luizotaviobarros

Wonder if he’s producing the whole album, though. If so, what is Billboard’s role?

Totally off-topic, but Mirvais has been liking some of the posts on the popcrush Madonna forum. How long has this been going on, does anybody know?

I think M’s team would be crazy not to cash in on all the (hopefully) positive press her 60th bitrthday will bring. But, well, we know her team.

This. I’d been hoping that M14 would be a radical departure from the stuff she’s been doing / the image she’s been projecting since Hard Candy, but I suspect it may not be the case - though it’s obviously too soon to tell. Madonna doesn’t have an image problem in Brazil - on the contrary. With good songs, a nod to older fans (whom HC and MDNA alienated) and enough promotion, I think Guy and co. can take her back to pre-MDNA levels of success. RH should’ve been that album, but it was completely ignored by radio - and hence the general public. But I wonder if the problem with US audiences runs deeper than that? I think first of all they need to figure out a way of making the US fall back in love with Madonna - or at least get the older fans back on board again. Otherwise - and I hope I’m wrong - they can promote the album till they’Re blue in the face, but it won’t work.

I am slightly disappointed (had been harboring hopes for mirwais + leonard) but still hopeful. At the end of the day, I think it’s Madonnas touch / vision / choice of producer that will determine whether we’ll end up with MDNA 2.0 or something more groundbreaking. I think her input really matters. I own most of the albums Stuart Price produced, and NONE, good as they are, come close to the brilliance of Confessions. To be honest, I’m more concerned about how invested the songwriters/producers are in the process of recording the album, the logistics (to stop leaks from happening), and the sound mastering. The devil is in the details and I suspect RH would’ve had a slightly different fate if Madonna’s team had been on top of the more practical side of things. And to be honest I’m even more concerned about how/whether Guy and M have learned from their mistakes during the RH era and are willing to fix them.

But are we 100% sure M14 will be released under Interscope? If so, I have my doubts it will do much better than RH. Case in point: Up until MDNA, the top 40 stations in Brazil (at least in SP) all gave her singles a fair amount of airplay. I remember at the MDNA show, most people knew GGW when they heard the opening verses. GGW, for fuck sake! RH was completely ignored by radio - at least in Sao Paulo. Even Ghosttown, which I was sure was going to smash at our local AC stations, flopped. In Brazil, if you’re in your early thirties to fifties, Madonna is still the Queen of pop. Her image is nowhere near as “tarnished” as it is in the US, so, really, if RH’s radio fiasco is not a lack of a proper record company behind it, I don’t know what it is. And don’t get me started on Guy and his team. Alicia Keys’ latest era should speak for itself.

Substitute for love gives me life. I became a fan after hearing it on the album.

The live album is available on Spotify, and there are no Madonna performances. So either the album is different from the live show or she's not actually singing.

It seems that in Brazil (where I'm writing from), Madonna never really came in for the sort of vile criticism she's subjected to by haters/mainstream media in the US. True, there's been a waning of interest in her new music (in my city, I didn't hear ANY of the rebel heart tracks on the radio - ever), but she's still seen as an Icon by pretty much anyone who hasn't been hiding in a cave for the past twenty years. But I didn't think her speech would go viral. Turns out it has. Four shares on my FB wall since 9am today, and the speech has been picked up by the mainstream media. The two top weekly magazines in Brazil are talking about it. One is a bit critical, but the other goes as far as to say that companies worldwide ought to watch that speech and reconsider the way they treat older employees.

Have you guys seen this?

I wonder if there's something wrong with the youtube counter. When it premiered we got the 301+ thing, which usually signals that the number of views will explode in a few hours (or is it the next day?). Then the counter went back to 1500 and now it's at 160K. But isn't it weird that a video with 160K views has as many as 20K likes while Living for Love, with 11 million, has 106K likes?

1. Devil Pray (my fav. song since the Confessions era) 2. Joan of Arch 3. Heartbreak City 4. Ghosttown 5. Holy Water Inside Out in its demo form would've been number 3, but I'm not crazy about what Kanye did.

Love Take That. Always have. Weak song, though. They got banned from BBC 1 this year and scored a huge number 1

Did you guys hear a few seconds of instrumental Ghosttown, right at the beginning?

Yeah. No mention of an upbeat Wash All Over Me, though.