The ease, directness, and playfulness of pop music and of pop culture as a whole are precisely what make its essence so appealing. Its apparent simplicity brings a sense of relaxation which, I can claim, no other artwork has ever given me personally—even if I fully understood it, both conceptually and visually. For me, pop music is the purest, most sincere, and most powerful art form, the only one truly capable of touching and moving me, which in my opinion is the main purpose, or meaning, of art.

​Even within pop music, which encompasses all popular music and not just a single genre, we encounter various hierarchical divisions. Depending on genre and individual taste, society and critics have for over a century been deciding which genre or subgenre is more important, deeper, more serious, while forgetting that the main goal of all genres—of pop music as a whole—is the same. That goal is entertainment, dance, relaxation. Regardless of genre, melody, or lyrics, it is always about the release of something, and that something seeks and ultimately finds its place in an audience who, in one way or another, identify with it, connect to it, or simply surrender to it. A similar thing could be said of visual art, except that it does this in a more subtle and less forceful way, which is why it does not have the opportunity to be as large and as loud as music.

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Much like zine culture, pop music and pop culture are also underestimated—whether because of their popularity, directness, or simplicity. These are two forms that go hand in hand, if we assume that pop music was indeed the main subject of zine culture in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Both practices are based on the mass distribution of information, on reprints, recordings, repetitions, and they invite the audience to participate. They are rare, perhaps even the only ones, that truly bring art closer to non-selected people outside the field—they do the opposite of established art, which is reserved only for certain groups. Consequently, despite having far stronger influence than other forms of art, they are criticised, overlooked, and belittled.

​To practise either of these forms, the creator does not need extensive specific knowledge or experience; both encourage self-initiated action, which should be based on a desire and need for expression and creation rather than on predefined rules. It seems that the two main criteria for art have become inaccessibility and unattainability, and because both of these practices are highly accessible and attainable, they are excluded.

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In their artistic work, they focus primarily on the global pop star Madonna, recording, describing, and reinterpreting their first feelings when listening to her music, recalling old impressions and intertwining them with new ones. The book encompasses works created between 2020 and 2022 and is a collection of drawings, digital works, photographs, and writings that explore their relationship with the star and her influence on their creative practice, while also revealing, through this research, an interesting relationship they consequently have with American culture.

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The first time they became familiar with Madonna, they were about nine years old. They saw her in the film The Next Best Thing (2000), and something awakened in them. At the same time, this was the period of her Sticky & Sweet tour; a performance in Slovenia was even announced, though it ultimately never happened, but they still remember many articles, features, and trailers. These sparked their interest and exploration, and Madonna soon became one of their first more serious interests and influences. They remember walking home from school through fields and meadows, headphones in their ears, accompanied by the sounds of La Isla Bonita or True Blue. That Christmas they received her CD, which became one of only two they owned, as they were growing up already in the age of internet piracy.

​Of course, Madonna was at some point overshadowed by other, new interests, and she soon became just a pleasant memory. They did not pay her any particular attention again until the fateful March of 2020. With the beginning of the COVID pandemic, they returned from Ljubljana back home, to Gorenjska. At first, they thought it would be only for a week or so, but soon that one week turned into three months. They spent those three months entirely at home; the only two outings were the forest and the garden. For the first time in five years, they spent so much time at home in one stretch, and it was probably somehow logical or expected that they were, in a way, “reliving” certain feelings they had lost when moving to Ljubljana.

They do not know exactly why Madonna was among them, but they are convinced that if the pandemic and their temporary return home had not happened, they would probably not have begun to delve into this topic again. It all began when they quite accidentally remembered that at around ten years old, at the height of their Madonna-mania, they cried because she was not their mother. This sentence seemed absolutely excellent to them—it became the starting point for the first artwork on this theme.

​Musicians have often been labelled as idols, icons; today this is less common. Perhaps it is less common because of digitalisation and our direct contact with the internet. We have at our fingertips the largest music library in the world, and the time and interest that were needed to devote oneself to a creator forty years ago are today significantly less necessary. Consequently, perhaps fewer people devote themselves to a particular performer in enough detail to grasp them in their full intensity, as we are constantly bombarded with new information and new works. Not only has the travel time of music been reduced from several days or weeks (when music was physically sent around the world on physical media) to just a few seconds needed for a click on a computer, but with various pre-recorded beats and samples, the growth of the industry and resources, and even more capitalistically oriented priorities, the time spent creating works has also been significantly reduced.

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Although most musicians are probably far from idols beneath their constructed personas, they agree with the label in terms of the intensity of their work. Perhaps fan bases and communities of creators who worked under each other’s influence could be compared to artistic movements.

​Twelve years later, they look at the pop star with different eyes. When thinking about her, different questions, thoughts, and feelings arise. They responded to these through drawings, collages, and videos, which at some point will connect into a whole and, at least they hope, finally explain the phenomenon of Madonna.