Alibaba
-
Posts
598 -
Joined
-
Online
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Calendar
Videos
Posts posted by Alibaba
-
-
13 hours ago, True Blue 84 said:
I agree, it's better but still not good at all
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!
- Redha DBL and Voguerista
-
2
-
The Immaculate Collection was an event and corresponds to an era in Madonna’s career. To a lesser degree, Something To Remember shares this characteristic. There was a concept behind both of them, and the quality shows. No subsequent collection has had this type of impact. TIC may not be comprehensive, but it is a Madonna album through and through. The gorgeous art direction and design remain the very best in her illustrious career in my opinion. The mixes that appear on TIC became the definitive versions for the masses.
You Can Dance gets an honorary mention for nostalgia, but it covers a very short period of time in M’s career.
Finally Enough Love was a noble effort in design and concept, but it fell short with the poor selection of edited mixes, and the lack of insight that should have been included through journalistic writing about the history of Madonna, dance music, DJ’s and the evolution of club mixes. The artwork was below standard for the scope of the project, particularly considering it was her first major legacy release. I still fail to understand how people get excited to collect rainbow colored vinyl and such. That has no value to me compared to the input and conceptual wealth of TIC, STR or YCD.
Celebration served as a decent selection of her greatest hits with a few unforgivable omissions and inclusions, but without a major upscaling of the tracks and the relative banality of both the packaging and the new songs in comparison to the regal powerhouses that were Justify My Love and Rescue Me - Mr. Brainwash was nothing more than another investment scam commercial artist lacking the cultural nuance and gravitas that Madonna’s career retrospective deserved, and while the song Celebration is a decent tip of the hat composite to all things Madonna, Revolver is frankly a travesty with hindsight - the entire project fell flat and sold poorly too, which seemed shocking even in the era of digital music considering it was a definitive greatest hits package from the top selling female artist of all time.
GHV2 is an abomination and has been erased from all memory. I don’t know anyone who has that album or refers to it in any way.
-
Don’t Stop feels like it’s going somewhere lush and grandiose, but it never quite gets there. It defies genre, but not in a good way. Comprised of a decent but half-baked and stiflingly compressed sonic arrangement that deserved more experimental attention, and lyrics that are perfunctory at best, the song always seemed out of place on Bedtime Stories. I understand that in those days a Madonna album required a dance song…it felt like this one was a reluctant compromise to satisfy WB execs, and it subsequently felt soulless and tacked on. It’s also too mid-tempo to match the essence of the song, thus giving a languid vibe, which may make it Madonna’s first stoner jam. 😂 That M had to splatter West Coast hip hop clichés into the mix is what really makes it a cynical exercise in commerce. It’s never really been a Madonna song to me. Something about it sounds off. I felt the same way about Beautiful Scars (not the demo) on Rebel Heart. It feels dissociative, like when amateur remixers come up with a groove to lay the original Madonna vocals on top of, but there’s a a lack of cohesion on some level.
-
46 minutes ago, Redha DBL said:
I agree. There's one though that is very well done it's "Your song" made by @skinbruno . He's very talented actually and his a.i Madonna tracks are very good.
It’s also ironic that the one decent AI cover is a song she actually did a live cover of! I also heard some early AI Madonna versions of Red Hot Chili Peppers songs that were at the very least quite interesting!
-
All these AI versions are completely betrayed by enunciation and pronunciation. The way a singer uses their mouth, tongue and voice projection is so unique. AI just takes some algorithm of sound from a vocalist and transposes the amalgam into another singer’s vocal stylings. Unless a singer has similar stylings it will sound inauthentic. Sometimes it’s a surprise to discover vocalists’ similarities that you’d never expect, for example, Madonna and Freddie Mercury. Most of the AI renderings of Madonna doing other people’s songs make her sound flat, unemotional and out of her normal vocal range, which to me emphasizes how important the emotionality of Madonna’s singing style is.
-
-
-
I paraphrase, but the Netflix documentary stipulates that the A+R people behind it all were split…one of them wanted Madonna, and the other wanted Cyndi and thought she had more staying power. That’s all there is to it, and going back to January 1985 it isn’t that much of a stretch to see why. Nobody knew Madonna would be around forty years later nor that she would become the type of cultural juggernaut she did. She was hot at that moment because Like A Virgin had been number one, but prior to that she hadn’t had massive commercial success. Cyndi Lauper was huge with She’s So Unusual. It’s ridiculous not to be able to see the logic behind the choice. Hindsight is always 20/20.
- Vogue Italia and Prayer
-
2
-
What a fantastic surprise! She looks great. The video does its job, and it cements this as a Madonna single with her full endorsement and participation. Just goes to show that she may have quite a few things up her sleeve that we have no idea she has already recorded/shot/produced.
-
I think she’s just tired at that point in the show. The Like A Virgin late interlude gives her a break to regain some energy for the finale…Maybe it would benefit her to sing Rain/Frozen/Take A Bow after the Jackson tribute, even if it doesn’t flow. It’s somewhat obvious that part of the show is missing something, and they’ve done their best to bridge the gap so to speak.
She’s literally amazing for being the consummate pro that she has proven herself to be by forging ahead with this tour after all that she has been through. No, her voice isn’t able to sustain itself as easily for two hours as she managed forty or thirty years ago, and we will never know if it is a respiratory issue, fitness, fatigue, age or just usage, wear and tear. It can be very taxing on the vocal cords to bellow in an arena several nights a week for six months. When she performs acoustic she sounds much more confident and comfortable. We all know that when she is singing softly she sounds absolutely glorious…her performing Between The Bars and Can’t Help Falling In Love are great examples of this. In fact, I bet she could sing most of her back catalog pretty comfortably close mic-ed in a studio booth.
Did I already say Madonna is amazing? 🤩
-
3 hours ago, musicinferno said:
5 more days for promoters to scramble around trying to sell all those empty floor seats
I imagine she spent the time with her father.
-
1 hour ago, Blue Jean said:
Love Cher, she’s a legend but I have no idea why people mock Madonna but not Cher?
Oh no! I’m gonna have to spew another Cher rant! 😂 Preface: I love Cher too, but…cough, cough:
Cher is the Queen of Revisionism. Unfortunately with the current regime of music journalists there isn’t much basis in fact or critical thinking, and so she has been elevated to this fantasy reality that she was the original Madonna over whom she has cultural dominance for sheer longevity. Nobody seems to remember the following:
-Cher never had a solo top ten album in the US until Heart of Stone in 1989. She didn’t have another until Believe a decade later.
-From 1973 until 1987, aside from Take Me Home, she didn’t have a single song that made the top 20. Also, aside from Believe, she has not had another since Just Like Jesse James in 1989.
-Cher was hawking Bally’s Total Fitness and playing the Mirage in Vegas dressed by Frederick’s of Hollywood in the 1980s even when her film career was at its peak, and by 1993 she was pedaling Lori Davis hair products in informercials. Everyone saw her as a joke.
-Let’s also be honest. With the minor exception of Tea With Mussolini in 1999, even her film career was over after Mermaids in 1990. And before anyone leaps to contradict this, Burlesque and Mamma Mia 2 are complete jokes and will be seen as such with time, if not already!
-Cher’s touring legacy began with her Farewell Tour, which was essentially a continuation of her Believe Tour in 1999 and has essentially evolved into her subsequent tours ever since. Nobody thought of Cher as a master of the arena tour ever until she was posited as such by Liz Rosenberg. While I admire her tenacity as a performer, I have seen her twice in concert and it’s schmaltzy, camp and tacky. These are all adjectives that lend themselves well to Cher as a public figure. She used to own it, and was renowned for her “I don’t give a shit” attitude, but eventually it all just became a charade. It’s clear she takes herself far more seriously than she pretends, and the result is releasing diabolical albums of ABBA covers and Christmas unclassics for a lark that no one cares about aside from a tiny gay minority.
I used to love Cher and her faux hair metal rock albums from 1986-1991, but there’s no creativity there. That’s why it’s so cruel that she gets elevated while Madonna gets dragged over the coals. They are absolutely entirely different species as entertainers and artists, and the (living) proof is in the pudding! You’d have to be blind to see anything Madonna has done and not find it vastly superior to Cher’s work.
-
To me, nothing beats Blond Ambition for the sheer symbolism of the choreography and the energy of the performance. I loved the MDNA version with its organ before the finale. I wanted to love S + S, but frankly I’ve forgotten what it sounded like live as I’ve grown too accustomed to the studio dubbed version. The Stuart Price versions were pretty anemic in my opinion, which was in such contrast to everything else he did with her. Celebration is visually stunning. I can’t really comment on the music because it’s a studio remix we’ve all known for 35 years, but I do love the outro with Prince’s Act Of Contrition guitar.
-
2 hours ago, Redha DBL said:
To be totally honest Tina was still amazing on stage even at 69 yo, full of energy and really dancing, not just "Rocking around". Watch her perform "Proud Mary" at 69 on Youtube and she's fire, voice and choreo.
Tina was amazingly vibrant and she gave it her all. That said, her agility was somewhat diminished by the time of her final tour, and, as with Madonna, the choreography was adapted to suit her while her younger backup dancers were clearly more active. It didn’t matter because her heart was in it, and Tina remains one of the greatest icons of the 20th century and an absolute powerhouse of a performer. Where I would say there is a significant difference between Tina and Madonna as performers - and I’m not talking style, obviously - is that Tina went on record saying she didn’t want to continue touring as she no longer enjoyed performing. We know with hindsight that she had health issues, which may have contributed to that desire to retire. Perhaps Madonna will come to the same conclusion between now and her 70th birthday, but for now she seems to thrive when on stage. I really don’t want to think about a time when Madonna might retire from performing. 🙈
-
Maybe the certifications are strategic. When they do the reissues I think the certifications will be updated for the press releases.
-
I believe the tour was always meant to reignite interest in her back catalog. From a business perspective I’d speculate that it was a necessary choice in order to rebuild her mostly shattered reputation as a cultural icon. Part of the reason why America and Europe are always the focus of tour itineraries is because they are also traditionally the biggest markets for music in general. It makes sense to me that in order to get casual fans interested in potential legacy releases, she needed to remind her audience of what she is actually famous for. Many people I’ve encountered in recent years see her as a crazy old lady who does nothing but gratuitously seek attention. It’s a horrifying realization, but in all fairness that is what she portrayed herself to be to the masses who have probably only been exposed to a retweet, an IG post or a TikTok of her acting like a troll with no eyebrows, giant lips and a filter that made her look like an alien, and that’s what they think she is. For most people Madonna ruled the 80s. Despite all her significant subsequent success, it is that version of her and her music that still sells.
All that to say that I think the legacy releases will come after the tour to further capitalize on the nostalgia, and if she promotes them, she might have a chance of getting decent exposure with new music down the line…if that’s even something she is interested in.
I also really don’t think the film is a road she needs to go down after the tour. She simply doesn’t have that type of appeal as a public figure, and I’m afraid it would be panned as totally self-indulgent. Maybe she doesn’t care and feels it’s necessary to set the record straight, but if that’s the case, a book would do her far more justice.
- sara94, Brendanlovesu1, vesalii and 1 other
-
4
-
It’s also about having something to say. When we’re younger we have a sense of freshness to our learning. We feel passionate about conveying these things, and we often think we are discovering something that no one else knows! It’s normal, if delusional. As we mature, we recognize that while we can put the unique ingredients of our personality and experience into anything we create, it becomes more difficult to ignore the sense that it might not have the significance we once thought. Life veers toward overcoming the drive of the ego in favor of something less tangible and more enlightened. When Madonna put this into her work in the form of musings on spirituality, death, existentialism, or anti-materialism, the public became somewhat intolerant annd accused her of preaching, hypocrisy and inauthenticity. When she reembraced being Madonna the public persona , there was a rejection of her output because she was deemed too old to be exploring sexuality and intimacy, and her introspective and political expressions were characterized as naive, gauche, out of step, elitist, calculated…the list goes on.
I think Madonna has enough self-awareness to know that it is difficult to convey her personal feelings into popular music at this stage of life because she exists in a world where she is a white woman of extreme privilege who is expected to stay in her lane, and would be canceled for pretty much anything that veered off course at this point. Therefore introspection and nostalgia about her life and career path and legacy are the logical roads forth of choice. The tour and biographical film seem to underline this awareness, and so I’m not sure what that translates to in terms of new music at this juncture. Would Madonna be accepted making pure dance or pop music now without it becoming camp and frothy like Cher or Kylie? Would modern Madonna ever want to be seen in that light? She really doesn’t seem to be interested in popularity at any cost. I don’t think she’s ever truly pandered, and when she tried being a brand a decade ago, she failed because she simply doesn’t have that type of broad appeal.
It will certainly be interesting to discover what Madonna is interested in doing musically in 2024 or 2025, if anything!
-
- Popular Post
- Popular Post
To me, Taylor Swift is insufferable. She seems spoiled, disingenuous, immature, and entitled. I find her music mediocre at best, and her live performances are a travesty. I think after the changing of the guard at the end of the 2000’s with the arrival of people like Lady Gaga there was a rejection of the mystique of the untouchable star, and everyone had to become accessible and cater to the fan base and public. I believe Madonna suffered a lot as a result of this as she was suddenly characterized as looking down her nose at her public. But Taylor Swift is what resulted from that. This “every girl” who has the same idiot emotional spectrum as her overgrown fans. She’s 34 writing poetry straight out of a Dear Diary for Dummies that you’d expect from 14 year-olds, and the generalized infantilism of young adults in today’s culture means they hail her a genius of authenticity and relatability. The standards are unbelievably subpar nowadays, and having a juggernaut of popular music history like Joni Mitchell perform tonight only further emphasized the contrast. All just opinions, for sure, and while Swift irks me when I see her, I have to say she’s also usually quite easy to ignore. While I’m sure she didn’t intend to so blatantly disrespect Celine Dion by grabbing her award from her without acknowledging her with even eye contact, it just serves as an example of everything I suspected about her…that her head is ultimately so far up her own ass that she can’t help herself .
- heikeeduardo, sara94, pawn_shop_blues and 14 others
-
3
-
2
-
12
-
3 hours ago, True Blue 84 said:
Sometimes people say her vocals can be more heard from the Paris date and on... But as i said many times allready, it all depends on the spot that person is recording "
She can CLEARLY be heard in these opening night video's, and if you think otherwise you should definitely go check your ears...
And she sounds great
Personally I meant that she has gained more confidence as the tour has progressed, and that the Paris shows were the delineating turning point for me.
You are right. I distinctly remember hearing Madonna’s voice from the beginning and I don’t know who is doubting that she is singing on the tour…That said, there have been shows when she sings with more intensity than others. She had a period of respiratory problems due to a cold at one point, and her voice is sometimes quite hoarse from straining her upper register and screaming in her fake angry voice, both of which seem to have dictated how hard she goes on any given night from my observations.
She has really seemed in amazing spirits in her most recent shows, and she’s giving her all in Chicago! I’m so happy she is fully enjoying this tour. It can be viscerally sensed throughout the performances.
- True Blue 84 and Salida
-
2
-
Madonna is an artist, not a pop star.
Also, maybe her voice has been strengthening after being intubated and having kidney failure, and she’s regained her lung capacity and lost some of the rawness that such a dilemma provokes biologically. Subsequently she can be heard more prominently in the mix. She’s definitely regained her confidence as a performer over the course of this tour. I’d say Paris is a good delineation.
Speaking of the best of pop stars, not sure if this was mentioned anywhere else, but I just saw that Kylie is receiving a Billboard Women In Music Award on March 6th in LA. Maybe she will be a ballroom guest after all!
-
-
Something I wasn’t aware of until reading the Mary Gabriel book is that Niki said herself at the time of Drowned World that she knew it was her last tour with M because she had had surgery on her leg and it left her with one leg shorter than the other. She was struggling and had to push through, describing it as her “Muhammad Ali moment” when realizing she wasn’t going to be able to sustain the physical requirements of the shows in the future.
I do think her friendship with Christopher probably informed a lot of the ensuing bitterness as she has talked about how the entire cast of characters in M’s life changed by the time of the DWT with Christopher being replaced as artistic director by Jamie King, and this meant she and Donna had less access to Madonna. Madonna traveled separately with her family going forth, whereas on previous tours they had all flown on the same plane. She was frustrated that M asked her to have a mohawk and lose weight, and was further outraged that Donna was asked to shave her head, something that was averted thanks to Niki restyling D’s hair to look the part without drastic cuts. She also didn’t like the violence in the show, something Chris also found bizarre as shared in his book. Donna herself stated that Christopher loved the three of them together, but King preferred acrobatic dancers and screens.
Christopher was very bitter about being replaced in both Madonna’s professional realm and her personal space when she hired David Collins as interior designer.
I’m only sharing this for those who asked why there would be any friction or tension between any of the players in this dynamic. Considering how many people Madonna has collaborated with and hired in the 23 years since the Drowned World Tour, it is quite possible that N + D are far less centric to her vision of her career than they are to her longtime fans. If Maripol was also in attendance last night, why not be equally focused on her lack of involvement? It’s quite extraordinary to think that Maripol, Donna and Niki were all at her last NY show! That’s what’s special about it all, and I feel Madonna really pushed herself harder vocally and physically last night. Who knows if their presence wasn’t a factor in this?!
-
The Celebration Tour (Spoilers)
in The Celebration Tour
Posted
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!