Alibaba

This thread is becoming unhinged again. I don’t even know if these are real people at this point. The posts are so trivial and bizarre that I honestly question if they are written by bots. I get that English isn’t everyone’s first language, but not even the worst direct translation can account for some of the lyrical bile I find myself reading sometimes. And it’s pages of it! Either people repeating the same thing over and over again, or random mood fits that should call for compassion and empathy because clearly there is a mental struggle on display, but then I remind myself that this is a MADONNA forum, not a support group. Can we focus on the actual topic of the thread and try to find the most intelligent and unique way to convey our personal perspectives? Humor is always a plus, as is self-awareness, but a critical eye requires knowledge and understanding.

Take A Bow ends with the lyric “Say goodbye”. The Michael Jackson tribute ends with the words “Never Can Say Goodbye” accompanied by the ethereal sounding “Angel” snippet. Madonna as a singer and cultural icon will live on forever, or at least long after she’s gone. Then all the Madonnas appear to demonstrate the breadth of her musical and visual impact while singing LUV Madonna while the real Madonna sings Bitch I’m Madonna. That’s the concept. It’s pretty straightforward.

I think it is extremely likely that she has indeed recorded a good deal of material that is awaiting release. Her initial game plan was to be done with the tour by December 2023. It is entirely possible she had an entire album ready for release prior to her illness. It's also possible that as Stuart Price has been consistently present throughout the tour dj-ing and overseeing sound engineering that they have collaborated musically on new material. He has had plenty of time to present ideas and she has had plenty of time on her days off to record vocals and co-produce.

Yes. I know your take. You have posted her London concert dates a multitude of times. I am not the enemy, I swear! I think she sounds great. I don't need to watch videos to justify my opinion, although I have watched footage of almost every date she has performed. I was at four of the LA shows and I attended two shows in NY. Her live voice is much louder in the mix currently than it was in NY in January, and from my assessment of multiple videos on dates prior to those and after, this was more often the case than not. The London shows were at the very beginning of the tour; her voice wasn't tired yet. It inevitably happens that she becomes hoarse on every tour. Additionally, she shouts a lot between her trying to reach those higher notes, particularly on Burning Up and yelling "rage" nightly in her Mother and Father rap. It isn't great for the vocal cords. She usually has sounded better when she has had a couple of nights off with the exception of the period when she was nursing a cold. This was different in LA because she performed five shows in a week, and yet her voice was strong with the exception of Saturday when she lost her upper range entirely and acknowledged it.

Her live vocals have been much more prominent in recent concerts. The backing track has been pushed way back in the mix. Her stamina has improved enormously too. It makes sense that she would take at least half a year or more to fully recover her strength and self-confidence, and by the time she landed in LA, she was there! She may have been preserving her voice, or her vocal cords might have been healing from a bout of winter sickness for the mid-tour dates. I was very pleasantly surprised by how much she pushed her vocals in LA, and she sounded good at all of the shows.

Tonight was the best show ever! She was on fire! She even sang a little bit of Hollywood! 💛

It was the new moon in every calendar. The kabbalists don’t have a monopoly on the lunar cycle.

Some random photos I took last night. Sorry they aren’t that clear! 😂

I don't know if he was at any of the NY shows. He lives here in LA and so I imagine that's why he was there! He was in the mixing booth...Mostly glued to his phone or talking to the doctor - I'm not a stalker, but I did keep looking his way to see what he was up to! He spent a lot of time looking back around the arena to gauge people's energy on different songs. He seemed very impressed that so many people knew the lyrics to Mother and Father! It was definitely a crowd filled with more than casual fans...People were singing a lot, and you could hear their voices throughout the show. Last night was my lower tier show to see the whole thing...It's overwhelming how the lighting and dancers create the entire mood! So much to see when you want to have your eyes fixed on M, but this was my chance to see the concept from a distance. Tonight it's the pit, baby! I'm gonna be scrutinizing her real life beauty so that it's etched in my brain to counter the Ricardo lens we have all gotten used to! I know we all say it over and over again, and I have seen Madonna live or in real life at least 40 times since I was a kid, but she is smaller than ever! She literally has the frame of a child, and without substantial heels, it really hits home. I was mesmerized by her personality last night. She is warmer than ever, and her joy is palpable. The bass is insane on this tour. I literally felt the hairs on my arms violently moving with the synth swish of Live To Tell pre-final verse. It was like a blast of wind traversed the arena. I couldn't tell if that was intentional, like some kind of immersive emotional experience! Bob came on dragging LA for how much botox he was seeing. He's right...We normalize cosmetic enhancements here in a way that makes a lot of people look positively ghoulish when seen outside of this bubble! Madonna, on the other hand, looked far less enhanced in person than I expected. Even her ass looks totally normal in the flesh! I have three more chances to see her up close. Tonight I'm going alone, which can feel weird to me as I get a little shy unless I know people, but at least I won't have to listen to my very casual fan friends' commentary throughout! I kid...They were a delight last night and they were awestruck. Their main takeaway was how emotional the concert was...that it made them realize how pivotal Madonna's influence had been in their own sexual and emotional development (they're lesbians and so early 90s M was an awakening for them)...Madonna is amazing. I wish the masses would appreciate her more! P.S. The Michael Jackson thing seems to be a hit with the general audience. They definitely love it visually as they all pull out their phones to record it. I love that she still cues the audience with Wanna Be Starting Something before the show begins and they play an instrumental of The Power of Goodbye as people exit.

Show was amazing tonight! She started early. Bob was first heard at 9:35pm! She was really energetic. Her speech after Don’t Tell Me was in honor of her doctor from her illness last summer who was in attendance with Guy O. Take A Bow sounded good…in fact, her voice was pretty strong throughout the show, if a little lost in the mix on those early tracks. The guest was Eric Andre. He pulled down his pants to expose his butt for the spanking. She seemed happy to be in LA…I gotta get to bed as I’m going tomorrow night and need some sleep! 😘

MDNA was a bone fide era. It will always define a significant period of the Madonna journey and she definitely gave some great visuals and looks. The album is mostly above average, and I found it was a welcome shift away from the bittersweet taste Hard Candy left me with personally. I often think the fanbase’s opinion of the album was influenced by Orbit’s loose lipped Facebook purges. It invited a lot of speculation and as a result became the Madonna album she neglected in favor of directing W.E., launching gyms and promoting perfumes. I think we all sense that from 2008 for about a decade Madonna seemed a little lost stylistically, as if she wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to do, but she still put out some truly solid, sometimes masterful pop on those subsequent albums. The EDM tinges haven’t aged as well, but the more traditional pop of TUTR, GMAYL, IAS, LS and BK sounds vibrant all these years later, and I still need to dance when I hear I’m Addicted and Some Girls. Masterpiece is among her greatest ballads, and Falling Free deserves its place in the esoteric file of Madonna lyricism. Everything else is decent, if generic and somewhat soulless. I purposefully avoided getting to Gang Bang until the end of this post because I used to think it was a spitfire of a song deserving of being a single, but now find it is novel at best and I rarely think about it.

If you’re a publisher and you want to sell books, you tell your celebrity authors to add salacious and ambiguous material about other celebrities. Madonna is always at the top of that wishlist. She has remained incredibly guarded and well-insulated from factual historical reporting considering how long she has been in the public realm. Everyone who was in NY in the 80s has a Madonna story, but they are all more about them than her if you really think about it. All that said, I find the quotes from his book about her energy not feeling right because she’s aging against the natural flow absolutely hysterical! No one with an ounce of self-awareness could actually take that quote seriously from a sexagenarian drag queen. On top of that, Madonna is really the ultimate drag queen. All the personae, images, costumes, characters and eras make her inimitable and untouchable as the most stylish and influential chameleon of the modern era. I think Ru is a really fascinating person, but in this case he can sashay away to the Love Shack baby!

Well as neither one of us knows her, let’s just move on. I’m not going to be schooled by you on how to communicate in any capacity. I tried to address you respectfully, but it clearly wasn’t good enough for you. Please just ignore me going forth. I certainly usually ignore you.

I’m sure Celine is enjoying life, and I have nothing but respect for her and wish her the very best in her promising recovery, but the idea of her getting onstage to have her legs raised and spread while a nearly naked dancer pretends to eat her out seems like a stretch to me given her persona and her recent health journey. Sorry if that seems offensive to you. It really wasn’t my intention, and so hopefully that should reassure you enough. I literally qualified the comment I made as sounding odd myself, and so I’m not sure how much more deferential I could have been. Also, I believe we should be able to laugh at life’s tragedies otherwise they consume us, and I’m quite sure Celine would agree. @VogueristaThere was nothing about my post that was sexist or misogynistic in my opinion. I don’t share anything about who I am, my gender, my sexuality, what I do, or what my opinions are of anything other than Madonna on this forum because it’s what the forum is primarily for. I do not approach anyone differently for being a man, a woman or non-binary. It isn’t intellectually important to me as I treat everyone equally based upon their intelligence, and I’m pretty sure that is what Madonna does too.

I don’t think the dancers would be able to grind on someone with stiff person syndrome. I know how wrong that sounds, but it’s true!

You’re right. I don’t think any of us quite understands how intense that must be to be moving around the way she does suspended in the air singing what is probably the most vocally demanding song of the night, and then hitting the ground with a ballad. The longer intro definitely works better as both a musical arrangement and as a breather. I love that we are still getting these aspects of a work in progress four months into the tour!

I’m sorry, but this is a vast improvement over those first performances. I’d say this is actually pretty good! I mean, to not think this is a competent vocal performance is really just contrarianism! I’m completely reassured seeing this as when I first saw her do it I was dumbfounded as it sounded like she was barely present and just going through the motions. I’ve noticed she seems more energetic in recent shows, and I’m loving it! I was going to sell my fourth night in LA to recoup some 💰but now I’m doing all four. I’ll never get these moments again with her, and so I’m soaking up every minute! Btw, when I saw Confessions in NY, she sounded amazing at pretty much every show (I went five times), and then I bought bootlegs from that Barney guy of the nights I attended and she sounded awful. Back then it was whatever digital camera people snuck in with the sound technology of the day; now it’s these bloody iPhones. Just like selfies, they render everything flat and ugly. 💛

Never too late indeed!