Madonna went butoh before Antony and the Johnsons did. FACT.

Sure, a mid-life struggle for relevance sent her bony ass gyrating into misguided R&B/BDSM collab's with Britney and Justin, but Madonna was once a pretty original pop artist. The other day I was YouTubing the vid for "Nothing Really Matters". I remember thinking it was 99 kinds of cool back in 1998: Madge with a silky Asian bob dances like a spazz in a Galliano kimono while all these futuristic-looking japandroids twitch in a trance - remember?

Madonna - Nothing Really Matters sélectionné dans Musique et Rock / Pop

Anyway, I was mostly really taken by the twitchy japandroids, and upon doing some research, I discovered that their movements were actually a type of Japanese dance/philosophy called "butoh". A whole lot more YouTubing and Googling ensued, and I am now definitely a huge fan of this "butoh". It involves super controlled limb motions, weird settings (Madonna's video was filmed in a decommissioned Swedish nuclear reactor, for example) and all-white zombie-mime body makeup, which gives the dancers an eerie alien vibe, and makes the performances both disturbing and captivating.

Bhuto was originated by Hijikata Tatsumi and Kazuo Ohno in post-war Japan, and Ohno (who is still alive at 102, btw), is the one who is featured on the cover of Antony and the Johnsons' latest and wonderful album, The Crying Light. (Ha! See? Madge = totally way ahead of Antony in the "homages to obscure Japanese movements" department.)

Here is legendary Ohno's performance of "The Dead Sea":




Doesn't he look like a wonderfully possessed geisha puppet? And here is another butoh video of Sankai Juku, the most well-known butoh dance group, hangin upside down and looking weird:



There is some disagreement on whether butoh has a prescribed vocabulary of movement or whether it is just "a certain state of mind or feeling that influences the body directly or indirectly." To me it seems that the latter is true - that it's mostly just about relaying a certain haunting, profound sentiment through visual and auditory cues. And by that definition, both Madonna's video and Antony's record succeed in embodying the warped wonder of butoh. BOOM.