Madonna and Elton John have kissed and made up. After decades of high-octane feuding (more of which anon), Madonna recently turned up impromptu backstage when John was appearing on late-night television sketch show, Saturday Night Live in New York to “confront” him. Her ensuing Instagram post, liked 420,605 times and counting, said: “Over the decades it hurt me to know that someone I admired so much shared his dislike of me publicly as an artist”.
Madonna continued: “When I met him, the first thing out of his mouth was ‘Forgive me’, and the walls between us fell down.”
The spat between the musicians was one for the ages: a dense matrix of jibes, counter-jibes, and outright insults (“She looks like a fucking fairground stripper”). Throughout, John seemed the most vocal and volatile. At the 2004 Q magazine awards, receiving the classic songwriter award, he said of Madonna’s nomination: “Madonna, best live act, fuck off! Since when was lip-synching live?” Before her 2012 US Superbowl half-time show, his publicly bequeathed advice was: “Make sure you lip-synch good.” (John later softened, if not entirely retracted, his lip-synch criticisms.)
It was such a long-running contretemps, it had its own eco-system and supporting players. At the 2012 Golden Globes, after John was beaten by Madonna for best original song his husband, David Furnish, said: “Her acceptance speech was embarrassing in its narcissism.”
When Madonna noted that Lady Gaga’s Born This Way sounded like her own song, Express Yourself, John professed outrage at how “ungracious” she was.
Now a Madonna-John collaboration is mooted, and the world can be relieved that the artists have finally buried the hatchet, and for once not in each other’s metaphorical skulls.
Alternatively, it could be that deep in our dark, damaged hearts, we enjoy such feuds. That celeb-strata hostilities are considered part of the entertainment: watching the rich and famous, the great and the good debase themselves, splash about in the bin-juice of human discord, revealing themselves to be just as imperfect, short-fused and obstinate as the rest of us. All of which proving that a feud can be many interesting things but it is also a great leveller.
Still, what are such feuds really about? Why would any famous people publicly go to war, especially these days, in a social media era when every slight, snub and smear is distributed, amplified and preserved for ever in online amber? In psychological terms – on any measurable level – what do they get out of it, how is it feeding them? And what of those of us who avidly watch these A-list bloodbaths play out? Who reach for the XXL tub of popcorn when celebrities openly diss each other on social media or via carefully cryptic but deadly comments in magazine interviews. What fault-line in the human condition explains that?
Dr Audrey Tang is a chartered member of the British Psychological Society, and the author of The Leader’s Guide To Wellbeing. She explains to me that generally with human beings, feuds can be a manifestation of something that’s been going on for much longer beneath the surface. “It doesn’t seem right to say that person also plays music, they’re in the same space, therefore they’re going to be competitive,” she says.
“It’s not necessarily professional. It may be that something personally triggered something in the other one and they’re reacting to that inner trauma.”
According to Tang, in psychological terms, feuding can be a highly complex matter involving primitive natures, hierarchies, fear-based impulses, familial structures, building personal needs on self-esteem (based on comparison) rather than self-compassion, not possessing strong enough conflict resolution skills, and more.
Why are relatively few feuds successfully resolved? “Then the question comes: what part of that feud is performative? What are people gaining? Is a feud performative because it gets ratings, it sells papers? Even if it’s not performative, how are you benefiting from prolonging this action and this experience?”
As for the public appetite for relishing the fall-out from high-profile feuds, Tang thinks it’s not only schadenfreude: “In a healing sense, it can spark discussion … You can remove yourself directly from the situation but you can discuss the same feelings, behaviours and actions talking about someone else … It allows us to explore these feelings safely.”
Certainly, the global stage has never been short of feuds, panning out across popular culture and far too numerous to list in full here. Sometimes the differences are resolved; other times, people double- or triple-down, taking their antipathy all the way to the grave.
The highways of rock’n’roll are littered with the firebombed wrecks of former creative closeness. The familial froideur of the now reunited Oasis brothers, Noel and Liam Gallagher, resulted in many a snipe (Noel, 2009: “Liam is the angriest man you’ll ever meet … a man with a fork in a world full of soup”).
Decades after Johnny Marr prompted the Smiths’ 1987 split, Morrissey still appears intent on feuding with him, in 2022 asking that Marr “please stop mentioning my name in interviews” (cue much hollow laughter from any hacks who, like myself, have ever tried to crowbar a Morrissey-quote out of the famously disinclined Marr).
Elsewhere, Taylor Swift and Katy Perry (now reconciled) initially dispatched each other to the wilds of social Siberia over some alleged stolen tour dancers. Kanye West’s beef with Swift is bizarre and ongoing: just a few days ago, he accused her (via her relationship with Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs) of being why he hasn’t been invited to play the Superbowl half-time show. Kelce is reported to be “furious”.
Nor have feuds been confined to musicians. In football, Brian Clough and Don Revie fought over the soul of circa-1970s Leeds United. In Hollywood, sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland feuded, and there was bloodcurdling enmity between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. On Crawford’s death, Davis was quoted as saying: “You should never say bad things about the dead, only good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”
With royalty: did we ever solve the mystery of who made who cry (Catherine? Meghan?) over Princess Charlotte’s wedding tights? In politics: the sibling fireworks of the 2010 Labour party leadership contest led to David and Ed Miliband being rebranded as the Cain and Abel of New Labour.
Then there are writers. The 18th-century poets Lord Byron and John Keats grated on each other. Novelist Julian Barnes started a feud with Martin Amis (later resolved) when he dropped his wife, Pat Kavanagh, as his literary agent. In US literary circles, Gore Vidal remarked of fellow author Truman Capote’s death: “A wise career move.” Norman Mailer also furiously feuded with Vidal, at one point punching him to the floor. Getting up, Vidal is supposed to have said: “Once again, words fail Norman Mailer.” Another literary feud involved novelist sisters, AS Byatt and Margaret Drabble, the latter observing: ”Discussing my sister just makes trouble.”
Some might prefer to think that all these celebrity skirmishes say something: that the famous are the absolute worst for feuding, and it’s all about paper-thin skins and giant egos, with social media pouring on the rocket fuel. For new kids on the block, there may even be cynical advantage to linking your name to a more successful person via a well-timed online fracas. (There is a food chain in feuds, just as there is anything else.) But again, what about our own part?
It’s somehow the famous sibling rivalries, the fraternal/sororal scuffles that bring the concept of feuding, the whole messy all-too-human shebang down to earth. Perhaps because sibling rivalry is a reminder that all of us are capable of feuding, even if Entertainment Weekly wouldn’t be remotely interested in whether we achieve conflict resolution; even if ordinary folk don’t make up in dramatic scenes backstage at Saturday Night Live, with thousands of likes on Instagram.
In the comments beneath Madonna’s post, John wrote a message, thanking her for “forgiving me and my big mouth”. John and Madonna’s well-cooked beef is done, but at 78 and 66 years old respectively, you really do have to marvel at the precious battery-life expended on verbally tearing lumps out of each other over the years. To paraphrase John’s own song, sorry wasn’t the hardest word, it was just a bit of a long time coming.
