Alibaba

Peppered throughout Madonna's career are references to drug use, both illicit and pharmaceutical. Sleeping pills, anti-anxiety medication, ecstasy, MDMA, cocaine, smoking cigarettes. She's a total paradox and hypocrite on a multitude of levels. She's a human being. It would seem that since 2015 Madonna is a person deeply uncomfortable in her skin on some level, and her increasing overt use of alcohol in recent years has seemed counterintuitive to her lifelong PR message. Again, not much of a surprise. Madonna has been a part of the entertainment industry for a very long time; an industry full of corrupt people and highly immoral behavior. How things are presented to us is almost never the truth. The world is a very complex place.

Peppered throughout Madonna's career are references to drug use, both illicit and pharmaceutical. Sleeping pills, anti-anxiety medication, ecstasy, MDMA, cocaine, smoking cigarettes. She's a total paradox and hypocrite on a multitude of levels. She's a human being. It would seem that since 2015 Madonna is a person deeply uncomfortable in her skin on some level, and her increasing overt use of alcohol in recent years has seemed counterintuitive to her lifelong PR message. Again, not much of a surprise. Madonna has been a part of the entertainment industry for a very long time; an industry full of corrupt people and highly immoral behavior. How things are presented to us is almost never the truth. The world is a very complex place.

How telling that of the thousands of artists who have performed at Coachella, they come back to Madonna to promote this. She really is beyond any other name in the business.

How telling that of the thousands of artists who have performed at Coachella, they come back to Madonna to promote this. She really is beyond any other name in the business.

How telling that of the thousands of artists who have performed at Coachella, they come back to Madonna to promote this. She really is beyond any other name in the business.

Bad Girl, the video, is exquisite. However, while it's an excellent album track that perfectly fits the album flow sonically while exploring the shadow side of escapism and self-destructiveness, I personally feel it simply doesn't have the richness in production that it deserves. It has always felt a little undercooked to me, and I think her vocals are the tiniest bit flat throughout, which oddly enhances the minor chords to create a sense of alienation and aloneness. It's totally effective for the moodiness of the track, but definitely renders it less commercial, thus its failure to capture the attention of the masses at the time imho. The performance she gave on SNL made the track so much more organic with its jazzy live instrumentation, and that will always be the definitive version I listen to. 

One of the best analyses I ever read on a Madonna board

With the exception of a few posts throughout these four pages, there is a fundamental lack of attention given to the primary issue here. It has less to do with Madonna changing, and more to do with the concept of fame changing post-digital revolution. Madonna's type of fame was truly exceptional for the longest time, but she aged out of the Zeitgeist when corporate interests no longer saw her preeminence as commercially useful. There was more money to be made from youth-oriented culture. Doing business with an artist of Madonna's stature would have meant profit margins for the corporate entities were diminished because she could take a larger stake herself. As the industry changed and panic kicked in regarding dwindling sales and illegal downloading, replacing artists like Madonna with green-eyed younger and more malleable acts would have been a natural shift. As it turned out, Madonna and Oseary were prescient and understood that they needed to strike while the commercial iron of touring receipts was hot, thus her 360 deal with Live Nation. Sidenote: Recording music hasn't been a valid source of income for Madonna for well over a decade; she herself decided to use her records as showcases for her live performances. She approached her creative flow as a Broadway director does. The music is the soundtrack to the show. No one seems to get this. Look at how this has become a more cynical template for less successful legacy acts who all have some type of dreadful Broadway adaptation of their back catalogs in the works.
As much as it upsets many of Madonna's fans to face this truth, most of them have long stopped being a core capitalist demographic. In fact, whenever I consider Madonna's modern legacy I am more fascinated by how limited many of her fans' perspective on her evolution is. I read endless posts about how she should be promoting her music as she did Ray of Light...That she would be better off returning to Warner Bros, as if nostalgia holds some sort of commercial magic wand in an era when almost no one sells music anymore! It shows a fundamental lack of comprehension that the world itself has drastically changed over the course of Madonna's career, and the fact that her phenomenal stamina managed to give her a somewhat imperialistic hold on global pop culture for two and a half decades is unprecedented. That's enough within itself to make everything she has done since that imperial phase ended worthy of admiration and a much kinder assessment, but there is so much more to explore here. 
There is no doubt that the public essentially wrote her off after she returned to her raunchier persona post-divorce.  One cannot deny the dismal showing of Celebration was more than a commercial embarrassment; it was a global smack in the face to the woman; age seemed to offer the world the chance to finally kick her where it hurt. 
I am more shocked by people's surprise at Madonna's healthy appetite for self-preservation through plastic surgery than by the results of the surgery. In an era of digital film and photography, no one can afford to show signs of obvious aging, and as one of the world's most photographed women whose career was built in great part on the promise of video as art form, it seems entirely logical that she would succumb to the pressures of the industry. Surely people aren't shocked to learn that Madonna is vain and a narcissist? 
Madonna explained herself most effectively during her promotion for her film W.E. I don't think many actually caught on at the time when she made parallels between herself and Wallis Simpson by describing the limiting views of the masses that prevent a public person from having more than one or two characteristics. It had long become painfully obvious that Madonna could not simultaneously and successfully be a provocative showwoman, a film director, a recording artist, an actress, a business owner, a good mother, and a human being with an evolving intellect...She therefore seemed to step back until she eventually found the best way to enable her own version of that narrative to thrive by inventing the Madame X character; an empty vessel capable of being anything she wants to be at any given fork in the road. Tears of a Clown was her first foray into meta-identity-fucking, and she knew all along that the only way forward was to leave the past and its intransigent inhabitants behind. I believe Madonna is a deconstructionist at this point in her life, fully in charge and fully self-aware. Whatever anyone else thinks of her is merely a projection of something deep within themselves. The need to denigrate her choices and their results is most probably more indicative of the audience's inability to move beyond preconceived notions and prejudice. After all, in a world of bullies, everyone is somehow still a victim. Madonna's greatest achievement is that she is a living work of art, full of contradictions and the ability to elicit the fullest emotional spectrum no matter the brush stroke. 

With the exception of a few posts throughout these four pages, there is a fundamental lack of attention given to the primary issue here. It has less to do with Madonna changing, and more to do with the concept of fame changing post-digital revolution. Madonna's type of fame was truly exceptional for the longest time, but she aged out of the Zeitgeist when corporate interests no longer saw her preeminence as commercially useful. There was more money to be made from youth-oriented culture. Doing business with an artist of Madonna's stature would have meant profit margins for the corporate entities were diminished because she could take a larger stake herself. As the industry changed and panic kicked in regarding dwindling sales and illegal downloading, replacing artists like Madonna with green-eyed younger and more malleable acts would have been a natural shift. As it turned out, Madonna and Oseary were prescient and understood that they needed to strike while the commercial iron of touring receipts was hot, thus her 360 deal with Live Nation. Sidenote: Recording music hasn't been a valid source of income for Madonna for well over a decade; she herself decided to use her records as showcases for her live performances. She approached her creative flow as a Broadway director does. The music is the soundtrack to the show. No one seems to get this. Look at how this has become a more cynical template for less successful legacy acts who all have some type of dreadful Broadway adaptation of their back catalogs in the works.
As much as it upsets many of Madonna's fans to face this truth, most of them have long stopped being a core capitalist demographic. In fact, whenever I consider Madonna's modern legacy I am more fascinated by how limited many of her fans' perspective on her evolution is. I read endless posts about how she should be promoting her music as she did Ray of Light...That she would be better off returning to Warner Bros, as if nostalgia holds some sort of commercial magic wand in an era when almost no one sells music anymore! It shows a fundamental lack of comprehension that the world itself has drastically changed over the course of Madonna's career, and the fact that her phenomenal stamina managed to give her a somewhat imperialistic hold on global pop culture for two and a half decades is unprecedented. That's enough within itself to make everything she has done since that imperial phase ended worthy of admiration and a much kinder assessment, but there is so much more to explore here. 
There is no doubt that the public essentially wrote her off after she returned to her raunchier persona post-divorce.  One cannot deny the dismal showing of Celebration was more than a commercial embarrassment; it was a global smack in the face to the woman; age seemed to offer the world the chance to finally kick her where it hurt. 
I am more shocked by people's surprise at Madonna's healthy appetite for self-preservation through plastic surgery than by the results of the surgery. In an era of digital film and photography, no one can afford to show signs of obvious aging, and as one of the world's most photographed women whose career was built in great part on the promise of video as art form, it seems entirely logical that she would succumb to the pressures of the industry. Surely people aren't shocked to learn that Madonna is vain and a narcissist? 
Madonna explained herself most effectively during her promotion for her film W.E. I don't think many actually caught on at the time when she made parallels between herself and Wallis Simpson by describing the limiting views of the masses that prevent a public person from having more than one or two characteristics. It had long become painfully obvious that Madonna could not simultaneously and successfully be a provocative showwoman, a film director, a recording artist, an actress, a business owner, a good mother, and a human being with an evolving intellect...She therefore seemed to step back until she eventually found the best way to enable her own version of that narrative to thrive by inventing the Madame X character; an empty vessel capable of being anything she wants to be at any given fork in the road. Tears of a Clown was her first foray into meta-identity-fucking, and she knew all along that the only way forward was to leave the past and its intransigent inhabitants behind. I believe Madonna is a deconstructionist at this point in her life, fully in charge and fully self-aware. Whatever anyone else thinks of her is merely a projection of something deep within themselves. The need to denigrate her choices and their results is most probably more indicative of the audience's inability to move beyond preconceived notions and prejudice. After all, in a world of bullies, everyone is somehow still a victim. Madonna's greatest achievement is that she is a living work of art, full of contradictions and the ability to elicit the fullest emotional spectrum no matter the brush stroke. 

With the exception of a few posts throughout these four pages, there is a fundamental lack of attention given to the primary issue here. It has less to do with Madonna changing, and more to do with the concept of fame changing post-digital revolution. Madonna's type of fame was truly exceptional for the longest time, but she aged out of the Zeitgeist when corporate interests no longer saw her preeminence as commercially useful. There was more money to be made from youth-oriented culture. Doing business with an artist of Madonna's stature would have meant profit margins for the corporate entities were diminished because she could take a larger stake herself. As the industry changed and panic kicked in regarding dwindling sales and illegal downloading, replacing artists like Madonna with green-eyed younger and more malleable acts would have been a natural shift. As it turned out, Madonna and Oseary were prescient and understood that they needed to strike while the commercial iron of touring receipts was hot, thus her 360 deal with Live Nation. Sidenote: Recording music hasn't been a valid source of income for Madonna for well over a decade; she herself decided to use her records as showcases for her live performances. She approached her creative flow as a Broadway director does. The music is the soundtrack to the show. No one seems to get this. Look at how this has become a more cynical template for less successful legacy acts who all have some type of dreadful Broadway adaptation of their back catalogs in the works.
As much as it upsets many of Madonna's fans to face this truth, most of them have long stopped being a core capitalist demographic. In fact, whenever I consider Madonna's modern legacy I am more fascinated by how limited many of her fans' perspective on her evolution is. I read endless posts about how she should be promoting her music as she did Ray of Light...That she would be better off returning to Warner Bros, as if nostalgia holds some sort of commercial magic wand in an era when almost no one sells music anymore! It shows a fundamental lack of comprehension that the world itself has drastically changed over the course of Madonna's career, and the fact that her phenomenal stamina managed to give her a somewhat imperialistic hold on global pop culture for two and a half decades is unprecedented. That's enough within itself to make everything she has done since that imperial phase ended worthy of admiration and a much kinder assessment, but there is so much more to explore here. 
There is no doubt that the public essentially wrote her off after she returned to her raunchier persona post-divorce.  One cannot deny the dismal showing of Celebration was more than a commercial embarrassment; it was a global smack in the face to the woman; age seemed to offer the world the chance to finally kick her where it hurt. 
I am more shocked by people's surprise at Madonna's healthy appetite for self-preservation through plastic surgery than by the results of the surgery. In an era of digital film and photography, no one can afford to show signs of obvious aging, and as one of the world's most photographed women whose career was built in great part on the promise of video as art form, it seems entirely logical that she would succumb to the pressures of the industry. Surely people aren't shocked to learn that Madonna is vain and a narcissist? 
Madonna explained herself most effectively during her promotion for her film W.E. I don't think many actually caught on at the time when she made parallels between herself and Wallis Simpson by describing the limiting views of the masses that prevent a public person from having more than one or two characteristics. It had long become painfully obvious that Madonna could not simultaneously and successfully be a provocative showwoman, a film director, a recording artist, an actress, a business owner, a good mother, and a human being with an evolving intellect...She therefore seemed to step back until she eventually found the best way to enable her own version of that narrative to thrive by inventing the Madame X character; an empty vessel capable of being anything she wants to be at any given fork in the road. Tears of a Clown was her first foray into meta-identity-fucking, and she knew all along that the only way forward was to leave the past and its intransigent inhabitants behind. I believe Madonna is a deconstructionist at this point in her life, fully in charge and fully self-aware. Whatever anyone else thinks of her is merely a projection of something deep within themselves. The need to denigrate her choices and their results is most probably more indicative of the audience's inability to move beyond preconceived notions and prejudice. After all, in a world of bullies, everyone is somehow still a victim. Madonna's greatest achievement is that she is a living work of art, full of contradictions and the ability to elicit the fullest emotional spectrum no matter the brush stroke. 

This type of denigration stems mostly from sexism. The Brits and the Americans hate women who do not fall into patriarchal submission.

This type of denigration stems mostly from sexism. The Brits and the Americans hate women who do not fall into patriarchal submission.

Just for fun I've edited the extended remixes of these songs to be similar to their album versions. They sound almost identical to the album versions, but they have new elements or instruments not available in the album versions. 
Like A Virgin (Remix Edit) 4:04 *New*
Material Girl (Remix Edit) 4:01
Over And Over (Remix Re-Edit) 5:28 
Cherish (Remix Edit) 5:01
Bad Girl (Remix Edit) 5:28
Secret (Junior's Luscious Club Edit) 4:54 
Don't Tell Me (Tracy Young Alternative Club Mix Edit) 5:28  
EDIT: All the remix edits of this post reuploaded in a single rar file: 

This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up  
 

All of this is complete projection. A place doesn't define a person. Neither does a partner. Madonna is an intuitively intelligent person. We know nothing of her friendships, or anything else for that matter. Anything we see of Madonna is what she decides to project of herself. What we see is probably a very artificial and condensed version of one tiny part of who she is. How the rest of her informs her future is what remains to be seen, and it's what remains exciting about seeing a true maverick navigate uncharted territory. 
 
We have no knowledge that Madonna became less involved in Kabbalah at any point. We only know she stopped talking about it in very controlled promotional press junkets and interviews, and we stopped seeing her heading in and out of the Kabbalah Center. Much of this probably had to do with the fact that Madonna has in recent years consistently lived in homes where the public never sees her enter or leave. 
The false narrative regarding Madonna's lack of input in projects the fanbase dislikes or likes less is another example of pure projection. In my opinion, also projection, William Orbit had a temporary lapse in judgment by going public with his personal frustration that Madonna did not make him the primary producer of MDNA. He wanted to have another immersive experience like Ray of Light, but Madonna was also into Martin S and wanted to pursue other avenues. 
While Madonna herself may be able to look back on her last two albums as periods of lesser inspiration, hindsight is mostly subjective too. Without those experiences, she wouldn't have come to the place of inspiration that led to Madame X. To me, Hard Candy is Madonna's least inspired modern album, but to others it's MDNA. I think MDNA is full of solid music and that it will undoubtedly eventually be reviewed with greater reverence. Her disenfranchisement over the Rebel Heart leak and its relative commercial failure was justifiable and understandably disappointing, but I think Madonna was very proud of her work on that album. Perhaps she is the worst perpetrator of her fans' failings in dismissing things because they weren't "big". Then again, she performed Candy Shop on three tours in seven years. 
And finally, I think it would be foolish to ignore that creativity is aloof and temperamental, and goes through a good deal of reformatting throughout a lifetime. If someone is lucky enough to be able to live from their art, they are going to still have periods when they question the purpose, the relevance and the trajectory of their work. Most people don't look at a Picasso or a Van Gogh and truthfully feel empowered and entitled to state that one period in their creative careers was vastly superior to another. One may appeal more to their sensibility, but the body of work is considered as a whole before it is dissected. Madonna is still alive and still creating. Therefore, I think her legacy is in a permanent state of fluidity. Only when she is no longer here will there be any solid universal reevaluation. She knows that, and that's why she now seemingly does whatever makes her happy. 
 
 

Understood! I can't pretend to know what makes one person see improvement where another sees otherwise; there's personal taste at the forefront of the debate, and that being totally subjective makes for a weak argument, and so I won't try to elaborate, but I appreciate your point of view.
What I can say is that I have struggled with my own perception of Madonna and my admiration for her over the past decade, and so I know how to contextualize the perception of diminishing returns. I have spent many hours in potential disillusionment upon experiencing various new Madonna projects. That said, I grew up very aware that everything Madonna did was reviled or dismissed by at least some faction of society, and I learned to become one of her fiercest advocates in my youth. Eventually, at around the time of the emergence of Kabbalah in Madonna's creative vernacular I became more questioning and cynical myself. I became more private in my experience of Madonna. I wasn't the targeted demographic of the children's books, and I didn't enjoy her GAP jeans ITG, or her discomfort with the worth of her own music at times...Fortunately, there was always something much meatier and more intense and dense to keep me interested; American Life was the first time that I saw Madonna universally dismissed for something that I found profoundly futuristic and thoroughly enthralling; a subtler monument to her power, but one that matched her evolving maturity. I stuck to that narrative throughout the subsequent years of resurgence and renaissance via COADF and grew to love that version of Madonna; the spiritually political mother and wife. When she then reemerged with Hard Candy I had to readapt again, but this time I was excited to see Madonna's defiance regarding her age. She was so physically powerful...It didn't matter that my private conversations with fellow fans and friends revolved around "did she/didn't she?' plastic surgery analysis and circumspection. I didn't take to the music on Hard Candy in the same way I had to her previous albums. I, like many other fans, had enjoyed the increasing creative influence of Stuart Price, and had hoped for Eurocentric Madonna to prevail. But Hard Candy was Madonna's clapback to Guy Ritchie's English fantasy/nightmare, and I accepted that I was essentially two steps behind, something I have always assumed whenever Madonna has made me uncomfortable or when my devotion has faltered...I know for a fact with hindsight that Madonna and Ritchie had split long before their relationship was publicly dissolved. It made sense that the entire HC era was an act of implicit rebellion. I have reassessed my experience of that period of her career and my life in accordance with that understanding! 
And that is where I was going with all of this...Thanks for being patient enough to get this far! When I was growing up and Madonna was ubiquitous and omnipotent, the channels that delivered her message and her vision targeted the masses. Everyone was exposed to the mainstream. There were fewer choices, and therefore there was more opportunity for an established act to have a huge cultural impact. Madonna was hyperaware of that rare opportunity and she made it work for her no matter the consequences. That hasn't been true for a good while - for her and any other artist for that matter - and so I think it is impossible to have the same experience of Madonna as we were lucky enough to experience twenty or thirty years ago. Madonna has produced music that I find exquisite and deeply moving in the last ten years that will never reach the ears that heard Material Girl or Vogue or Into The Groove. It doesn't make it lesser in quality in my opinion, but I know the lack of cultural impact of a song like Masterpiece makes it seem a diminished work in many people's minds. That's how I perceive things in any case.
 
I love this debate by the way! Please keep it going! 

With the exception of a few posts throughout these four pages, there is a fundamental lack of attention given to the primary issue here. It has less to do with Madonna changing, and more to do with the concept of fame changing post-digital revolution. Madonna's type of fame was truly exceptional for the longest time, but she aged out of the Zeitgeist when corporate interests no longer saw her preeminence as commercially useful. There was more money to be made from youth-oriented culture. Doing business with an artist of Madonna's stature would have meant profit margins for the corporate entities were diminished because she could take a larger stake herself. As the industry changed and panic kicked in regarding dwindling sales and illegal downloading, replacing artists like Madonna with green-eyed younger and more malleable acts would have been a natural shift. As it turned out, Madonna and Oseary were prescient and understood that they needed to strike while the commercial iron of touring receipts was hot, thus her 360 deal with Live Nation. Sidenote: Recording music hasn't been a valid source of income for Madonna for well over a decade; she herself decided to use her records as showcases for her live performances. She approached her creative flow as a Broadway director does. The music is the soundtrack to the show. No one seems to get this. Look at how this has become a more cynical template for less successful legacy acts who all have some type of dreadful Broadway adaptation of their back catalogs in the works.
As much as it upsets many of Madonna's fans to face this truth, most of them have long stopped being a core capitalist demographic. In fact, whenever I consider Madonna's modern legacy I am more fascinated by how limited many of her fans' perspective on her evolution is. I read endless posts about how she should be promoting her music as she did Ray of Light...That she would be better off returning to Warner Bros, as if nostalgia holds some sort of commercial magic wand in an era when almost no one sells music anymore! It shows a fundamental lack of comprehension that the world itself has drastically changed over the course of Madonna's career, and the fact that her phenomenal stamina managed to give her a somewhat imperialistic hold on global pop culture for two and a half decades is unprecedented. That's enough within itself to make everything she has done since that imperial phase ended worthy of admiration and a much kinder assessment, but there is so much more to explore here. 
There is no doubt that the public essentially wrote her off after she returned to her raunchier persona post-divorce.  One cannot deny the dismal showing of Celebration was more than a commercial embarrassment; it was a global smack in the face to the woman; age seemed to offer the world the chance to finally kick her where it hurt. 
I am more shocked by people's surprise at Madonna's healthy appetite for self-preservation through plastic surgery than by the results of the surgery. In an era of digital film and photography, no one can afford to show signs of obvious aging, and as one of the world's most photographed women whose career was built in great part on the promise of video as art form, it seems entirely logical that she would succumb to the pressures of the industry. Surely people aren't shocked to learn that Madonna is vain and a narcissist? 
Madonna explained herself most effectively during her promotion for her film W.E. I don't think many actually caught on at the time when she made parallels between herself and Wallis Simpson by describing the limiting views of the masses that prevent a public person from having more than one or two characteristics. It had long become painfully obvious that Madonna could not simultaneously and successfully be a provocative showwoman, a film director, a recording artist, an actress, a business owner, a good mother, and a human being with an evolving intellect...She therefore seemed to step back until she eventually found the best way to enable her own version of that narrative to thrive by inventing the Madame X character; an empty vessel capable of being anything she wants to be at any given fork in the road. Tears of a Clown was her first foray into meta-identity-fucking, and she knew all along that the only way forward was to leave the past and its intransigent inhabitants behind. I believe Madonna is a deconstructionist at this point in her life, fully in charge and fully self-aware. Whatever anyone else thinks of her is merely a projection of something deep within themselves. The need to denigrate her choices and their results is most probably more indicative of the audience's inability to move beyond preconceived notions and prejudice. After all, in a world of bullies, everyone is somehow still a victim. Madonna's greatest achievement is that she is a living work of art, full of contradictions and the ability to elicit the fullest emotional spectrum no matter the brush stroke. 

Understood! I can't pretend to know what makes one person see improvement where another sees otherwise; there's personal taste at the forefront of the debate, and that being totally subjective makes for a weak argument, and so I won't try to elaborate, but I appreciate your point of view.
What I can say is that I have struggled with my own perception of Madonna and my admiration for her over the past decade, and so I know how to contextualize the perception of diminishing returns. I have spent many hours in potential disillusionment upon experiencing various new Madonna projects. That said, I grew up very aware that everything Madonna did was reviled or dismissed by at least some faction of society, and I learned to become one of her fiercest advocates in my youth. Eventually, at around the time of the emergence of Kabbalah in Madonna's creative vernacular I became more questioning and cynical myself. I became more private in my experience of Madonna. I wasn't the targeted demographic of the children's books, and I didn't enjoy her GAP jeans ITG, or her discomfort with the worth of her own music at times...Fortunately, there was always something much meatier and more intense and dense to keep me interested; American Life was the first time that I saw Madonna universally dismissed for something that I found profoundly futuristic and thoroughly enthralling; a subtler monument to her power, but one that matched her evolving maturity. I stuck to that narrative throughout the subsequent years of resurgence and renaissance via COADF and grew to love that version of Madonna; the spiritually political mother and wife. When she then reemerged with Hard Candy I had to readapt again, but this time I was excited to see Madonna's defiance regarding her age. She was so physically powerful...It didn't matter that my private conversations with fellow fans and friends revolved around "did she/didn't she?' plastic surgery analysis and circumspection. I didn't take to the music on Hard Candy in the same way I had to her previous albums. I, like many other fans, had enjoyed the increasing creative influence of Stuart Price, and had hoped for Eurocentric Madonna to prevail. But Hard Candy was Madonna's clapback to Guy Ritchie's English fantasy/nightmare, and I accepted that I was essentially two steps behind, something I have always assumed whenever Madonna has made me uncomfortable or when my devotion has faltered...I know for a fact with hindsight that Madonna and Ritchie had split long before their relationship was publicly dissolved. It made sense that the entire HC era was an act of implicit rebellion. I have reassessed my experience of that period of her career and my life in accordance with that understanding! 
And that is where I was going with all of this...Thanks for being patient enough to get this far! When I was growing up and Madonna was ubiquitous and omnipotent, the channels that delivered her message and her vision targeted the masses. Everyone was exposed to the mainstream. There were fewer choices, and therefore there was more opportunity for an established act to have a huge cultural impact. Madonna was hyperaware of that rare opportunity and she made it work for her no matter the consequences. That hasn't been true for a good while - for her and any other artist for that matter - and so I think it is impossible to have the same experience of Madonna as we were lucky enough to experience twenty or thirty years ago. Madonna has produced music that I find exquisite and deeply moving in the last ten years that will never reach the ears that heard Material Girl or Vogue or Into The Groove. It doesn't make it lesser in quality in my opinion, but I know the lack of cultural impact of a song like Masterpiece makes it seem a diminished work in many people's minds. That's how I perceive things in any case.
 
I love this debate by the way! Please keep it going! 

With the exception of a few posts throughout these four pages, there is a fundamental lack of attention given to the primary issue here. It has less to do with Madonna changing, and more to do with the concept of fame changing post-digital revolution. Madonna's type of fame was truly exceptional for the longest time, but she aged out of the Zeitgeist when corporate interests no longer saw her preeminence as commercially useful. There was more money to be made from youth-oriented culture. Doing business with an artist of Madonna's stature would have meant profit margins for the corporate entities were diminished because she could take a larger stake herself. As the industry changed and panic kicked in regarding dwindling sales and illegal downloading, replacing artists like Madonna with green-eyed younger and more malleable acts would have been a natural shift. As it turned out, Madonna and Oseary were prescient and understood that they needed to strike while the commercial iron of touring receipts was hot, thus her 360 deal with Live Nation. Sidenote: Recording music hasn't been a valid source of income for Madonna for well over a decade; she herself decided to use her records as showcases for her live performances. She approached her creative flow as a Broadway director does. The music is the soundtrack to the show. No one seems to get this. Look at how this has become a more cynical template for less successful legacy acts who all have some type of dreadful Broadway adaptation of their back catalogs in the works.
As much as it upsets many of Madonna's fans to face this truth, most of them have long stopped being a core capitalist demographic. In fact, whenever I consider Madonna's modern legacy I am more fascinated by how limited many of her fans' perspective on her evolution is. I read endless posts about how she should be promoting her music as she did Ray of Light...That she would be better off returning to Warner Bros, as if nostalgia holds some sort of commercial magic wand in an era when almost no one sells music anymore! It shows a fundamental lack of comprehension that the world itself has drastically changed over the course of Madonna's career, and the fact that her phenomenal stamina managed to give her a somewhat imperialistic hold on global pop culture for two and a half decades is unprecedented. That's enough within itself to make everything she has done since that imperial phase ended worthy of admiration and a much kinder assessment, but there is so much more to explore here. 
There is no doubt that the public essentially wrote her off after she returned to her raunchier persona post-divorce.  One cannot deny the dismal showing of Celebration was more than a commercial embarrassment; it was a global smack in the face to the woman; age seemed to offer the world the chance to finally kick her where it hurt. 
I am more shocked by people's surprise at Madonna's healthy appetite for self-preservation through plastic surgery than by the results of the surgery. In an era of digital film and photography, no one can afford to show signs of obvious aging, and as one of the world's most photographed women whose career was built in great part on the promise of video as art form, it seems entirely logical that she would succumb to the pressures of the industry. Surely people aren't shocked to learn that Madonna is vain and a narcissist? 
Madonna explained herself most effectively during her promotion for her film W.E. I don't think many actually caught on at the time when she made parallels between herself and Wallis Simpson by describing the limiting views of the masses that prevent a public person from having more than one or two characteristics. It had long become painfully obvious that Madonna could not simultaneously and successfully be a provocative showwoman, a film director, a recording artist, an actress, a business owner, a good mother, and a human being with an evolving intellect...She therefore seemed to step back until she eventually found the best way to enable her own version of that narrative to thrive by inventing the Madame X character; an empty vessel capable of being anything she wants to be at any given fork in the road. Tears of a Clown was her first foray into meta-identity-fucking, and she knew all along that the only way forward was to leave the past and its intransigent inhabitants behind. I believe Madonna is a deconstructionist at this point in her life, fully in charge and fully self-aware. Whatever anyone else thinks of her is merely a projection of something deep within themselves. The need to denigrate her choices and their results is most probably more indicative of the audience's inability to move beyond preconceived notions and prejudice. After all, in a world of bullies, everyone is somehow still a victim. Madonna's greatest achievement is that she is a living work of art, full of contradictions and the ability to elicit the fullest emotional spectrum no matter the brush stroke. 

Guys, I'm so so sorry, but I'm a little high right now and listening to Madame X audio right now, and...
She doesn't sound great. A *LOT* of it is audio mixing. I can hear the layers so much better. I think they have it setup so that whenever her live voice cuts out, a piped in voice comes in. She's not the first artist I've seen do that. And there's a TON of reverb on her voice (makes it echo). Finally, there's definitely pitch correction on her live voice. So much of it is a backup track.
I'm not sure her live voice is quite what we're making it out to be, I'm sad to say. 

All of this is complete projection. A place doesn't define a person. Neither does a partner. Madonna is an intuitively intelligent person. We know nothing of her friendships, or anything else for that matter. Anything we see of Madonna is what she decides to project of herself. What we see is probably a very artificial and condensed version of one tiny part of who she is. How the rest of her informs her future is what remains to be seen, and it's what remains exciting about seeing a true maverick navigate uncharted territory. 
 
We have no knowledge that Madonna became less involved in Kabbalah at any point. We only know she stopped talking about it in very controlled promotional press junkets and interviews, and we stopped seeing her heading in and out of the Kabbalah Center. Much of this probably had to do with the fact that Madonna has in recent years consistently lived in homes where the public never sees her enter or leave. 
The false narrative regarding Madonna's lack of input in projects the fanbase dislikes or likes less is another example of pure projection. In my opinion, also projection, William Orbit had a temporary lapse in judgment by going public with his personal frustration that Madonna did not make him the primary producer of MDNA. He wanted to have another immersive experience like Ray of Light, but Madonna was also into Martin S and wanted to pursue other avenues. 
While Madonna herself may be able to look back on her last two albums as periods of lesser inspiration, hindsight is mostly subjective too. Without those experiences, she wouldn't have come to the place of inspiration that led to Madame X. To me, Hard Candy is Madonna's least inspired modern album, but to others it's MDNA. I think MDNA is full of solid music and that it will undoubtedly eventually be reviewed with greater reverence. Her disenfranchisement over the Rebel Heart leak and its relative commercial failure was justifiable and understandably disappointing, but I think Madonna was very proud of her work on that album. Perhaps she is the worst perpetrator of her fans' failings in dismissing things because they weren't "big". Then again, she performed Candy Shop on three tours in seven years. 
And finally, I think it would be foolish to ignore that creativity is aloof and temperamental, and goes through a good deal of reformatting throughout a lifetime. If someone is lucky enough to be able to live from their art, they are going to still have periods when they question the purpose, the relevance and the trajectory of their work. Most people don't look at a Picasso or a Van Gogh and truthfully feel empowered and entitled to state that one period in their creative careers was vastly superior to another. One may appeal more to their sensibility, but the body of work is considered as a whole before it is dissected. Madonna is still alive and still creating. Therefore, I think her legacy is in a permanent state of fluidity. Only when she is no longer here will there be any solid universal reevaluation. She knows that, and that's why she now seemingly does whatever makes her happy. 
 
 

With the exception of a few posts throughout these four pages, there is a fundamental lack of attention given to the primary issue here. It has less to do with Madonna changing, and more to do with the concept of fame changing post-digital revolution. Madonna's type of fame was truly exceptional for the longest time, but she aged out of the Zeitgeist when corporate interests no longer saw her preeminence as commercially useful. There was more money to be made from youth-oriented culture. Doing business with an artist of Madonna's stature would have meant profit margins for the corporate entities were diminished because she could take a larger stake herself. As the industry changed and panic kicked in regarding dwindling sales and illegal downloading, replacing artists like Madonna with green-eyed younger and more malleable acts would have been a natural shift. As it turned out, Madonna and Oseary were prescient and understood that they needed to strike while the commercial iron of touring receipts was hot, thus her 360 deal with Live Nation. Sidenote: Recording music hasn't been a valid source of income for Madonna for well over a decade; she herself decided to use her records as showcases for her live performances. She approached her creative flow as a Broadway director does. The music is the soundtrack to the show. No one seems to get this. Look at how this has become a more cynical template for less successful legacy acts who all have some type of dreadful Broadway adaptation of their back catalogs in the works.
As much as it upsets many of Madonna's fans to face this truth, most of them have long stopped being a core capitalist demographic. In fact, whenever I consider Madonna's modern legacy I am more fascinated by how limited many of her fans' perspective on her evolution is. I read endless posts about how she should be promoting her music as she did Ray of Light...That she would be better off returning to Warner Bros, as if nostalgia holds some sort of commercial magic wand in an era when almost no one sells music anymore! It shows a fundamental lack of comprehension that the world itself has drastically changed over the course of Madonna's career, and the fact that her phenomenal stamina managed to give her a somewhat imperialistic hold on global pop culture for two and a half decades is unprecedented. That's enough within itself to make everything she has done since that imperial phase ended worthy of admiration and a much kinder assessment, but there is so much more to explore here. 
There is no doubt that the public essentially wrote her off after she returned to her raunchier persona post-divorce.  One cannot deny the dismal showing of Celebration was more than a commercial embarrassment; it was a global smack in the face to the woman; age seemed to offer the world the chance to finally kick her where it hurt. 
I am more shocked by people's surprise at Madonna's healthy appetite for self-preservation through plastic surgery than by the results of the surgery. In an era of digital film and photography, no one can afford to show signs of obvious aging, and as one of the world's most photographed women whose career was built in great part on the promise of video as art form, it seems entirely logical that she would succumb to the pressures of the industry. Surely people aren't shocked to learn that Madonna is vain and a narcissist? 
Madonna explained herself most effectively during her promotion for her film W.E. I don't think many actually caught on at the time when she made parallels between herself and Wallis Simpson by describing the limiting views of the masses that prevent a public person from having more than one or two characteristics. It had long become painfully obvious that Madonna could not simultaneously and successfully be a provocative showwoman, a film director, a recording artist, an actress, a business owner, a good mother, and a human being with an evolving intellect...She therefore seemed to step back until she eventually found the best way to enable her own version of that narrative to thrive by inventing the Madame X character; an empty vessel capable of being anything she wants to be at any given fork in the road. Tears of a Clown was her first foray into meta-identity-fucking, and she knew all along that the only way forward was to leave the past and its intransigent inhabitants behind. I believe Madonna is a deconstructionist at this point in her life, fully in charge and fully self-aware. Whatever anyone else thinks of her is merely a projection of something deep within themselves. The need to denigrate her choices and their results is most probably more indicative of the audience's inability to move beyond preconceived notions and prejudice. After all, in a world of bullies, everyone is somehow still a victim. Madonna's greatest achievement is that she is a living work of art, full of contradictions and the ability to elicit the fullest emotional spectrum no matter the brush stroke. 

With the exception of a few posts throughout these four pages, there is a fundamental lack of attention given to the primary issue here. It has less to do with Madonna changing, and more to do with the concept of fame changing post-digital revolution. Madonna's type of fame was truly exceptional for the longest time, but she aged out of the Zeitgeist when corporate interests no longer saw her preeminence as commercially useful. There was more money to be made from youth-oriented culture. Doing business with an artist of Madonna's stature would have meant profit margins for the corporate entities were diminished because she could take a larger stake herself. As the industry changed and panic kicked in regarding dwindling sales and illegal downloading, replacing artists like Madonna with green-eyed younger and more malleable acts would have been a natural shift. As it turned out, Madonna and Oseary were prescient and understood that they needed to strike while the commercial iron of touring receipts was hot, thus her 360 deal with Live Nation. Sidenote: Recording music hasn't been a valid source of income for Madonna for well over a decade; she herself decided to use her records as showcases for her live performances. She approached her creative flow as a Broadway director does. The music is the soundtrack to the show. No one seems to get this. Look at how this has become a more cynical template for less successful legacy acts who all have some type of dreadful Broadway adaptation of their back catalogs in the works.
As much as it upsets many of Madonna's fans to face this truth, most of them have long stopped being a core capitalist demographic. In fact, whenever I consider Madonna's modern legacy I am more fascinated by how limited many of her fans' perspective on her evolution is. I read endless posts about how she should be promoting her music as she did Ray of Light...That she would be better off returning to Warner Bros, as if nostalgia holds some sort of commercial magic wand in an era when almost no one sells music anymore! It shows a fundamental lack of comprehension that the world itself has drastically changed over the course of Madonna's career, and the fact that her phenomenal stamina managed to give her a somewhat imperialistic hold on global pop culture for two and a half decades is unprecedented. That's enough within itself to make everything she has done since that imperial phase ended worthy of admiration and a much kinder assessment, but there is so much more to explore here. 
There is no doubt that the public essentially wrote her off after she returned to her raunchier persona post-divorce.  One cannot deny the dismal showing of Celebration was more than a commercial embarrassment; it was a global smack in the face to the woman; age seemed to offer the world the chance to finally kick her where it hurt. 
I am more shocked by people's surprise at Madonna's healthy appetite for self-preservation through plastic surgery than by the results of the surgery. In an era of digital film and photography, no one can afford to show signs of obvious aging, and as one of the world's most photographed women whose career was built in great part on the promise of video as art form, it seems entirely logical that she would succumb to the pressures of the industry. Surely people aren't shocked to learn that Madonna is vain and a narcissist? 
Madonna explained herself most effectively during her promotion for her film W.E. I don't think many actually caught on at the time when she made parallels between herself and Wallis Simpson by describing the limiting views of the masses that prevent a public person from having more than one or two characteristics. It had long become painfully obvious that Madonna could not simultaneously and successfully be a provocative showwoman, a film director, a recording artist, an actress, a business owner, a good mother, and a human being with an evolving intellect...She therefore seemed to step back until she eventually found the best way to enable her own version of that narrative to thrive by inventing the Madame X character; an empty vessel capable of being anything she wants to be at any given fork in the road. Tears of a Clown was her first foray into meta-identity-fucking, and she knew all along that the only way forward was to leave the past and its intransigent inhabitants behind. I believe Madonna is a deconstructionist at this point in her life, fully in charge and fully self-aware. Whatever anyone else thinks of her is merely a projection of something deep within themselves. The need to denigrate her choices and their results is most probably more indicative of the audience's inability to move beyond preconceived notions and prejudice. After all, in a world of bullies, everyone is somehow still a victim. Madonna's greatest achievement is that she is a living work of art, full of contradictions and the ability to elicit the fullest emotional spectrum no matter the brush stroke. 

An album with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Alberto Iglesias and Abel Korzeniowski.

An album with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Alberto Iglesias and Abel Korzeniowski.

With the exception of a few posts throughout these four pages, there is a fundamental lack of attention given to the primary issue here. It has less to do with Madonna changing, and more to do with the concept of fame changing post-digital revolution. Madonna's type of fame was truly exceptional for the longest time, but she aged out of the Zeitgeist when corporate interests no longer saw her preeminence as commercially useful. There was more money to be made from youth-oriented culture. Doing business with an artist of Madonna's stature would have meant profit margins for the corporate entities were diminished because she could take a larger stake herself. As the industry changed and panic kicked in regarding dwindling sales and illegal downloading, replacing artists like Madonna with green-eyed younger and more malleable acts would have been a natural shift. As it turned out, Madonna and Oseary were prescient and understood that they needed to strike while the commercial iron of touring receipts was hot, thus her 360 deal with Live Nation. Sidenote: Recording music hasn't been a valid source of income for Madonna for well over a decade; she herself decided to use her records as showcases for her live performances. She approached her creative flow as a Broadway director does. The music is the soundtrack to the show. No one seems to get this. Look at how this has become a more cynical template for less successful legacy acts who all have some type of dreadful Broadway adaptation of their back catalogs in the works.
As much as it upsets many of Madonna's fans to face this truth, most of them have long stopped being a core capitalist demographic. In fact, whenever I consider Madonna's modern legacy I am more fascinated by how limited many of her fans' perspective on her evolution is. I read endless posts about how she should be promoting her music as she did Ray of Light...That she would be better off returning to Warner Bros, as if nostalgia holds some sort of commercial magic wand in an era when almost no one sells music anymore! It shows a fundamental lack of comprehension that the world itself has drastically changed over the course of Madonna's career, and the fact that her phenomenal stamina managed to give her a somewhat imperialistic hold on global pop culture for two and a half decades is unprecedented. That's enough within itself to make everything she has done since that imperial phase ended worthy of admiration and a much kinder assessment, but there is so much more to explore here. 
There is no doubt that the public essentially wrote her off after she returned to her raunchier persona post-divorce.  One cannot deny the dismal showing of Celebration was more than a commercial embarrassment; it was a global smack in the face to the woman; age seemed to offer the world the chance to finally kick her where it hurt. 
I am more shocked by people's surprise at Madonna's healthy appetite for self-preservation through plastic surgery than by the results of the surgery. In an era of digital film and photography, no one can afford to show signs of obvious aging, and as one of the world's most photographed women whose career was built in great part on the promise of video as art form, it seems entirely logical that she would succumb to the pressures of the industry. Surely people aren't shocked to learn that Madonna is vain and a narcissist? 
Madonna explained herself most effectively during her promotion for her film W.E. I don't think many actually caught on at the time when she made parallels between herself and Wallis Simpson by describing the limiting views of the masses that prevent a public person from having more than one or two characteristics. It had long become painfully obvious that Madonna could not simultaneously and successfully be a provocative showwoman, a film director, a recording artist, an actress, a business owner, a good mother, and a human being with an evolving intellect...She therefore seemed to step back until she eventually found the best way to enable her own version of that narrative to thrive by inventing the Madame X character; an empty vessel capable of being anything she wants to be at any given fork in the road. Tears of a Clown was her first foray into meta-identity-fucking, and she knew all along that the only way forward was to leave the past and its intransigent inhabitants behind. I believe Madonna is a deconstructionist at this point in her life, fully in charge and fully self-aware. Whatever anyone else thinks of her is merely a projection of something deep within themselves. The need to denigrate her choices and their results is most probably more indicative of the audience's inability to move beyond preconceived notions and prejudice. After all, in a world of bullies, everyone is somehow still a victim. Madonna's greatest achievement is that she is a living work of art, full of contradictions and the ability to elicit the fullest emotional spectrum no matter the brush stroke.