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Sometimes I wonder if we're all seeing the same person on her social media. Does she look like someone who can undergo a grueling stadium tour? Not only physically but she doesn't seem mentally disciplined as she was even just 3 years ago. She set the standard for putting on intricate artistic shows and sadly all her performances over the past 2 years have been mediocre.

Sometimes I wonder if we're all seeing the same person on her social media. Does she look like someone who can undergo a grueling stadium tour? Not only physically but she doesn't seem mentally disciplined as she was even just 3 years ago. She set the standard for putting on intricate artistic shows and sadly all her performances over the past 2 years have been mediocre.

Sometimes I wonder if we're all seeing the same person on her social media. Does she look like someone who can undergo a grueling stadium tour? Not only physically but she doesn't seem mentally disciplined as she was even just 3 years ago. She set the standard for putting on intricate artistic shows and sadly all her performances over the past 2 years have been mediocre.

Sometimes I wonder if we're all seeing the same person on her social media. Does she look like someone who can undergo a grueling stadium tour? Not only physically but she doesn't seem mentally disciplined as she was even just 3 years ago. She set the standard for putting on intricate artistic shows and sadly all her performances over the past 2 years have been mediocre.

Sometimes I wonder if we're all seeing the same person on her social media. Does she look like someone who can undergo a grueling stadium tour? Not only physically but she doesn't seem mentally disciplined as she was even just 3 years ago. She set the standard for putting on intricate artistic shows and sadly all her performances over the past 2 years have been mediocre.

Wow, just when you think she can´t go lower she goes...

Basquiat and Madonna by Czech artist Adam Štech. This painting is part of his current exhibition at the Ascaso Gallery in Miami.

 
Painting by Paul Lovering

 
Amour Madonna by Caspa

 
A mural by Chor Boogie in Times Square


Footage of him painting the mural at 4:20
 

Basquiat and Madonna by Czech artist Adam Štech. This painting is part of his current exhibition at the Ascaso Gallery in Miami.

 
Painting by Paul Lovering

 
Amour Madonna by Caspa

 
A mural by Chor Boogie in Times Square


Footage of him painting the mural at 4:20
 

She probably had to get her hair and makeup done at 10am to make sure she was ready.
Like when I invite my aunt for dinner I tell her dinner is at 4 so when she arrives at 5:30 we can eat at 6.

Do you really think she spent years writing a script with multiple screenwriters and auditioning actresses with no intention of a movie being made? I can't see her wasting people's time like that. She has most likely faced an obstacle but that wouldn't be the first time in her career. This film is something she's very passionate about. She knows if she doesn't tell her story someone else will. Even if she doesn't end up directing it as she intended or if it ends up becoming a series, I think she wants this visual autobiography to be made for various reasons. This would be an embarrassing failure for this project to fail before it's even made.

Do you really think she spent years writing a script with multiple screenwriters and auditioning actresses with no intention of a movie being made? I can't see her wasting people's time like that. She has most likely faced an obstacle but that wouldn't be the first time in her career. This film is something she's very passionate about. She knows if she doesn't tell her story someone else will. Even if she doesn't end up directing it as she intended or if it ends up becoming a series, I think she wants this visual autobiography to be made for various reasons. This would be an embarrassing failure for this project to fail before it's even made.

Everything you say is true, however in Madonna's case she shoots herself in the foot repeatedly when she makes accusations of ageism and then uses filters on her photos. It's quite simple why she gets the abuse, because she invites it. If she was proud of who she was she wouldn't fake everything, that's one of the most disappointing things about her these past few years. She could've absolutely carried on without surgery and still looked amazing, now she's done so much weird stuff to her face and body she looks horrific without filters (and that's nothing to do with her age, that's just a series of bad choices).

Commenting incessantly on every single thing someone says you disagree with than playing victim or claiming you are just defending Madonna is immature and irritating for the rest of us.  

This pink hair isn't the issue. She always changed her hairstyle as part of her reinventions but she still looked like herself facially. She looks unrecognizable to me now. She was a classic beauty IMO and had expressive eyes. She has erased that for a motionless and emotionless face. I see a resemblance to Marilyn Manson, especially in her lasted Instagram video.

Madonna has morphed into a mixture of Pete Burns and Marilyn Manson. She has fleeting moments when she looks good but it's amazing in a trainwreck sort of way to see what she has become. It's like she's a completely different person even from the Rebel Heart era.

The question is why? Is she really blind ? Or maybe she’s sourraunded just by yes people... but really no one can tell her she doesn’t look so good or classy or just that she just doesn’t look like “herself” anymore? I was reading comments on her insta and they are all writing the same stuff: where is her face?
to only think she looked so good 10 years ago ... looks like a completely different person...

You have it written in your original post that she performed Camden Palace in March 1983. According to the article, the dates would be February 23 (Le Beat Route), February 24 (Camden Palace), and February 25 (Xenon).

She was in London in February 1983. That's when Joe Bangay took these pictures of her.



Here's a magazine clipping from the March 5, 1983 issue of Black Echoes. The article says she had performed in London the previous week. She played at 3 clubs: Le Beat Route, Camden Palace and Xenon.



 
 

She was in London in February 1983. That's when Joe Bangay took these pictures of her.



Here's a magazine clipping from the March 5, 1983 issue of Black Echoes. The article says she had performed in London the previous week. She played at 3 clubs: Le Beat Route, Camden Palace and Xenon.



 
 

This pink hair isn't the issue. She always changed her hairstyle as part of her reinventions but she still looked like herself facially. She looks unrecognizable to me now. She was a classic beauty IMO and had expressive eyes. She has erased that for a motionless and emotionless face. I see a resemblance to Marilyn Manson, especially in her lasted Instagram video.

Madonna pretends to drink and use cannabis for the negative response she gets for it? Seems unlikely, but why not? It’s true that she definitely doesn’t give a hoot how she is perceived. To me, she seems to be caught up in processing an anger that results from the friction between her self-image and her public image. As fascinating as that is - although she is certainly stingy nowadays in terms of throwing us crumbs about who she truly is behind the mask -  it’s also uncomfortable to observe at times. That’s just an opinion, but I’m sure some other fans can relate. 
 
While everyone is entitled to love or leave whatever Madonna does these days, there’s a common truth that no one wants to continue highlighting here because it incurs too much wrath, and yet it deserves to be explored more intellectually. Much of the rejection of modern Madonna is not only about ageism, but also about perceived mediocrity (again, it’s all about opinion and taste). Whether that is because Madonna wants to emulate the general mediocrity of current algorithmic, reductive pop culture to stay current and fit in or because she isn’t very good anymore is sort of a pointless debate. She may simply be having fun, and good for her, but I do often find myself asking what the point is of her harping on about a message that is never actually reflected in her work? The end product isn’t disturbing the peace, nor is it breaking new ground. It is aesthetically displeasing to many, has no social context or message other than the perpetuation of vapid narcissism, and therefore has no exceptional reason to enter the zeitgeist. Madonna has principles. Madonna has experience. Madonna has a history of injecting her work with the personal and the provocative, and yet there hasn’t been an ounce of that in anything she has done since Madame X. 
 
Another elephant in the room is that Madonna’s legacy has been canceled, or at the very least radically reduced due in great part to the problematic existence of a privileged, self-obsessive, white woman with a history of alleged cultural appropriation failing to address her cultural impact in a contemporary manner. I see it in every newspaper or cultural magazine. Madonna is an afterthought. She is rarely quoted or named as an example of anything…this after three decades of being the de facto reference for everything from motherhood, philosophy and spirituality to sex, politics and materialism. These are not my feelings about her at all. I am not an apologist. I don’t do woke revisionism. I accept that culture is vibrant and ever changing, and that great artists are also often personally problematic and compromised. This generation will eat itself, and its Pollyanna activism will barely make a ripple in the grand scheme of non-manufactured consent and dissent. Of this I am certain. I love Madonna for her irreverence, her rudeness and her arrogance. Sometimes her insecurities overshadow these qualities and make her seem mean and callous, but that’s who she has always been, and will eventually be celebrated and cited for. Not the icon on a pedestal many of her fans want to hold onto…that’s fine too. After all, she spent decades building that facade. Ugliness and mediocrity can be found throughout her career. There are moments when things were gauche or gratuitous. I can be objective about that and still be captivated by her, even at her very worst! Usually these short chapters were countered by a moment of sheer brilliance and a momentary embrace of conventional beauty and glamor…just enough to keep everyone mesmerized. That’s the part that is missing, and a lot of that comes from the discomfort surrounding her radically altered appearance and her complete disregard for convention. Discussing this from a more objective perspective is difficult on here as there is always someone ready to pounce on any implication they can insert of misogyny, ageism, or discrimination of any other kind. I understand this too. We are all trying to be just, fair and inclusive, but let’s be honest…it’s so confusing nowadays to speak on anything due to the necessary vetting we all must do before risking our reputations and our feelings by sharing a personal perspective. Maybe that’s the source of any true activism to be found at the core of the essence of Madonna’s legacy…that her very existence provokes so much confusion and vitriol because it is so charged with electricity…because she invited us all to approve and disapprove constantly for the sake of the exposure and the collective reactivity…because she told us not to take anything literally while hiding behind a blanket of alleged irony that was often just an expression of her own struggle with literalism. The guarantee I see is that those of us who remain beholden to her artistry will all rip each other to shreds just because we think we all know/own a part of her that no one else sees. I wish there was more incentive to invest time in discussing Madonna’s latter day output, but until her innovative nature re-emerges,  I’m personally left still waiting for the extraordinary courage of Baldwin’s spirit that she so often references to manifest in Madonna’s work. 

@Simonsays
I would hope that it is understood that it is implicit that what I write about is my opinion. What else would it be? I’m not presenting a historical list of events. I’m expressing my perception from my unique perspective. My opinion is always expressed from a place of intended honesty. I have been very consciously experiencing Madonna and her fanbase for 38 years. That gives me a certain insightfulness that is, in my opinion, worthy of being approached as coming from a place of integrity. In your posts, you expressed that you think some Madonna fans are resistant to the idea of her being overtly sexual at 64. Personally, I am not interested in this part of Madonna as it seems gratuitous and mindless to me. What is this fake construct we all have bought into that it is ageist to question why a person isn’t able to find greatness and beauty in aging? Isn’t there something off in that perspective? I won’t indict her ideas about self-image as I’m not in her head, but I can certainly observe the potential for perceived hypocrisy in her actions.  The many times she has stated her own revised disinterest in provocation for the sake of provocation leaves me questioning where she sees purpose in returning to that behavior late in her career. It might be more understandable if she followed a consistent narrative, but there isn’t one. For decades it was the journey from the wilderness to redemption, which by the time of Rebel Heart took on a more palpably collective tone in the form of talk of a spiritual revolution. Four years ago she was finding her way through the sea of nihilism in a world gone mad on the verge of destruction as Madame X. Perhaps the fact that we actually experienced radical societal shifts as the result of a global pandemic that robbed us of the illusions of freedom, exposed the hypocrisy of hegemony, and ultimately brought on a resurgence of saber rattling and war drums that put us closer to nuclear annihilation than ever before (Is all of that just an opinion too? Hmmm. I don’t know.) made her just say “Fuck it!”, and thus the constructed narrative ended. Unless she tells us what has been going on in her mind…unless she openly shares her feelings and thoughts on her physical and emotional struggles with injuries and pain…unless she intellectually reviews her career and sociocultural impact with honesty and objectivity, all we are left with are our opinions. But hopefully these are formed from experience and observation. 

This pink hair isn't the issue. She always changed her hairstyle as part of her reinventions but she still looked like herself facially. She looks unrecognizable to me now. She was a classic beauty IMO and had expressive eyes. She has erased that for a motionless and emotionless face. I see a resemblance to Marilyn Manson, especially in her lasted Instagram video.

Madonna attended Kid Cudi's concert a few days ago. Maybe she wants to cast him as Jean-Michel Basquiat. Cudi resembles Basquiat and they're both Afro-Latino.

 




It looked like he paid homage to M at the CFDA Fashion Awards last year

I agree with most of what you said here - I don’t think Warner’s are thinking of new music at all with this deal - it’s safe to say that at this twilight stage in her career she is not going to have a mega hit song or album now ( they would have followed her low sales during interscope years ) all they should be focusing on ( if they are smart ) is the legacy releases now - unfortunately M seems to be taking a sideways step with these or maybe it’s intentional with the remix obsession probably because it means she can directly involve herself in the promotion - sadly the way she looks and acts now is just not helping her whichever way people want to spin it - what she should be doing is focusing on the albums and thinking ways to promote them - surely these remixes could have been tagged on as bonus songs for the original studio albums ( or maybe that is the plan ? ) what’s infuriating to me is the total silence , no interviews where she has talked about these reissues - are we getting  just songs or videos or full length concerts etc ? If she would just talk about that I think that would at least keep me interested…