Ferguson87

I've re watched the concert. Madonna was great BUT I don't know what you guys think about the general visual direction of the show. Who directed the stream? Jonas? I think the camera angles and the general presentation was poor. They missed the highlights of the show so many times. 

Dirty Cash (Money Talks) by The Adventures of Stevie V played at many of the shows I attended - roundabout the same section where Good Life by Inner City played.

While I loved the event, I am also quite sad that it definitively put paid to my fantasy of Donna and Niki being the best kept secret of The Celebration Tour. 

While I loved the event, I am also quite sad that it definitively put paid to my fantasy of Donna and Niki being the best kept secret of The Celebration Tour. 

spoiler alert

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The first 4 minutes of that tour announcement video made me want to walk into oncoming traffic...but the last 10 seconds are absolutely iconic and she looks beautiful. Enough of all the guests and fake celebrity friends.
I love the warped posters.
I hope Bob is an opening act.
I love that she said 80's, 90's and 2000's after the "80's heavy" rumour. Explore that incredible catalog and don't let them box you into just the 80's, Queen!
Just please leave the friends/flavors of the moment for another day. 
I just wanna see Madonna for god's sake💖
 

Madonna at this stage of life singing Time stood still at the piano with the grillzs and the fake ass OMG lol

Here  is the web capture 1080p

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I love chickens

Now that the tour is over, can one of you bitches who secretly recorded the show (I'm certain SOMEONE here has video) please post the vids? It's not compromising her artistic integrity, now that the show is over, and I cannot wait over a year for this edited mess to drop 

For me, personally, if I had all M eras laid out in front of me at a checkout, I'd be placing the 'next customer' divider right after the MDNA tour. Things have been catastrophic since. 

Someone asked if there were recordings from London shows and I posted the link to my thread. No spoiler in this specific conversation. The whole thread is full of spoilers, including setlist changes reviews from each night etc., so if you don't want to know  anything this might not be the right thread for you. If you need info about venue, times, access just ask or use the status update.

After midnight hour I can't feel your power

I’m not sure what longeve means? Do you mean an artist with longevity?
I don’t doubt she’s been a great artist. She’s already proven that, but her ability to continue being great is seriously in question, because her audience is dwindling. Her albums don’t sell well beyond week 1. She struggles to get her music played on the radio and her concert attendance figures over the last decade have declined. There are many reasons why that might be and so much of it is out her control. I appreciate her decline in popularity is not necessarily tied to the quality of her art.
I also realize it was never her attention for this tour to outgrows Sticky & Sweet. By design it was always going to be smaller, be seen by fewer people, and make less money, but that does negate the anger, frustration and disappointment many fans have felt during this era, and these are her most ardent supporters, people willing to pay hundreds, in some cases thousands of dollars/pounds/euros to see a show that is quite literally putting people to sleep.
Perhaps she doesn’t care. Perhaps some fans don’t care either. They’ll forgive and applaud her no matter what she does, but tolerating this behaviour only encourage it, and she needs to understand how damaging it is in order to change it. Otherwise she’ll be performing her ‘great’ art to an ever shrinking audience. Any aspirations to ‘disturb the peace’ will have long since past, because the rest of the world will have moved on, won’t know about it and won’t care. Simply put, she can’t continue being a great artist without people acknowledging the greatness of her art. I love her but in her own words, she needs to ‘wake up’. 
 
 

I agree! It thought Rebel Heart imbued so many facets of Madonna abilities as a performer. It was spectacular, theatrical, provocative, and thrilling; but also quiet, sweet, romantic and intimate, with a decent mix of songs old and news.
How I judge any Madonna tour will depend largely on the set list, which is an obvious thing to say, but compared to most artists, she tends to focus each tour on her current album, and there's never really a guaranteed selection of hits you can be sure she'll perform. If you weren't into Madame X, there's only really 5 older songs for this show to fall back on, and 3 of those (Human Nature, Vogue, and Like A Prayer) have been performed with frequency on previous tours. 
Comparatively, even if you weren't a fan of the Rebel Heart, MDNA or Hard Candy albums, at least their accompanying tours played a decent number of older songs, often reinvented in imaginative ways, so they offered more than just the newer songs to enjoy. I loved the Drowned World Tour because it basically ignored the first half of her career and concentrated on Ray of Light, Music, and Bedtime Stories. I remember fans being very critical of the set list at the time, but I think it made sense to focus on those albums given how critically and commercially acclaimed they were. Conversely, Madame X has been quite polarising among fans, despite generally positive critical reviews. I'm not saying she shouldn't focus on the Madame X songs, but given how expensive the tickets were, it would have been nice to acknowledge the incredible career she's had, and play a decent number of songs spanning the entirety of her career, so there was more for everyone to enjoy - and I don't mean just the obvious hits. 
Alternatively, she could've charged less for tickets if she wanted this tour to be so Madame X-specific; then at least fans wouldn't have felt short-changed. It seems paradoxical to think tickets for this tour have been the most expensive of her career, even though it has the cheapest production values, and so few hit songs on the set list. That's not to say I didn't enjoy it, but to point out she's offered so much more, for far less in her previous tours, and that's why Madame X is my least favourite.

After watching the Madonna - Madame X Tour twice (and she cut off God Control, Dark Ballet and Human Nature on my dates), Here’s my take:
Strongest Points:
1. Intimacy
2. Emphasis on new material
3. Crowd interaction
Weakest Points:
1. Production budget
2. Setlist & pacing
3. Phone ban
4. Outfits
5. Interludes
6. Lack of identity for Madame X persona.

Worst/best is a relative thing. On the one hand her voice (despite the ridiculous auto-tuning on some songs) hasn't sounded this good since the Drowned World Tour; but the sets and costumes and general production values of this show look really cheap compared to her other arena/stadium tours over the last 2 decades. 
When she sang I really enjoyed it, but the show is very choppy - it stops/starts, stops/starts more than an American football game - and I personally don't care for her sardonic and sometimes puerile sense of humour in the (many) monologues.
For obvious reasons her dancing and energy levels were not great in the 2 shows I saw (compared to other tours); and yes, I know everyone's fed up of talking about it, but her giant ass, whatever she'd had done or is wearing, looks weirdly distracting and her face did look very puffy. Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong talking bout her face or body, because her image has been so intrinsic to her career over the last 38 years. She's been selling it, and we've been buying it. It's a transactional relationship and it served both our interests well.
The organisation of this tour has been awful, beginning with the registration code fiasco, too many dates announced, exorbitant ticket prices, late start times, rescheduled shows, cancelled shows, shortened set lists... being a Madonna fan in 2020 has become a very challenging and elitist experience. What's bites the most, is the tickets prices for this tour, were more expensive than any other, even though it's my least favourite show.
There were flashes of brilliance here and there, but I really hope this is just an experiment and not the promise of things to come. To be clear, I'm a huge Madonna fan. I've seen her more than 20 times over the last 2 decades, travelled from Moscow to Madison Square Garden, spending thousands of pounds in the process; but this show felt like a step backwards and I left feeling disappointed. No one does spectacle like Madonna. No one. But the very nature of this show and the venues chosen, made it feel undeniably small - intimate, yes; but Madonna is a queen, an ice-cold Goddess in fact! I don't want to hear about her kids and injuries. I want her to be larger than life, and impossibly infallible. This tour has only reminded me of how human she really is, and that scares me. She can't get old. That's something other people do, not Madonna.
This does makes me wonder though - where do we go from here? I know she planted the seed, saying she  had wanted to do this kind of show sometime ago, but I also wonder if it came from necessity, rather than by design. Unless she's going to be more generous with her back catalogue, I suspect her fan base will continue to dwindle with any future tours, and I'm not expecting she'll ever fully recover from these injuries.
I also think this tour was a missed opportunity. The Madame X songs were genuinely great, especially Batuka, Killers Who Are Partying, Crazy, Medellin, and Extreme Occident - basically the third act, but why oh why did she include Human Nature, Vogue and Like A Prayer for the umpteenth time, when those songs have been done and done to death? I would have swapped Human Nature for an amped-up rock guitar version of Sorry. It would still convey the same message, but with more raw energy, whilst allowing her to stand still and not exacerbate any injuries. What It Feels Like For A Girl also would also fit the themes of this show (I know it was rehearsed). Even though Like A Prayer was a crowd-pleasing finale, it could have easily been replaced by Crazy For You, which would have been an equally rousing sing-along and fit so well within the intimacy of a theatre show setting, whilst acting as coda to the Virgin tour, where it all began. What about other number 1 singles such as Take A Bow (her longest running number 1 in the US) or This Used to Be MY Playground, so far, never performed on tour.
Don't get me wrong - it's not that I didn't enjoy the show, but I've come away feeling painfully aware that Madonna's touring career may have peaked both in terms of creativity and commercial-ability now. Instead of offering something totally new, unique and unexpected, Madame X ended up being a scaled-down of her usual arena tour, but with fewer hits and more talking in between songs. I'm reminded of the You Must Love Me lyrics:
Where do we go from here?
This isn't where we intended to be
We had it all
You believed in me, I believed in you
Certainties disappear
What do we do for our dream to survive?
How do we keep all our passions alive
As we used to do?
So what's next Madame X?
x

I can’t, I’m already attending on the 13th but just wanted to vouch that’s a really great seat, I was row C 28 last week and second row in Lisbon, the central section of the royal circle offers an amazing view of the whole show that you don’t get on the floor.  If I wasn’t going I’d snap it up.

Playing the knee roulette with fans. Just cancel the whole thing already and refund everyone and take good care of your health. 

I saw it in New York in September and didn’t like it. The narrative that everyone who’s criticising it hasn’t seen it is simply not true. 
 
As Alan states: it’s absolutely fine to not like absolutely everything she does. For me, yes, this is her worst tour in terms of cohesion, setlist, creativity - the lot. And I’m far from someone who is put off by a setlist that isn’t full of hits. Indeed, the Re-invention Tour is one of my least favourites. I do appreciate narrative cohesion when encountering a less-hit-heavy setlist, though, and, much like the era itself, I don’t believe the show has any. The whole story/concept of Madame X is jumbled at best and a pretentious mess at worst. With this being a theatre show, there was a real opportunity to put flesh on the bones of the concept. And they didn’t. At all. Plus, the vocoder effects throughout the entire show provide another barrier to the supposed intimacy that it was meant to encapsulate (alongside the tightly-scripted audience interactions and lack of deviance from the nightly setlist). 

Madonna does not NEED TO DO ANYTHING . To claim that she does sounds pretentious to me !
An artist is not here to please you , 
as quoted by James Baldwin ‘ artists are here to disturb the peace.
and it seems her intent has been working it’s magic ?

She needs to stop being such a pretentious jerk and deliver the hits that made her the icon she is and please her fans.

I saw it in New York in September and didn’t like it. The narrative that everyone who’s criticising it hasn’t seen it is simply not true. 
 
As Alan states: it’s absolutely fine to not like absolutely everything she does. For me, yes, this is her worst tour in terms of cohesion, setlist, creativity - the lot. And I’m far from someone who is put off by a setlist that isn’t full of hits. Indeed, the Re-invention Tour is one of my least favourites. I do appreciate narrative cohesion when encountering a less-hit-heavy setlist, though, and, much like the era itself, I don’t believe the show has any. The whole story/concept of Madame X is jumbled at best and a pretentious mess at worst. With this being a theatre show, there was a real opportunity to put flesh on the bones of the concept. And they didn’t. At all. Plus, the vocoder effects throughout the entire show provide another barrier to the supposed intimacy that it was meant to encapsulate (alongside the tightly-scripted audience interactions and lack of deviance from the nightly setlist). 

I saw it in New York in September and didn’t like it. The narrative that everyone who’s criticising it hasn’t seen it is simply not true. 
 
As Alan states: it’s absolutely fine to not like absolutely everything she does. For me, yes, this is her worst tour in terms of cohesion, setlist, creativity - the lot. And I’m far from someone who is put off by a setlist that isn’t full of hits. Indeed, the Re-invention Tour is one of my least favourites. I do appreciate narrative cohesion when encountering a less-hit-heavy setlist, though, and, much like the era itself, I don’t believe the show has any. The whole story/concept of Madame X is jumbled at best and a pretentious mess at worst. With this being a theatre show, there was a real opportunity to put flesh on the bones of the concept. And they didn’t. At all. Plus, the vocoder effects throughout the entire show provide another barrier to the supposed intimacy that it was meant to encapsulate (alongside the tightly-scripted audience interactions and lack of deviance from the nightly setlist). 

I saw it in New York in September and didn’t like it. The narrative that everyone who’s criticising it hasn’t seen it is simply not true. 
 
As Alan states: it’s absolutely fine to not like absolutely everything she does. For me, yes, this is her worst tour in terms of cohesion, setlist, creativity - the lot. And I’m far from someone who is put off by a setlist that isn’t full of hits. Indeed, the Re-invention Tour is one of my least favourites. I do appreciate narrative cohesion when encountering a less-hit-heavy setlist, though, and, much like the era itself, I don’t believe the show has any. The whole story/concept of Madame X is jumbled at best and a pretentious mess at worst. With this being a theatre show, there was a real opportunity to put flesh on the bones of the concept. And they didn’t. At all. Plus, the vocoder effects throughout the entire show provide another barrier to the supposed intimacy that it was meant to encapsulate (alongside the tightly-scripted audience interactions and lack of deviance from the nightly setlist).