Madonna says Kanye West inspires her in V Magazine cover story

Madonna has been slammed on social media for recreating Marilyn Monroe’s death bed scene.

In the latest V Magazine cover interview, the 63-year-old Like A Virgin singer was seen laying face down on a mattress exposing her bottom, while in another shot prescription pill bottles could be seen by a nightstand.

Monroe was found in dead in her Brentwood, California home in 1962, and is said to have overdosed on sedative drugs the night before.

A photograph of the death bed scene looks eerily similar to setting created by photographer Steven Klein, and fans were quick to express their feelings of it being bad taste on Friday.  

‘For some morbid and eerie reason, Madonna decides to re-create Marilyn Monroe’s death bed,’ pop culture expert Mike Sington tweeted. 

Many replied saying, ‘This isn’t cool. Glamorizing suicide is the only takeaway once the shock factor wears off,’ while another said: ‘Yuck. Gross and inappropriate.’

Another wrote: ‘this makes me queasy . seems to me in bad taste.’

The photographer said he was inspired by Bert Stern’s series The Last Sitting, which is believed to be the final photoshoot that Marilyn Monroe sat for, six weeks before her death on August 4, 1962. 

In Klein’s shoot, he re-created the iconic shoot with the Material Girl wearing no shirt and thong undies as she laid face down with a cross on her back.

The chart-topping star, who is promoting her new documentary Madame X, also showed off her chest when in a bustier as she was surrounded by male bodyguards.

Some of the highlights of her interview included talking about Kanye West’s controversial Donda album which she said is ‘the only thing’ that has inspired her among recent music. 

The musician said she was was intrigued that the rapper was ‘working toward failure’ in an interview with the playwright Jeremy O. Harris.

Madonna also said that she respected Martin Luther King Jr and claimed he had many mistresses.

But the focus of the cover package was her incredibly racy shoot that made her look 33, not 63.   

Klein wrote in an introduction that he and Madonna weren’t ‘interested in re-creating the images exactly,’ but they tried to ‘capture the liaison between a star and the camera, the mystery, and magic of this creative collaboration.’

As an homage to the original series, which features several nude photos of Monroe and plenty of uncharacteristically unguarded images, Madonna posted for one of the alternate covers seemingly wearing nothing but fishnet stockings and tan Louboutins as she was splayed out on a bed with her back and pert derriere to the camera.

Other cover photos showed the diva in closeup, emphasizing her age-defying features as she ran strands of pearls and diamonds across her lips. 

She was seen in glamorous white furs in a messy hotel room, with prescription pill bottles placed on a nightstand as a reference to Monroe’s drug dependencies in her final years.

In some of the black-and-white images she wore a bustier inspired by some of her earlier touring looks and covered with thick jeweled strands running down to her legs.

One black-and-white portrait showed her in a simple black suit with a fur thrown over her shoulder as she showed off her platinum locks. 

The singer also addressed her age and her ability to keep performing with the necessary energy.

‘I don’t even think about my age, to tell you the truth,’ she said. ‘I just keep going.’

Madonna added that she was ‘in agony’ for her Madame X tour because of the worn-out cartilage in her right hip.

As for when she might finally retired, she said: ‘I think we’ll just stop when we don’t have any f***ing ideas, when we don’t feel inspired anymore.’

Elsewhere, she opened about about falling in love with her 27-year-old boyfriend Ahlamalik Williams, who dies in the opening sequence of Madame X.

‘That’s what made me fall in love with him: his commitment to what he was doing,’ she said. ‘And also that he was embodying and personifying both Malcolm X and the writing of James Baldwin. And I loved that. He died before I came on stage every night. There was something very poetic about it.’

Harris got the pop icon on the subject of Kanye after asking if she had ‘heard or seen’ anything recently that she thought was ‘cute.’

‘I mean, the only thing that I’ve heard recently that has inspired me is Kanye’s record Donda,’ she replied. ‘There are very few artists that are working toward failure. And I feel like he is.’ 

Harris added that West is ‘staring at an abyss right now,’ to which the singer (born Madonna Ciccone) agreed.

‘I can’t say that I agree with all of his politics and the way that he thinks of women, or unmarried people having sex, or the gay community. But his work is on the razor’s edge, and it’s inspiring and it’s rare,’ she said. 

‘Everybody was waiting so long for his record to come out and then finally when it came out, everybody else’s record came out, too. And he still stood out.’

But Harris quizzed the singer about West’s late addition of DaBaby to the album in a prominent guest spot after he was booted from several festival bills over a homophobic rant he delivered at a Rolling Loud concert in Miami in July.

Madonna said she was ‘conflicted’ about his inclusion, but she said it was more important to ‘pay attention to the message, not the messenger.’

‘Listen to the teachings. Don’t get caught up in the teacher, what the teacher’s doing,’ she added.

Then the songstress bizarrely compared West’s embrace of DaBaby to Martin Luther King Jr. 

‘I mean, if you want to get down to dissect the character, look at the way Martin Luther King lived his life. You know, he was a Christian, God-fearing man preaching about morals and values and family,’ she said. 

‘And he had mistresses everywhere. And definitely, not living up to the image that he was presenting about himself, but does that take away from what he did for the world and how he sacrificed his life and how he was willing to work to failure, the ultimate failure, which is death by assassination? No.’

She added that she was ‘disgusted’ by King’s treatment from the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover and ‘the Kennedys’ and declared that she didn’t want to listen to secret audio tapes featuring the Civil Rights Movement icon. 

Harris and Madonna were discussing her new film Madame X, and he zeroed on a quotation from early in the film: ‘Artist’s are here to disturb the peace.’

Harris wondered if there was any peace left to disturb in the world, but the singer explained that she was interested in fighting censorship and ‘cancel culture.’

‘I believe that our job is to disturb the status quo. The censoring that’s going on in the world right now, that’s pretty frightening,’ she claimed. ‘No one’s allowed to speak their mind right now. No one’s allowed to say what they really think about things for fear of being canceled, cancel culture. 

‘In cancel culture, disturbing the peace is probably an act of treason. We could start right there, and then we can just talk about our work as artists,’ she added.

Speaking of Madame X, Madonna complained that ‘everyone told me not to do it because it was too ambitious.’

She added that union rules about working after 5 p.m. meant the show, which rehearsed until 3 a.m., paid astronomical overtime rates. 

Madonna concluded the interview by describing herself as the ultimate survivor.

‘There’s a line in my script, when my mother dies, I get back up and I keep going. And [when] all my friends died of AIDS, I get back up and I keep going, Basquiat dies, and I get back up and I keep going,’ she said. 

‘This stranger rapes me with a knife to my throat. I get back up and I keep going. My ex-husband betrays me. I get back up and I keep going. My brother betrays me, I get back up and I keep going. 

‘Either you have that mentality that you get back up and keep going, or you sit around, thinking about what people are thinking about you all the time,’ she added.