Mden

Erotica is in my top six albums of all time, along with Madame X, Rebel Heart, Music, American Life, and Bedtime Stories. All 10s. The album that I have the least connection to is Confessions. I tried and tried and tried to get into it to no avail. There’s definitely something wrong with me, cause it’s universally liked. 

Yeah…it’s me, one of the novel writers! Scroll on if you don’t have the patience or interest. 😂
 
As I scrolled through comments here and elsewhere, I noticed a good few that were simply callous, dismissive and more a reflection of whatever misery resides in the commenter’s mind, and perhaps a nod to their total disenfranchisement as “consumers”. I think the culture in which we live post-social media has rendered people impossible to please, vicious and in constant search of the negative. It’s a social disease, and many people have it. Enjoy your misery - and if you’re triggered by this being said, you know it’s on you!
 
To put the experience of opening night into context, I’d like to share that I remember seeing Sticky and Sweet in Cardiff fourteen years ago, and I found the show underwhelming. With time, Madonna loosened up, and by the time I saw her back home in the US she was commanding that stage with aplomb and gusto. I believe this can be said of her initial performances throughout her years of touring. 

It’s clear that Madonna is somewhat limited in movement by injury, and whether or not her choreography has been adjusted to accommodate this will eventually become clear if she manages to recover while touring. 

All that said, she looks amazing! She’s 65. Most people 20 years her junior would look ridiculous doing what she is doing here, and yet she looks an absolute powerhouse. I saw a lot of vulnerability in her performance this evening. I don’t know if that will stay as prevalent as her confidence increases. Let’s not forget this is her first global tour since having not only a near fatal health crisis, but also significant hip and knee surgeries. She is bound to be uncomfortable. She also has the scrutiny of haters en masse to contend with when committing to exposing herself publicly for all to see night after night! She’s been ridiculed constantly for years, and so I can only imagine the amount of inner work she must do to prepare herself for this type of experience! 
 
As for the flow of the show, I think we need to see it in person and observe everything that is being conveyed before making assessments about what is superfluous and what is lacking. Maybe it’s a work in progress to be fine tuned in the coming shows, but Madonna isn’t dumb. She doesn’t commit herself to projects of this scale mindlessly! There is a narrative. Maybe you’re just not seeing it yet! The audacity of anyone to question her vision as if she’s some bar singer who is taking to the arena stage for the first time! It’s not up to any of us to say what should or shouldn’t  be done in her show. That’s a matter of personal preference, and we established long ago that it is impossible for Madonna to fully please even a large minority of her hardcore fans. It’s not a conventional Madonna show. It’s not a conventional show on any level. The power of suggestion along with negative feedback creates a loop of ugliness. It happens on here and on other platforms all the time. It’s like needing to put down your phone. It requires a type of self-discipline to not feed into it or have your point of view altered by it. As previously stated in another post, it is one thing to offer a critique (and if you want to make it interesting and worthwhile you have to use your intellect and knowledge), but to be immediately focused on her ass, the songs she didn’t perform, the parts you didn’t like…it’s just lazy in my opinion. I have to accept it, and unfortunately I often get caught up in reading it, but for the record, and I will put it in CAPS for emphasis:
I AM SO PROUD TO BE A MADONNA FAN TODAY. I AM PROUD OF HER; HER TENACITY, HER VISION, AND HER LEGACY. 
 
This tour probably won’t be able to match the cultural impact of its 80s, 90s and 00s predecessors because it is totally retrospective. To me, it serves as a reminder of the fragility of life within the construct of time. In this way, I found there was a kinship with The Girlie Show; something ironically uncelebratory lurks throughout the show. Maybe that’s inevitable given the brush with death Madonna had earlier this year and the general malaise in the world as it stands today. That said, there is a warmth to it that I found lacking on Rebel Heart and Madame X. A sense of the transcendent, I guess. The fast pace of the setlist in order to fit more songs in is a little jarring, but we also live in a time when the average pop song is no longer than 2.5 minutes, and so it may also be that this is a throughly modern approach that we aren’t comfortable with because we come from a time when the longer a song was, the deeper it went! That’s my take, anyway. 
 
I didn’t expect to be mesmerized by the livestreams today, especially when the first one showed the ceiling more than anything else and was accompanied by some of the most classic fan “vocals” my ears have ever had the displeasure of experiencing, but there were obvious showstoppers, even rendered in poor quality…NRM, Live To Tell and Bad Girl come to mind. I realized in seeing many other fan videos that Madonna makes references to past performances and videos (Open Your Heart, for example) that I didn’t see in the live stream. I imagine there’s a lot of these moments, and so I am very much looking forward to eventually seeing all this up close and in the flesh! 
 
I’ve read a lot of speculation about her vocals. “Is she singing live? Is the entire show mimed?” 
It seems quite obvious to me from any of the videos from the floor audience that she is singing live. You can hear when she’s relying heavily on the backing track, but it seems like there’s some technology being used to blend her voice better with the track vocals. The only exception to this for me was Everybody, which was just too obvious because the original vocal is too girlish for her now. To anyone questioning if she’s singing live, she even messed up the vocals on a couple of occasions…Bad Girl for example. I think she’s in fine voice for the most part, but she did sound a little croaky and strained on some songs…I don’t remember exactly which ones, but I think Vogue was one of them. She definitely doesn’t have ease with her higher register anymore, and that’s just fine. They’ve done a great job of choosing and arranging the songs to suit her comfort. 
 
FINALLY, THIS IS DEFINITELY A SHOW THAT NEEDS TO BE PRO SHOT LIKE BLOND AMBITION IN TRUTH OR DARE! 
 
🩵🩵🩵🩵🩵🩵🩵🩵🩵🩵🩵🩵

The more I see of the higher quality videos the more I am falling in love with this tour. She looks amazing. I hope tomorrow that they do the full version of Celebration to end it.

What a moment! I think this performance is going to be one of my faves too from this tour. I mean…. Madonna even got in her face and put the top down etc and Mercy still carried on and played magnificently! MERCY JAMES is the quietest of her kids and look how she just SPOKE it!!! Omg!!!!! What a natural, so full of grace, and so composed! I want MORE!!!!!

I have no words. I can’t wait for the dvd! 

Variety concert review: Material Girl is Still the Reigning Queen of Pop Music

Four songs into Madonna’s long-awaited Celebration Tour and a technical hitch gives her a chance to chat for a little longer than was probably planned.
She tells the crowd of her early days being “hungry, broke and scared” in New York, with a lack of support from her father, who wanted her to come back home. 
“But I was not about to go back,” she declares. “Because I am not a quitter!” 
You can say that again. Madonna has been many things to many people over her 40-year pop career – something this two-hour-plus, 40-odd song, multiple-costume-change telling of “the story of my life through music and dance” makes very clear. But throughout it all, she has always been an absolute trouper. 
Most other performers would have balked at taking on a gruelling world tour less than four months after a stay in the ICU with a serious bacterial infection. Many more might have at least considered tempering the ambitious nature of an all-singing, all-dancing show that would be a physical challenge for any of today’s young pop megastars, let alone a 65-year-old pop veteran with strapping on her knee. 
But not Madonna. After postponing the scheduled first leg, the tour finds itself starting – a mere 20 minutes late – at London’s O2 Arena, the very venue where, in 2015, she famously fell down the stairs after a cape malfunction at the BRIT Awards.
Those of us who were close enough to hear the thud as she hit the floor like a pole-axed prize fighter that night were amazed when she simply got back to her feet and got on with the show. And tonight, she metaphorically climbs off the canvas of that hospital stay to reclaim her pop heavyweight crown, a metaphor helpfully supported by the elaborate boxing set-up utilized during the lead-up to the show’s second act.
There are few signs that Madonna was fazed by the fraught run-up, let alone the lengthy “reset” required after her punky rip through “Burning Up.” She may sigh, “This is exactly what you don’t want to happen on your opening night,” but she simply gets her hype man Bob the Drag Queen up to tell jokes, while reminiscing about the days when she would trade “blowjobs for showers” in ‘80s NYC.
Tonight, the Madonna show goes on and, after that early hitch, it simply doesn’t stop, laying on spectacle after spectacle and show-stopper after show-stopper. With so many stages, set-ups and costume changes, you could probably catch this gig half a dozen times and still not spot everything (and many of this crowd, teetering on the brink of delirium ever since the Madonna pop-up store opened in the adjoining mall this morning, seem set to do just that).
And for once, Madonna – whose relentless commitment to the present and future of her music had always previously prevented her from playing the fantasy setlist her catalog seemed to be crying out for – is here to celebrate her four decades at the top with almost every song a fan – whether casual or obsessive – could dream of.
Furthermore, tonight she lays claim not just to her own history, but also to her influence on music and the wider world over the last 40 years. Not for nothing did the set start with “Nothing Really Matters” and its refrain of, “It all comes back to me”.
There are nods to her activism – including a passionate plea for peace between Israel and Palestine and tributes to those we have lost to AIDS – and her trailblazing, via a montage of negative news headlines and video footage from across her career. It’s a timely reminder that, in an age where anyone with a million streams that gets a new haircut can be hailed as “iconic,” Madonna really has achieved that status, over and over.
There are snippets of other people’s music throughout – a snatch of Sam Smith’s “Unholy” here or Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” there, plus a surprisingly poignant acoustic cover of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”. Some of her children make on-stage cameos, and even her ex-husbands appear briefly on screen. There are tributes to Sinead O’Connor and, more controversially, Michael Jackson, via a dubious mash-up of “Billie Jean” with “Like a Virgin”.
But mostly, it’s about Madonna and her songs. Taylor Swift has undoubtedly crystalized the concept of musical ‘eras’ in the public consciousness, but Madonna is no slouch when it comes to giving each phase of her career a distinct look and sound.
And tonight, she flits seamlessly between different stages of her life, sometimes via a costume change, sometimes by climbing into an illuminated portal that sees her fly over the crowd on her way to another time and place.
From the joyous early ‘80s dance-pop of “Get Into the Groove” and “Holiday”; to big ballads such as “Live to Tell” and “Bad Girl”; to the raunch of “Erotica” (in which Madge gets to saucily, um, interact with her younger self via a lookalike in the iconic “Blonde Ambition” get-up) and “Justify My Love”; to the sheer, irresistible pizazz of “Vogue,” “Don’t Tell Me,” “La Isla Bonita,” “Ray of Light,” “Hung Up,” “Like a Prayer” and so many others; this show is proof that there is no such thing as too much Madonna.
True, the lack of a live band occasionally makes things lack a little punch (most notably on a glitchy “Die Another Day”). But overall, tonight shows that while – just like 40 years ago – Madonna still doesn’t know how to quit, boy has she learned how to come back.
“It’s been a crazy year,” she says, during a rare pause for breath. “I didn’t think I was going to make it and neither did my doctors.”
But thankfully, she did and, by the end, all the different iterations of Madonna from across the decades are on stage, the lookalikes hugging each other with delight during “Bitch, I’m Madonna,” while the real deal stays center stage and supremely focused.
Still dancing, still singing, still the one and only Madonna.  

WOW!

I’m surprised at just how well Nothing Really Matters works as the opener. Stunning. ❤️

My two centes about the show and how it narrates her career/life.
"Nothing Really Matters", "Everybody", "Into the Hollywood Groove", "Burning Up", "Open Your Heart", "Holiday"  the first part of the 80s, a joyful and celebratory pop.

Then late 80s with "Live to Tell" and how the AIDS crisis made her lose people and how it affected her life, culminating in her questioning things and the development of her work and rebellion against religion/patriarchy: "Like a Prayer"/"Unholy”/"Act of Contrition".

Then the  sexual and queer defiance of her work in 90s with, "Erotica", "Justify My Love"/"Fever" (Medley), "Hung Up on Tokischa"/"Hung Up" (Medley), "Bad Girl", "Vogue", "Human Nature".

"Crazy for You"  how it all comes down to love after all the controversy (or you could see it as how she re-invented herself as a ballad singer in the mid 90s to "save her career" if you're cynical lol). "Die Another Day", "Don’t Tell Me" is her drive to keep her head up and keep going no matter what. "Mother and Father", 'La Isla Bonita", "Argentina". about her wounds from the loss of her mother and how important it was to make Evita and how it ended up closing a circle with her becoming a mother there. 
"Bedtime Story", "Ray of Light", "Rain" her rebirth and spiritual awakening after Lola which culminated in ROL and gave a twist , a revival, survival to her career. 
"Bitch I’m Madonna"/"Give Me All Your Luvin'" (Medley) , "Celebration"/"Music" (Medley) is where she is now, being the baddest bitch who refuses to go away and to live up to people's expectations.

NRM really got me crying. I can't! its just so freaking powerful, I can't wait to see it in Paris in a few weeks

Goddess

This will be remembered as her finest tour. It will evolve and a month from now all doubt will be gone. As for her physicality, shes 65 and she knows it, she's accepted her physical change with grace and humility and the outcome is an excellent stage ability where she's doing the best with all skill set. Im thrilled ♥️

Omggggh

Thank you so much! Wow wow wow to what I’ve heard so far! Nothing Really Matters is amazing. She looked so cool!

I actually think the setlist is pretty damn solid.  

I absolutely love it 

Still gagging over that Cher bit 🤣🤣🤣