Should he use violence to combat violence? To stage a killing spree of mass in a nightclub, which is highly reminiscent of the shooting in 2016 in Orlando Florida, to criticize the gun lobby? The question arises since the release, on 26 June, the video accompanying God Control – word game with “gun control” or gun control – as Madonna from his new album, Madame X released on 14 June. The queen of pop wants to, you know, regulate more severely the circulation of weapons in the United States.
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The clip follows a timeline in reverse, starting with the images of the dead lying on the floor of a nightclub. After a short scene showing coffins lined up in a church, the video goes back the course of events. For 30 seconds, the slaughter itself is filmed. We see a man pulling with a machine gun on the dance floor. The suite is also nightmare as shocking: the victims, taken from convulsion, will get confused with the dances frantic survivors. This scene was apocalyptic, is the pretext of the words themselves: “This is your wake up call” or “this is the time to wake up”.
In a sort of flashback, Madonna, grimée in queen of disco, is being attacked, it also, in the street by armed men on the way to the disco. Then following this same timeline in reverse, we see the star in his apartment getting ready for this evening cursed. The tv is on. It streams the place of a shooting in a school in Arizona. The text of the song takes its motto: “everybody knows the damn truth / Our nation has been lied to, we have lost the respect / […] When they speak of reforms, it makes me laugh / They claim that they help, it makes me laugh”.
“Wake up”
meanwhile, the clip shows images, real this time, manifestations of anti-firearms in the United States. On the last fixed shot, Madonna expresses, crying, his compassion for the victims of firearms. The video ends with the raw statistics. They remind us that 36,000 people die by gunfire each year in the United States, and 100,000 more are injured. The video ends finally by a series of slogans: “gun Control now”,”Nobody is safe”… While Madonna takes over the loop “Wake up!”
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God control is a song committed but also shocking, as Madonna would assume by preventing the fans from the violence of the scenario from the beginning of the clip. Despite this warning, a survivor of the shooting of Orlando, during which 49 people were killed, has not hesitated to criticize him on TMZ the form and the sincerity of the artist’s process: “I understand that Madonna is trying to raise awareness on the control of firearms, but I do not think that this is the right way of doing it, explained Patience Carter. For someone like me who has actually seen these pictures, experienced these images… to see them again, dramatized for the hearing, I find that this lack of sensitivity.”
