Madonna's awkward kisses onstage with Drake at the Coachella

Once upon a time when millions of teenage boys fantasized about Madonna.
Shortly after she surprised Drake at Coachella with a ghastly kiss that left the rapper looking as if someone sprayed the inside of his mouth with Liquid-Plumr on Sunday, those fantasies gradually turned to nightmares.


In the video clip whic quickly circled the globe, Madonna strides on stage in her knee-high black leather boots and not much else. Drake, unaware he is about to be disgusted, is perched on a stool.

Madonna sneaks up from behind. The music stops and she cranks up on his chin, like she’s trying to start a Ford Model T. Then she tosses her blond locks over her left shoulder and swoops down. His face becomes a sheet of glass at 180 degrees and her lips turn into a suction cup. Drake squirms, like he’s getting a root canal without anesthesia. He instinctively reaches for his head, like he’s trying to rip off a box jellyfish.

But Madonna has none of it. She grabs his arm and pushes it away. She uses her gloved tentacle to stroke his chest. You know those old-timey claw machines at the arcade? Madonna’s tongue was the claw and somewhere, deep inside Drake’s throat, was a prize nobody else could see.

The unwanted CPR lasts a few seconds. Then Drake slouches forward, his eyes tightly shut from the gullet trauma. He covers his mouth, like a tourist in a mountain chopper ride about to lose his lunch. Madonna stares at the back of his skull with dead eyes and smeared lipstick and disheveled hair.


She looks like a vampire after a three-hour blood binge.

Then she hoists her arm in the air and reminds the whooping crowd of her name — “Bitch, I’m Madonna” — in case they were unable to read the all-caps letters on her T-shirt (“BIG AS MADONNA”) or were unaware this carnal spectacle was unfolding during a Drake song titled “Madonna.”

That’s a lot of Madonna. That’s too much Madonna.

There are kisses that transcend time and become a part of popular culture, such as Alfred Eisenstaedt’s 1945 V-J Day photo in Life magazine of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square. There are kisses that are fine art, a painting by Gustav Klimt, say, or a sculpture by Rodin. Then there was this Madonna-on-Drake incident, a calculated PDA that somehow managed to combine the cringe-inducing awkwardness of Al and Tipper Gore’s smooch in 2000 with the chapped-lip suffering displayed in 2013 by a Thai couple who earned a Guinness World Records title for a continuous kiss that lasted 58 hours, 35 minutes and 58 seconds.

Drake looked like his kiss with Madonna lasted even longer.

Hunched over, hand covering his mouth, he looked utterly revolted.

How did this happen to Madonna? How did the former sex kitten constantly praised for her ability to “reinvent” turn into such a dull cougar? That C-word is not a shot at her age, though if a 56-year-old male singer attempted a tonsillectomy on a 28-year-old female singer at a music festival — and the female reacted like a gazelle in the jaws of a lion — some would be calling for a criminal investigation. Imagine if it were Prince with Taylor Swift.

At the very least, we’d be tossing around another C-word: creepy.

Madonna stormed the music business in the ’80s and, in a bustier and garter belt, pioneered the way for so many others who vogued in her wake. And now Madonna is officially . . . creepy. Her canon of risqué milestones — including a kiss with Britney Spears at the MTV VMAs in 2003 — has been replaced by a pamphlet of predictable provocations. She’ll probably soon put out another sex book or film a threesome that gets “leaked” online.

The reinvention has been crushed by self-caricature.

As she exited the stage on Sunday, vanishing from the atmospheric glow of dry ice and blue lights, the crowd cheered. Drake recovered from his acute nausea in time to ask his fans one question: “Holy s--t, what the f--k just happened?”

I’ll tell you what happened, Drake. Madonna tried too hard to recapture her past. And that is the opposite of sexy.

4/13/2015