Demi Lovato Rages for the Machine

I imagine we are supposed to be outraged. But honestly, Madonna was doing this old routine 40 years ago! So it’s all just a bit of a yawn.

Fresh from transitioning back to being a woman after spending a year getting about as non-binary, pop star Demi Lovato has released her new album - Holy Fvck.

If you’re confused by the title, the album cover features her posing in bondage gear on a mattress shaped like a cross.

Get it?

No?

The title track likens having sex with her to partaking in Holy Communion.

Still confused?

Track 8 is a song called Heaven which is about the joys of masturbation.

“If pleasure’s wrong, cast me out like a sinner.

I found myself with my two little fingers

My right hand got me singing my praises

Holy water and my spirit awakens

Cut it off, cut it off, cut it off, cut it off”

The repeated lyric “cut it off” is a nod to Mathew 5v30 where Jesus says that if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off. (If you’re not familiar with the Bible, Jesus’ statement is metaphorical.)

Lovato says of the song …

“I love the pre-chorus where it repeats, ‘Cut it off!’ because unless you know the Bible verse behind the song, you’re like, ‘What?’ And then, of course, the chorus—'Going to hell because it feels like heaven.’”

On the album she calls herself a sinner, a heathen, a serpent, a sexorcist, and “ungodly but heaven sent”. And that’s all by the album’s midpoint.

So wow. Using Christian iconography to subvert traditional norms. So edgy. So avant garde. So tedious.

Madonna was doing this before Lovato was even born. Remember Madge writhing around with crucifixes singing “Like a Virgin”? And then she sang “Like a Prayer” with burning crosses and an eroticised Jesus. Later she performed “Live to Tell”while wearing a crown of thorns and suspended from a giant crucifix.

Madonna is still writhing, only now as a senior citizen.

Lovato doesn’t even have Madonna’s granny gimmick to work with.

If she was actually wanting to be edgy, she might try mocking Islam, or the Pride Flag, or Black Lives Matter.

That’s crazy, of course. She’s not that edgy. She’s more your standard sort of stand-back-from-the-edge kind of edgy.

She’s about as edgy as a beige Volvo driver doing 25 in a 40km/h zone.

Lovato pretends mocking Christianity is subversive when it’s really just unoriginal and safe. Salman Rushdie wasn’t stabbed by an extremist Catholic nun, you know.

If Lovato sang that Jesus was her Lord and Savour, now that would be brave.

But there’s nothing anti-authoritarian about mocking Christianity since practically every institution is already anti-Christian.

When you malign Christianity you’re not raging against the machine, you’re raging for the machine.

Such a yawn.