ShantiAshtangi

Which of the two hair styles is a wig?

Now that I am grown … I run around and sing "bitch I'm Madonna, na nananana." :D

Oh yes, please!!

I think is could easily be achieved by moving things around a little. I must admit that I find the first segment a little weird. NRM sets a beautifully mystic tone which isn't picked up. Instead, she leaved after just one song for a costume change only to come out again and perform some of her biggest classics from the 80s. I'd say by moving the BS–ROL–Rain-section to the front right after NRM and moving Everybody—ITG–OYH–Holiday to the end (between BIM and Celebration), she'd solve the issue by creating a much better flow musically and by having the biggest party hits right at the end.

She is, I didn't doubt that. But having your lead vocals doubled up by playing studio lead vocals along your live vocals is simply lazy, I'm sorry. Turn up her mic if the music is too loud but don't do that. And what does her age have to do with that? She's 65 yeah but she hasn't lost her voice. She either doesn't care or doesn't dare to sing without pre-recorded support which I do not expect to happen at a live (!)-concert. And – and that's more important – she diminishes her own talents by doing so. Yeah, you could hear her live vocals stopping when she had to sneeze during ITG but you could also hear how loud her pre-receded vocals were. I'd say it's a 50/50-thing. And it is fuel to the fire of everyone who claims she cannot sing. She obviously thinks so herself.

But she is definitely partly to be blamed for that because with the exception of 1998–2004 she never really bothered with the singing. She didn't train her voice properly until Evita and she lost interest in doing so after Confessions. And these days, she's hiding her singing-ability (which its definitely there) behind effects and backing-tracks. She is not a great singer technically because she doesn't have a wide range. But she is a singer that is able to express emotions. I don't know how she does it but the way she sings a song tells the story at least as much as the lyrics do. She's much better than Taylor here, if you ask me, who doesn't have that ability. And yet, she goes for backing tracks and everything on tour rather than training her voice and singing properly. If you have the studio vocals playing behind your live vocals, you have to stay in synch with them. That means, you can't alter certain lines, etc., which means you cannot highlight certain parts of a song, depending on the mood or the night. It becomes very robotic. I don't mind if she lip-synchs a song when the choreography is demanding. Celine Dion is lipping two thirds of her shows and doesn't dance at all. But I H A T E it when she has her own album vocals playing along during performances such as NRM or Live To Tell. These are numbers where she's standing still. She's a singer after all and she's playing a concert. I expect someone with the professionalism and the talent that Madonna has to sing live without support in such moments. She has proven time and time again that she's capable of doing so. And yet she isn't, may it be a lack of nerves or a lack of training. But if people spend as much money as they do when they buy a ticket to her shows, they deserve someone who's in charge of their nerves and their instrument, here, her voice.

I feel sorry for her but then again, I always wondered how she actually felt comfortable in that pot-smoking surrounding she's been in since dating the latest dancer (I can't even remember their names). It's really funny that one the one hand it seems she's really looking for men she can control, hence the young guys who are often much less educated than her, aren't as fluent in English as she is and at the same time you can see her changing quite drastically each time she is with a new man. Even 2012-Madonna would rather have shot herself than smoking weed and suddenly she was all about drinking and doing pot. That always seemed to be as if she wanted to make herself compatible to her boyfriends and their peers. But I guess, eventually, she needs someone much more impressive than any oof the guys she's been with since Guy.

If you have a problem with opinions, you probably shouldn't join discussion forums.

Technically, they never recorded a duet. Madonna did this song with Leonard and later with Orbit for ROL and didn’t release it. It was then given to Martim, he recorded his vocals and lowered the pitch of the original song to make it fit his range. That’s why Madonna sound rather odd on it. They’ve never been in the studio together and she obviously didn’t care enough to come in and re-record her vocals.

She should just go back to working with one co-writer and there’s no more confusion. Madonna/Pat Leonard. That’s clear and understandable.

Because that’s one of the reasons why she’s been so successful. Because people knew whenever she did something they would get flawlessly entertained. Yes, she had bad vocals before but every performance of her was a true extravaganza. if you strip it back like this – and I love that she finally dares to do that – you need to make sure that what is left is great. And she’s well aware of the fact that her live singing is often not good enough. That’s why she uses autotune, has loud album vocals playing along, that’s why she replaced her live vocals with newly recorded vocals when she releases something – from a dvd up to a performance that was aired in TV a few days before with horrible vocals. She is a singer and she has a good voice. It’s nothing out of reach for her to train her vocals and sound great, especially not if she’s standing on a bar rather than doing BAT-like dance routines. She just needs to bother.

Me too. I love how the album gets more sophisticated towards the end. IMHO, she sold the record short by saying it was mainly about dancing and having a good time. It’s quite introspective towards the end and why everybody hates Push and the likes, to me Push, How High and LION are among the best productions from that album.

I hope we get Each Time and Just A Dream.

Is it? I thought only one tiny bit of Vogue was from Lisbon. They even had to colour the corset differently as she wore the golden one in Lisbon and the lilac one in Paris. I doubt they’d go through all the trouble for more than one shot.

I must admit, I can’t picture her doing any of her previous albums with the look she has currently. ROL was so laid-back and she was in such a different mood back then, I can‘t picture a Madonna with platinum blonde hair, giant boob pushed up to her chin, fillers and grillz doing songs like NRM or Little Star.

I don’t know whether she hates her back catalogue but she obviously wants to sell a certain image of herself these days. That’s why she ignores big pets of her back catalogue, especially songs from the 90s. She tries to keep up the image of Madonna, the sexy dance-artist. That’s why she keeps revisiting songs like Like A Virgin or Material Girl although she’s said more than once that she doesn’t like them. She seems to forget and wants people to forget that a good part of her career was based on mid-tempo tracks and ballads. Most of her hits between Justify My Love and Music have been mid- or down-tempo songs but she doesn’t want to perform them on tour. That’s why she sticks to a very limited part of her back catalogue, simply because it suits the image she wants to present best. At least that’s my impression.

I just remember that here in Germany where she hadn’t suffered from the AL-backlash, people were still crazy for her when Hung Up was released. I remember that radio stations announced a week in advance that they were going to play the new Madonna-song in XX days and the general anticipation was high. The single and record then were a huge success and the concerts she played in Germany received favourable reviews. It was basically the same again in 2008 but this time, it felt as if something was missing. Madonna was missing. 4minutes is a decent song but unlike 2005, Madonna wasn’t there in 2008. She did nearly no promotion, didn’t appear on TV. All she did were the two promo concerts that sounded badly put together and were badly rehearsed. While Madonna seemed quite positive in 2005, she appeared way more reserved in 2008 (in hindsight, it was understandable) and her new puffy face didn’t help it. Then, it was the first time she released a record and did not live the new era at all. She looked so different on the album cover and in the music videos compared to how she looked during interviews. I was surprised that this time, she didn’t sell a full package where she really presented the persona from the record also in real life. And then, there was the music. Hard Candy is a decent album but in comparison to her previous work, it felt forced and uninspired. While after ROL, many songs by other artists sounded like wannabe-ROL-tracks, this time, her new music sounded like something you’ve heard before. And it marked the moment when she started to be very in your face with her sexuality, after more than ten years, where she wasn’t quiet about her sexuality but didn’t use it as a tool. I’m sure, 1998-Madonna would have been terribly embarrassed by a song like Candy Shop when she had a song like Skin, which was also about love and sex but der with the whole issue in a way more elaborate and tasteful manner. All in all, Hard Candy marked the beginning of her decline as a pop-star, as an artist, as a professional performer and as *the* driving force in show business.

That’s not true. Many straight people loved ROL and Music. In fact, ROL is one of her most un-queer records ever.

True Blue is such a great album. It’s fantastic. I wonder if we will ever get such an album from Madonna again. It’s not like it’s particularly light subject-wise but the topics, politics and lyrics always take a second row behind the music. And how great is the music? The songs are so catchy, so melodic and it’s a pure joy listening to her vocals.

No, an edited version is just a shorter, cut version of the full length version of a song. As soon as it is adjusted, even if the adjustments are only minor, then we talk about a remix. It’s basically the question whether you just cut the full length version or whether you need to go back to the multi tracks.

That is no censorship, it simply isn’t. Because the book, film, piece of music is available in an unedited form both in the UK and the US. Maybe not on the radio but on CD. Maybe not on TV but on DVD. There is no way you can compare that to non-democratic countries where certain opinions or pieces of culture are completely forbidden and people are punished if they read or watch certain things.

That’s not true, though. You do get the rights to these songs if you want to. You get the right to every song as long as you don’t alter the composition. She would have been allowed to cover Gimme Gimme Gimme and also perform it on stage an release the live version but she had to ask for the sample as Hung Up was a different song and the composition of the original was altered. Legally, it doesn’t make a difference whether she plays a holiday or LDLHA – both songs were not written by her.

You mean, like she did with Live 8 or Live Earth? Or that Haiti performance? Or singing Imagine in 2005?

Edits have nothing to do with censorship. Why does everybody keep on claiming all the time that there’s censorship in Western countries? This is not Iran. If you censor something, then the original is not available. If a radio station doesn’t play the word “fuck” you can still listen to the full version of CD or Spotify.

If her music had been shite, she wouldn’t have had a career. Plus, these days, using sex actually prevents her from selling as much as she could.