tomasjohn

I love this record, and first owned it on vinyl.
I thought there was something wrong with my copy after the song Now I'm Following You, and was heartbroken for a couple of seconds. Then it morphed into the dance mix, and I laughed at how funny the transition was.
It's an album that is loved by several genetrations. I played a few songs for my grandmother a few years ago, and she asked me to get her a copy of it.
Whenever she has guests over, she'll play a song from the cd and ask the guests if they can guess who the singer is, and they are always surprised when she tells them it's Madonna.
Even my picky grandfather liked it, and was surprised at how rhythmic her singing was. Much better than he expected.
He also loved the movie Who's That Girl. He saw it for what it was: A silly comedy. He thought Madonna was great in it.

I just wish Madonna would have recorded her versions of the two other tracks Sondheim wrote for Dick Tracy : Live alone i like it and Back In business (so much superior to her penned Back in business especially the live slowed down version by Liza) and of all the songs Andy Paley wrote for Dick Tracy, Bananas is the absolute worst, looking glass sea or Blue Nights are way better and i wish she got Mamma Mia by les Negresses vertes (as it was written for Madonna for that soundtrack but she got it too late and it ended on the european version of the OST) on time so she could have recorded and put it on the album instead of Bananas. 

Honestly, if the cover was different and all references of Dick Tracy were removed I think people would see it for what it is, an amazing Big Band album. 
Hanky Panky deserves more recognition in her discography. 

Besides Cry Baby, I think the album is flawless. It's actually my top 5 favs 
He's A Man alone is one of her best album tracks! 

Probably one of the rarest Madonna magaine ever, from Japan in 1983 with exclusives pics of her appartment then. 









 

They just have no knowledge of anything about it, probably they have a single guy (in-house) for everything that took the job with a bio full of lies. They think AI can do wonders but if you overdoing it with every option available in topaz you're ending with something that came out of dystopia. Literally anyone can upscale a video just by using Handbrake and make it look better than those jelly ones. Analog master tapes have better quality than anything posted there. Even those tape artifacts have more life than those random textures on 4K remaster of Take a Bow. But again the newer ones are not that bad, but still they're changing stuff that doesn't have to be fixed.
I know most people don't care or get it. But if you know what I mean, you really know the importance of it.

Why can't her team upscale videos like this-all are washed up and down and look like they were sourced from one of those bar tv's

Oof don’t go into this. You’ll get the usual “nothing was ever promised”, “this is all a narrative made up by the fans”, “why are you reading so much into a 2 year old announcement”, “nobody except fans care about anniversaries”, crowd

spoiler alert

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Love these details but one part isn't entirely accurate.  During rehearsals, they did indeed attempt to clear the space -- however, a handful of staff, myself included, made our way all the way up to the 2nd or 3rd balcony and watched through the small windows at the back of the balcony -- was such a treat to watch them run through it multiple times.  And then of course we had to keep our mouths shut to keep all the plans under wraps.

Former MTV execs look back at the infamous performance, which turns 20 this year, and share how it all went down
Former MTV president Van Toffler had the history books on his mind when he asked Madonna to open the 2003 Video Music Awards. Toffler wanted to honor the VMAs’ nearly two-decade legacy with a callback to its inaugural 1984 edition. A lot had happened since Madonna rolled around in a wedding dress during “Like a Virgin” at that first awards show,  but she remained the video era’s flagship star. Toffler hoped a plum spot on the program would motivate the Queen of Pop to outdo herself. 
“I don’t have to encourage Madonna to go over-the-top,” he tells Rolling Stone 20 years later. “That’s in her DNA. We were just saying, ‘We’re gonna give you a lot of real estate. It’s a big moment.’ We talked about guest performers.”
Toffler got what he craved and then some when Madonna, beamed into 11 million homes from Radio City Music Hall, branzely kissed her foremost heirs, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, and set off a firestorm. 
Today, the kisses seem fairly chaste. In 2003, they were scandalous. The morning after, the New York Post described the performance as a “raunchy, bump-and-grind dance routine that ended in explicit, open-mouth kisses.” (Never mind that it actually continued with Missy Elliott performing “Work It.”) When Madonna appeared on Oprah three weeks later, the kisses were the first topic she was asked about. “I had no idea that it was going to cause the ruckus that it caused,” she said.
In reality, she probably knew. There’s a reason the whole thing had been shrouded in secrecy. MTV didn’t advertise the performance, well aware that two semi-rivalrous pop darlings sharing the stage with Madonna and hip-hop’s reigning empress would play better if no one knew what to expect. Plus, enough had unfolded behind the scenes to leave MTV’s top brass wondering what would actually go down on the night of August 28, 2003. 
According to Tom Calderone, former executive vice president of music and talent at the network, the VMAs were looking for a cheerier tone after Bruce Springsteen opened 2002’s show with the anthemic 9/11 memorial “The Rising.” So Toffler put in a call to Madonna’s manager, Guy Oseary, and let the singer decide how she’d fulfill the assignment. Producers might fine-tune a different artist’s act, but not Madonna’s, says Summer Strauch, who worked on the VMAs and other starry MTV programming. 
“When you turn to Madonna, they were always very understanding that this is her creative moment,” Strauch says of the network’s chiefs. “They value whatever she chooses.” 
Before long, Toffler and his staff learned that Madonna had recruited three peers: Spears, Elliott, and Jennifer Lopez, who was riding the success of “Jenny from the Block” and the No. 1 hit “All I Have.” That roster alone was worth celebrating, until MTV briefly worried everything might fall apart. During a pre-VMAs beach vacation Toffler took, he received a phone call reporting that Lopez had to drop out because she’d already agreed to shoot the movie Shall We Dance? that summer. Madonna’s stage requests were designed for four people. What would happen without one of them? “I was fearful that the performance was in jeopardy,” Toffler recalls. 
Madonna apparently chose Spears and Lopez because they were the best young dancers around, but Aguilera added another layer of excitement. The hot-and-cold dynamic between her and Spears, who co-starred on The All-New Mickey Mouse Club in 1993 and were perceived as pop-culture adversaries, made their dual participation almost as shocking as the ensuing kisses at the time. (Pink has said she and Gwen Stefani were also invited to participate at some point. No one I spoke to for this story recalls that, but producer Alex Coletti recently told PopSugar that he remembers Stefani’s name being floated.) 
Once Aguilera replaced Lopez, Madonna’s private rehearsals began as MTV pieced together the rest of the show, which included a Metallica medley, Coldplay’s VMAs debut, and Beyoncé and Jay-Z singing “Crazy in Love.” Eventually, the network learned that Madonna planned to start the performance with “Like a Virgin,” with Spears and Aguilera atop a hydraulic wedding cake from which she would emerge. Then she’d transition into the single she’d just released, “Hollywood,” before tossing to Elliott (“Yo, yo, yo, who that be?!”). All of them would come back together at the end for a sort of tango set to a final reprise of “Hollywood.” 
Madonna wanted as few people as possible to know the details, so rehearsals were locked down, Strauch says. The most MTV’s executives saw of the prep process was select videotape footage, and none of it showed any headline-worthy PDA. They watched Spears and Aguilera eat up Madonna’s every word as she tweaked their dance moves and acted as an elder stateswoman. “Madonna kept making them do things over, and they were totally listening to her,” Strauch says. But sources say it wasn’t until about two weeks before the broadcast when a full picture presented itself. 
The VMAs’ veteran director, Beth McCarthy-Miller, whose credits include Saturday Night Live and many noted sitcoms, flew to Los Angeles to watch the women rehearse. One day, Toffler’s phone rang. McCarthy-Miller was on the line, whispering from the corner of a studio. “’You’re not going to be able to tell anyone, but I think this is going to make you happy,'” Toffler recalls her saying. “‘Madonna kisses Britney and Christina.'” 
Here came the “fuck-yeah” flash point Toffler and his team had hoped for, the bait that would reel in the kind of controversy MTV courted. “You knew it was going to be a moment,” Strauch says. “I remember everyone smiling and high-fiving.” 
After that, secrecy became even more vital. During the official Radio City run-throughs the week of the show, Madonna’s team requested the building be cleared when it was her turn. Even without widespread social media, no one wanted to risk a Page Six leak. “Radio stations around the country were coming to do live broadcasts from there, so we had to get literally everybody out,” Calderone says. “And then you’ve got the gift room — that had to be evacuated. Even security. At the end, there were only a handful of us in that room, and a few people in the truck outside [where McCarthy-Miller and her team dictated the camera shots].” 
On August 28, everyone was nervous — and fortunately, everything went off without a hitch. In fact, it was better than anyone could have predicted. Madonna’s six-year-old daughter Lourdes was the flower girl who crossed the stage and kicked the whole performance off. Spears and Aguilera appeared one by one, their faces covered in white veils that they each pulled back for dramatic reveals. After singing the first few lines of “Like a Virgin,” they rolled around the floor in wedding dresses. Then, Madonna ascended out of the giant cake wearing shiny black coattails and a Marlene Dietrich-inspired top hat — the groom for both brides.
Because the number opened the telecast, McCarthy-Miller and the producers treated reaction shots like a roll call announcing the VMAs’ attendees. Today, it plays like the ultimate mid-2000s who’s who: Beyoncé smiling and clapping; Avril Lavigne and Kelly Osbourne (who had recently covered “Papa Don’t Preach”) looking disinterested; a stone-faced Mary J. Blige; the original Queer Eye Fab Five having the time of their lives; Guy Ritchie (aka Mr. Madonna) cheering on his wife; an appropriately amused Snoop Doog; short-lived couple 50 Cent and Vivica A. Fox laughing along; Lindsay Lohan and the Hilton sisters dancing; and a surprisingly game Eminem. 
The preeminent reaction shots, of course, belonged to Justin Timberlake: first, a raised eyebrow as Madonna, Spears, and Aguilera danced centerstage. Then, about 30 seconds later, as Madonna removed the garter on Aguilera’s thigh and swapped spit with Spears, associate director Stefani Cohen made the call to cut away from most of Aguilera’s kiss to show Timberlake looking irate. The decision, sources agree, was not premeditated. Cohen was monitoring the camera stationed on Timberlake, who had famously dated Spears and cast a lookalike in his barbed “Cry Me a River” video one year earlier. When the folks in the directors’ truck saw his expression, the choice was a no-brainer. It’s part of what makes the performance so unforgettable — a megastar’s stodgy response to his ex-girlfriend’s harmless frolic. 
Behind the scenes, the cutaway upset Aguilera’s management, even though she had her own separate performance scheduled. “That caused a little bit of grief coming my way,” Toffler says. “It didn’t make life easier that night, but you have to make choices in a live show. Sometimes you’re wrong and sometimes you’re right, but I think the beauty of the VMAs was the combustibility. You wanted to make it fun and semi-chaotic. That’s what we did.” Her team asked MTV to re-edit the performance for subsequent broadcasts, according to Calderone. The network didn’t comply. (Aguilera declined to comment for this story. “It was a cheap shot,” she told Andy Cohen in 2018. “I definitely saw the newspaper the next day and was like, ‘Oh, well, I guess I got left out of that one.’” You can see what the performance would have looked like without reaction shots in this rehearsal footage.)
Others were offended by the display as a whole — and not always the people you’d expect. “First of all, Madonna is too old to be kissing someone who is 22,” Stevie Nicks told an Australian newspaper a few weeks later. “And Britney should be smarter than that. Hopefully she will figure a way out of this hole she has dug for herself. I thought it was the most obnoxious moment in television history.”
MTV, meanwhile, got hate mail, according to Toffler. “It’s just par for the course,” he says. “The older demographic wasn’t ready for it.”
To Aguilera’s point, most people remember the Madonna-Britney kiss more vividly than they do the Madonna-Christina one — and sadly, even fewer remember that Missy Elliott was there at all. But the performance remains a relic of the VMAs’ glory days, when the show was still a watercooler staple worthy of that much star power. When Madonna attended Spears’ wedding last year, a quick smooch between the two prompted many news outlets to claim they were recreating 2003. 
“It’s just quintessential Madonna,” Toffler says. “You give Madonna the germ of an idea or just the real estate, and she’s going to take it. She had a history of pushing us and pushing culture, and that’s what was great about her and what was great about MTV. We pushed culture in provocative ways.” 
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/2003-vmas-britney-madonna-christina-kiss-1234809755/

Yes but horrorificly upscaled

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The way her team went from curating really interesting and comprehensive digital singles to...will this do?
Feast on scraps I guess. 
This took literally ZERO effort. 

Original file... 

And the one on ITunes... 

Again they messed up the colors on distribution. 
Yes, photographed using an iPhone, see the metadata. 

I don't get the strategy behind these releases. Not counting the randomness of them, released without a real criteria, but what's the point in dropping half of them as full maxi singles, promo mixes and edits included and the other half being just a few of the many existing promotional tracks? Why would they want only part of her singles to have a full library of mixes? Also, what's happening with the artworks and the inexact uploads?! 

A  Mediocre Album Cover can ruin Your Day
The cover album really suck , people say “ we should be grateful “  yes grateful my axx  when I’m paying for something I’m not thinking grateful . People fall in love with this remixes and album cover  is the hold experience. Which Madonna got Lazy to deliver quality    ( really make you think about this tour) .   
 
I hope they change the cover someday. ……NOT !! 
 
don’t settle for shit , speak your mind people. Don’t be another sheep, 

Hey again everyone, 
I reached out to Addiction to Vinyl again to press them for some clarification. We've just communicated within the past hour; here's what they said:
The reissues were "Originally due to start in September but obviously delayed a couple of months" which I think we can all understand, given the medical emergency and delay of the tour. They reaffirmed the plan "to rerelease all her albums in order in a deluxe treatment over the next 4 years." I assume a 5th year can be anticipated as well, for the later albums like MDNA and Rebel Heart.  I asked VERY pointedly if this is simply their interpretation of the press release, or if they received this information from someone in-the-know. I specifically addressed the fact that the press release only mentions landmark albums and not every album. Their verbatim response was, "A friend works at Warner and said its all albums in chronological order."  
Of course, everyone is free to doubt it as you please. But I just want to keep you all in the loop of what I'm hearing.

Ah ok 
The Japan releases ran like this
18 Oct Causing A Commotion
17 Nov You Can Dance (or nearby) 
25 Nov WTG Live laser disc
25 Jan - The Look of Love
25 April - Spotlight
They were saturating the market after the WTG tour - I know the RSD supermix was based on the 1987 WTG picture disc from the UK (even the back cover is the same design) so maybe was made up by someone on another forum as the CAC 12" was out before YCD and they ran parraell campaigns for WTG and YCD etc 

Prince's estate just reminded everyone (once again) how a super deluxe edition of an album should be done. Amazing.
https://store.prince.com/dept/diamonds-and-pearls

This part is most definitely not quoting Madonna, nor anyone official.  This is simply paraphrasing what the press statement stated. In fact, all through that actual interview she doesn't even speak of the Warner deal in this context:
 
 If anyone is thinking this confirms we are getting unreleased and/or demos, then I expect you're probably going to be disappointed.
That being said; like many of us have stated in this thread, it would be crazy just to re-issue the albums with the original tracks with nothing extra. Besides, that wouldn't be considered "expansive" or "deluxe" either.  So it's not impossible for fans to think demos/unreleased tracks will be included. Though, it doesn't mean we will get such.

Back in 1992, Madonna released a Coffee Table Book, called "Sex".  The book was a provocative look at sexual fantasies in photographs and words. It was quite controversial and coincided with the release of her Erotica album. Included with the book was an exclusive song called Erotic. Madonna suffered a lot of backlash at the time, calling her all sorts of nasty names and claiming her book was trash.  But do you agree?  Let's hear from the fans?  Feel free to share your favorite stories, encounters or photos from this book.
Listen here: Sex Book - Erotic Audio

 
 
Maybe not SFW? Outtake

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Well, I love Mirwais and all songs they made together, it's the best period of Madonna for me. But maybe, except Music, they were not even aiming for hits?
I dont really think that was a purpose of them working together especially for American Life or later for Madame X, if those songs would have materialized with general public, it would be great, but I think they were absolutely not aiming for huge pop hits breaking charts while working together and both realized that. If so, they would have made just another Music song. It was clearly more aimed to express the art side of Madonna, her political statements, world view, and other thoughts of Madonna. 
If they would have been truly focused on making a chart-topping hit album, then I guess they both would have realized the production of American Life album is not going to do that and changed the direction of an album. Thats why later on, COADF happened where Mirwais work was limited. 

The Holiday performance in France in better quality. Filmed at Loisirs de Cergy-Pontoise
 

A very detailed article of Madonna "oral history" of her debut album:
Excerpt... quote from Michael Rosenblatt: “I gave Madonna – after we signed – I gave her a gift of one of these old school Casiotone keyboards with a cassette player built in,” Rosenblatt told CNN in a recent interview. “And a week or two – definitely not longer than two weeks after I signed her – she came into my office and she played me ‘Lucky Star.’ She said, ‘I just wrote this on this little thing’ I got her.”
Full article here:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/29/entertainment/madonna-40th-anniversary/index.html