazing work of all the women who participated. ... I would never, ever intentionally trivialize the emotional and physical challenges of terminating a pregnancy.' I mean, celebrities aren't necessarily the most educated on current events, social issues, and history. Remember when a fan asked Bebe Rexha where she'd go if she could time travel, and Rexha replied, "I would go to Paris 1940s"? For context, Paris was under Nazi occupation in the 1940s. When people pointed this out, Rexha wrote, "Girl I failed history. I just googled it." Moving on from one of the most embarrassing social media fails to me, Mia Farrow once posted a happy birthday message to her daughter Quincy, accompanied by a photo. Innocent enough, right? Except she forgot to crop the photo and posted it with the search bar visible. To find the photo, she'd searched "Mia Farrow and her black children." In another online fail, back in 2014, Rita Ora tweeted that she'd release new music if she got 100,000 retweets. It only got 2,000 retweets, and Ora deleted the tweet. She then tweeted, "By the way my Twitter got hacked somebody is threatening to release new music I've worked really hard on. Nothing comes out until I'm ready." Jim Carrey's two-minute-long video declaring his love for Emma Stone is definitely one of the more bizarre things I've seen a celebrity do, and whether or not he was joking, it had everyone cringing. In the video, Carrey says, "If I were a lot younger, I would marry you, and we would have chubby little freckle-faced kids. We'd laugh all day long and go camping, play Yahtzee, tell ghost stories by the fire. And the sex..." He trailed off, clearly thinking about sex with Emma Stone. Emma took the video in stride, later saying of the video, "Right before that video came out, we were at the MTV Movie Awards. Jason Sudeikis hosted … There was like five of us, and we just went on this tangent of talking nice behind Jim Carrey's back. Jason was talking about how great [Carrey] was when he went to Saturday Night Live and how he was just like a comedic genius. Everyone was kind of weighing in, like 'He's the best. He's amazing.' And so when [the video] happened, we all kind of talked to each other like, 'Weird, that was the guy we were lauding for, like, 30 minutes.' Have you ever done that? Just all sat around a table saying nice things about one person? It was the greatest thing. You walk away, and you were just like, That felt so good, to talk about how wonderful someone is." Ben Affleck made headlines in 2021 after a woman named Nivine Jay posted a TikTok claiming she had matched with Affleck on Raya but unmatched him because she thought his profile was fake. She then alleged that Affleck had reached out to her on Instagram, sending her a video in which he said, "Nivine, why did you unmatch me? It's me!" This might all seem a little she posted the video Affleck sent. Most of us remember when Adam Levine got in hot water in 2022 after multiple women came forward with flirty messages he had sent them — even though he's married. "Holy f–k. Holy f–king f–k. That body of yours is absurd," he allegedly wrote in several messages. "F–kkkkkkkkk I'd do anything for it," he wrote in another. Fans reposted the comments, captioning them with their own scenarios like "Me when I see a Klondike Bar." But while we may remember the memes, I feel like one of the most cringe-worthy parts of this got overlooked: that Levine's wife, Behati Prinsloo, was pregnant at the time, and Levine apparently wanted to name their child after one of the women he was DMing, Sumner Stroh. Stroh (who claimed the two had an affair) shared an alleged DM from Levine reading, "Ok serious question. I'm having another baby and if it's [a] boy I really wanna name it Sumner. You ok with that? DEAD serious." Levine later released a statement admitting to using "poor judgment in speaking with anyone other than my wife in ANY kind of flirtatious manner." However, he denied having an affair. 'I did not have an affair, nevertheless, I crossed the line during a regrettable period of my life. In certain instances it became inappropriate.' I will personally never forget James Corden's infamous AMA (Reddit's "Ask Me Anything," where fans can, well, ask the celeb anything). Signing on to promote Carpool Karaoke, Corden was flooded with insults and questions regarding claims about his staff's pay, with the most well-known being a comment from someone claiming to have sat next to Corden at a restaurant and calling him "a massively entitled c*** who yelled and treated the waitstaff like shit." The other comments were so negative that he only answered three before signing off. Grimes certainly has her fair share of cringe moments, but I think the worst has got to be when she was photographed in this wild futuristic outfit reading The Community Manifesto after splitting from Elon Musk. She later claimed she'd done it to troll paparazzi and "yield the most onion-ish possible headline." certainly succeeded. The New York Post headline was "Grimes seen reading Karl Marx following split with world's richest man Elon Musk." Although, I think I may actually have found an even more cringe-worthy paparazzi shot: when Bradley Cooper was photographed with then-girlfriend Suki Waterhouse reading Lolita in a park. Cooper was 38 at the time, while Waterhouse was 21. There are about a million cringe-worthy Logan Paul moments to choose from — which means some of the smaller ones get overlooked. Like the time he promoted Lunchly (a similar product to Lunchables, co-created by Paul) while his wife was giving birth. "I turned the hospital room into a vibe," he captioned a Snapchat story of his fiancé. The post showed the room decorated with string lights and stocked with the kid's lunch product, zooming in on a pack. Because there's nothing that makes the birth of your child more special than self-promo. Later, he tweeted, "unfortunately i'm just now seeing what's happening with the conflict and will pause on tomorrow's announcement. i pray for everyone's safety 🙏🏾" In yet another embarrassing social media snafu, Charli D'Amelio spotted #HereForCharli trending on Twitter in 2021 and tweeted, "Oh my goodness, you are all so sweet to me. You have no idea how much your kind words warm my heart i am so lucky to have you all by my side!! I love you bebs." However, she quickly deleted the tweet when fans pointed out the hashtag was actually for Charli XCX, whose friend, the musician and producer, Sophie, died suddenly. Zac Efron was also feeling grateful at an inappropriate time. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2016, Zac Efron tweeted out a photo of himself captioned: "I'm grateful for a couple things today: Martin Luther King Jr. & 10 million followers on IG." In response to backlash over seemingly equating MLK's contributions with milestones in Instagram followers, Efron deleted the tweet and wrote, "I have nothing but the greatest admiration & respect for MLK. My last post was insensitive & I apologize to anyone who I offended. So sorry." When Bow Wow flexed his luxurious travel plans on Instagram, it seemed like a pretty regular celeb post, complete with a photo of a private jet and the caption, "Travel day. NYC press run for Growing Up Hip Hop. Lets gooo." However, he was embarrassingly exposed when a Twitter user posted a photo of Bow Wow flying commercial, writing, "So this guy lil Bow Wow is on my flight to NY but on Instagram he posted a picture of a private jet captioned 'traveling to NY today.'" And am I the only one who thought Alec Baldwin's posting a photo of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins as a "tribute" — a year after he held the gun that killed her — was super cringe-worthy? It was captioned "one year ago..." as if it was some kind of nostalgic TBT. It feels especially weird considering he was later charged with involuntary manslaughter for the killing (the case was later dismissed). One more social media example – when Kardashian hanger-on Foodgod, aka Jonathan Cheban, posted a story on Instagram asking, "Should I go live later?" and the answer was "no." How come no one but me seems to remember when CeeLo Green attempted a disastrous rebrand back in late 2016? He even released a song — "Fuck Me, I'm Famous" — as his alter ego "Gnarly Davidson." He then attended the 2017 Grammys as Gnarly, dressed in all-gold. He later claimed he wasn't at the Grammys, telling TMZ, "That's somebody else altogether, man," really committing to the bit. After releasing a second song about wanting to be with Beyoncé, Green apparently abandoned the Gnarly Davidson persona. Ariana Grande has a ton of tattoos, and it was no surprise when she got one as an homage to her song "7 Rings." She posted the tattoo — written in Japanese characters — online, and fans quickly pointed out her tattoo actually translated to a charcoal grill. Which is especially awkward considering Ari is vegan. In response to online mockery, she tweeted, 'Indeed, I left out 'つの指' which should have gone in between. It hurt like fuck n still looks tight. I wouldn't have lasted one more symbol lmao. But this spot also peels a ton and won't last so if I miss it enough I'll suffer thru the whole thing next time.' In another tweet, she wrote, 'Pls leave me and my tambourine grill alone. thank u.' She later had the tattoo "fixed," though it still didn't correctly translate to "7 Rings." And finally, this one's more straight-up embarrassing than cringe (and I truly feel for Fergie here), but I feel like too many of us have forgotten the moment Fergie peed her pants onstage in 2005. Fans snapped a photo, and it quickly circulated online. She later explained, "We were late for stage, driving down the freeway, it's Friday traffic ... get to the stage, we have to start right [into] the show. I'm running on and we jump and do 'Let's Get It Started', and I get crazy and I jump and I run across the stage and my adrenaline was going and gosh, I wish it didn't happen. It was so embarrassing!" What embarrassing or cringe-worthy celeb moment can you not forget? Let us know in the comments!
