Kimono Lisa?

The material girl's new look

This year's Grammy awards began in yellowface. The stage of the Shrine Auditorium was dressed up as a Japanese tea room and Madonna performed "Nothing Really Matters" dressed as a geisha in an electric red kimono. Madonna "yellowed" up by "whitening" up, straightening her hair into flat-black sheets and wearing thick white pancake make-up.

Repeating the formula she flaunted in her "Vogue" days of style thievery, Madonna surrounded herself with the very bodies she was feeding off: a coterie of Asian women in white kimonos and grotesque translucent masks and a shirtless Asian man twirling a flaming baton. They danced and pantomimed as their 40-year-old wanna-be Kyoto mother pushed her body into jagged breaks and muscular angles.

You know you've lost your touch as a careerist cultural vulture when you can't even make acts of symbolic colonialism look original -- or, worse, when someone like Grammy host Rosie O'Donnell can do it just as easily by delivering her opening remarks between two veggie-chopping sushi chefs after a ceremonial bow to the audience. "She's not the only one who can do Japanese," O'Donnell quipped. "Every time she does that number, I think of tempura." And indeed that's all Madonna, whom O'Donnell dubbed "the little geisha that could," had done: an exoticizing performance of snide otherness about as deep as conflating Japan with a fried cooking technique. The little geisha that couldn't, what could be worse?

How about the thought that Madonna's geishaphilia comes from Middle America bestsellerville, Arthur Golden's novel of transgender East/West ventriloquism, Memoirs of a Geisha. There's no hiding her lack of trailblazing on this one: Madonna "Sayuri" Ciccone became fascinated with Golden's fictional rendering of what she's called "the geisha-concubine thing" right alongside my mother (and grandmother, who read it first).

In her "Vogue" period, Madonna was ripping off black queens; now she's ripping off a white Harvard-educated art historian and heir to the New York Times newspaper fortune who himself is making a new fortune off his literary impersonation of a living Japanese woman, Mineko Iwasaki. (The book's audio version keeps the ventriloquist routine afloat and features actress Elaina Davis reading in a Japanese accent.) Steven Spielberg, who's taking it to the Hollywood screen -- with Arthur Golden as Oskar Schindler as John Quincy Adams -- has called it "a lovely, small Asian story."

On the radar * Everlast as the racist, evidence-planting Officer O'Maley Bitchkowski in the "The Men in Blue" scene from Prince Paul's hip-hop musical A Prince Among Thieves (Tommy Boy). * Eighties half-shirt and leg-warmer "jazz" dance choreography reborn as disruptive public performance art in the brilliant video for Fatboy Slim's "Praise You." * Terre Thaemlitz decrying pink-triangle commodification by folding abstract sound collage into queer theory on Love for Sale (Mille Plateaux), his audio essay of "electro acoustic queer nation criticism." * Dusty Springfield, 1939-1999.

These are Madonna's new peers. It was only after they laid the groundwork that she scrubbed off her subcontinent henna, donned geisha drag on the cover of last month's Harper's Bazaar (in an outfit cribbed from Björk's Alexander McQueen geisha get-up on 1997's Homogenic), and claimed, "Sometimes I think what I do is like being a modern-day geisha."

I suppose there could be an argument made for the female pop star as the entertaining concubine of an industry run by white male fantasy and power. But that's not what happens in the Hype-Williams-directs-The-Pillow-Book video for "Nothing Really Matters," where Madonna erases the objects of her alleged identification and inspiration with a gleeful visual violence. At least the infantilizing J-girl craze of a few years ago, with its pigtailed penchant for edible cuteness, involved Asian women with voices and agency (Cibo Matto, Shonen Knife). Geishaphilia keeps them silent, powerless, and crazy -- their mouths taped shut, their bodies out of control.

In the video's teahouse-turned-warehouse space, Asian women covered in white face chalk and wrapped in straitjacket kimonos move in fits and spasms and occasionally get to stick their tongues out. "Everything I give you," Madonna sings as they cluster around her, "all comes back to me." She's right about the last part, but the lie of geishaphilia is that Madonna, Golden, and the rest of the millennial Orientalist lot are giving anybody anything at all.