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http://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/music/2015/09/30/madonna-detroit-joe-louis-arena-concert/72989068/

Madonna still pulling out all the stops as tour heads to Detroit
By Brian McCollum, Detroit Free Press Pop Music Critic

September 30, 2015

She may not stir quite as much instant outrage anymore. The Top 10 hits may not come as consistently as they used to. There’s a new generation of pop starlets grabbing the headlines and social-media oxygen.

But don’t go betting against Madonna.

Having kicked off her Rebel Heart Tour earlier this month in Montreal — launching a global jaunt scheduled to run through the spring — the Michigan-born pop star will swing into Joe Louis Arena Thursday, scene of her hometown tour stop in 2012.

At 57, Madonna seems to have moved into the stage of her career where she reigns as a kind of confident, impervious pop matriarch, grabbing what she pleases from the music of the day, still happy to titillate when she can — even if she's no longer single-handedly reshaping the boundaries of popular culture.

The Joe show brings Madonna home to a region that’s been very much on her mind this past year. In summer 2014, she pledged funding to three Detroit organizations — Downtown Youth Boxing Gym, Detroit Achievement Academy and the Empowerment Plan — after touring a host of community groups in the city.

It was the start of what she called a long-term commitment to Detroit, where "a piece of my heart will always be,” as the Rochester Hills-bred star said.

It was about that time when word emerged that her teen daughter, Lourdes Leon, had enrolled at the University of Michigan — the school Madonna briefly attended before heading off to New York to kindle her dance career. (Lourdes and Madonna’s father, 84-year-old Silvio Ciccone, are expected to be on hand Thursday, a source close to the Joe Louis show tells the Free Press.)

And then there was the Rochester Hills dustup in March, when she took to “The Howard Stern Show” and criticized her hometown as straitlaced and stifling. Those remarks — later reiterated in an US Weekly interview — prompted rebukes from the city’s mayor and U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell.

A staffer for Rochester Hills Mayor Bryan Barnett said the mayor had contemplated attending the Joe Louis show to present Madonna with goodwill flowers, but will be out of town Thursday.

Madonna has always been tuned in to the latest dance-music trends, and “Rebel Heart” certainly fits the bill. Released in the spring after a series of premature online leaks, the album sees Madonna carrying on the EDM theme she latched onto for 2012’s “MDNA,” this time working with electronic-crossover producers such as Avicii and Diplo.

In an era when younger artists have upped the ante on stage production (see: Taylor Swift) and pushed the boundaries of pop-shock (see: Miley Cyrus), Madonna appears to be holding her own. By all accounts, the Rebel Heart Tour — part of her ongoing mega-deal with Live Nation — is a sizzling, top-end production, a spectacle of continually shifting staging, racy outfits, daring stunts and intricate dance routines, with a fit, high-energy Madonna at the heart of it all.

Reports have described a show featuring a playful, lighthearted demeanor to go with a set list that includes ample material from “Rebel Heart.” She doesn’t neglect her older hits, but just like other Madonna tours of recent years, the veteran star uses the opportunity to overhaul arrangements and refashion musical approaches. Concertgoers who want to hear the oldies as they remember them will have to live with Madonna doing things the way she wants.

As Madonna nears her 60s, it remains to be seen how long she’ll keep running with the template that has shaped her career from the outset: the rebellious sexuality, the poking and provoking of religious conventions, the knack for keeping herself on the leading edge of fashion and trends.

Of course, many asked the same question when she turned 50 — and, for that matter, 10 years before that. We'll have to see what happens Thursday at Joe Louis Arena, but it's unlikely that Madonna is ready to be boring just yet.

Contact Brian McCollum: 313-223-4450 or bmccollum@freepress.com.

Madonna

7:30 p.m. Thursday

Joe Louis Arena, 600 Civic Center, Detroit

313-396-7000

$53-$358.

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There are plenty of people in Brasil who can easily afford her prices. Not sure about which arenas she would use though... She has only played the largest stadiums here.... She is obviously not in mood for stadiums......:/

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Madonna still playing by one set of rules: Her own

It hasn’t been a great year for Madonna.

The lead up to her March release “Rebel Heart” was a mess. A handful of songs leaked on the web, prompting an early digital release of half the tracks, robbing the project of its marketing momentum.

The publicity campaign that built to its proper street date ran afoul, Madonna’s usual stabs at controversy drawing sighs rather than shock: She posted pictures of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. in bondage ropes on Instagram, and then co-opted the Charlie Hebdo killings for album promo.

The result: “Rebel Heart” debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, her first album since 1998’s “Ray of Light” to miss the top spot, then sank like a stone.

Things didn’t get any better from there. “Rebel Heart’s” three singles all flopped; “Living for Love” and “Ghosttown” missed Billboard’s Hot 100 entirely, while the third single, “B---- I’m Madonna,” peaked at No. 84.

There was that weird make-out session with Drake at Coachella, which ended with the Canadian rapper wiping his mouth like he had just taken a swig of expired milk.

And then there were Madonna’s comments about Michigan, when she remarked “oh, nothing” when asked what her favorite part about growing up here was.

Collectively, the misfires led to the same chatter that has plagued the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer for more than 30 years — questions of her relevancy, complaints about her brashness, wishes that she would just go away already.

Madonna has heard it all before and weathered it all before. And as she brings her “Rebel Heart” tour to Joe Louis Arena Thursday, the same wisdom applies:

Write Madonna off at your own peril.

People have been dismissing Madonna her entire career, and still she stands, the Queen of Pop. For her, the title is a lifetime appointment, the same way Aretha Franklin is the Queen of Soul or Michael Jackson is the King of Pop. Others come along, glory fades, the spotlight shifts. But no one challenges the throne.

Yet the question remains: Are Madonna’s hitmaking days are behind her? For an artist who has been so entwined in the zeitgeist that for several decades she was the zeitgeist, her thuds of late are deafening.

It’s not just her lack of album sales and single traction. Creatively, her last three albums — “Rebel Heart,” 2012’s “MDNA” and 2008’s “Hard Candy” — are her three least satisfying works, finding the one-time pop culture maven chasing trends rather than setting them.

In the case of “B---- I’m Madonna,” she’s purporting to live a lifestyle — “we go hard or we go home, we gon’ do this all night long, we get freaky if you want, b---- I’m Madonna” — that sounds just plain silly coming out of her mouth.

Pop is traditionally a playground for the young, and the 57-year-old has angled to buck that trend. Still, her last No. 1 single was 2000’s “Music,” which was released when current Billboard chart-topper the Weeknd was in 5th grade. (Madonna was 42 when “Music” hit No. 1, and no artist older than she was at that time has sat atop the Hot 100 since.)

Madonna has fought back against the forces of ageism and sexism in the music industry, and if she wants to go on stage and make out with a rapper less than half her age, no one is going to tell her she can’t. But that doesn’t mean make it a good idea, and Madonna seems to have either A) lost touch with her ability to make smart decisions or B) stopped caring altogether about making smart decisions.

She is playing by her own rules, which is something she’s always done, since she told Dick Clark in 1983 that she planned to one day rule the world.

Madonna hasn’t changed, it’s our expectations of her — and of a performer of her age — that have. We want her to play nice, which she has never done, and she’s not going to start now.

So here she is, still ruffling feathers, refusing to go down quietly. And the “Rebel Heart” tour is making plenty of noise: Rolling Stone called the show “a tour of everything only Madonna can do,” and it’s poised to make a killing at the box office. (Madonna’s last two tours, 2008-09’s Sticky & Sweet and 2012’s MDNA outing, are the fifth and 11th highest-grossing tours of all-time, respectively).

Where does she go from here? She can keep touring as long as she wants to: She’s still sharp on stage, and artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney are proving musicians can still tear up the road well into their sixth and seventh decades. She’s not likely to settle down, and she’ll take risks that may or not pay off.

Her legacy is intact, her influence is undeniable, her impact is immeasurable. True, Madonna hasn’t had a great year. But she’s still dancing, whether we like it or not, to the beat of her own rebel heart.

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/entertainment/2015/09/30/madonna-still-playing-one-set-rules/73085530/

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Why do they keep diminishing the album ? It was available for free EVERYWHERE (every article about it, on tv news etc....links spreading like fire) months before its release in various incarnations. People didn't buy it because once it was released they already had it and digested it for months. Thing is it's a very good album. Hard Candy is good too. Why would Madonna be considered chasing trends when the sound of Hard Candy was doinating the charts 4 years later ? (Blurred lines, Happy, Get Lucky...). It give them MDNA though.

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and another partially biased review from the Chicago Tribune...

Even before Madonna took the stage Monday at the United Center, the senses hit overload. Warrior dancers hoisted crosses, Mike Tyson issued threats from the video screen, fake blood streamed as if from a tabloid murder photo, and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” provided the soundtrack.

Music isn’t quite incidental to the spectacle that is a Madonna show, it’s more like an ingredient in a multimedia melting pot of outrageous fashion, noir video, theater, dance, performance art and social commentary. There were 20 dancers and three musicians, 22 videos and a whopping 60 people backstage taking care of costumes that ran from Cotton Club fringe to a long, flowing royal cape. There was even a Britney Spears look-alike pulled from the audience.

More difficult to find on many of the singer’s tours was an emotional center. But that wasn’t a problem Monday – the most intimate Madonna tour yet. It’s tough for any pop entertainer, let alone a 57-year-old female artist, to retain her chart appeal for one decade, let alone four. Madonna may still be the most famous woman in the pop world – Beyonce might take issue with that – but she’s had only a few top-10 singles in the new millennium.

Though she could easily live off greatest hits tours or Vegas residencies, Madonna somehow remains engaged. Her latest album, “Rebel Heart,” is a mess, a tangle of proclamations and confessions. She wants it all. There are songs that expose insecurities and fess up to narcissism. And then there are the tunes that basically say, “I’m old enough to be your mom and I can still do anything you can do better – got a problem with that?”

She set the tone within minutes of arriving on stage: “Who do you think you are?” she barked. Later she demanded, “Get off my pole!” during a profane ode to oral sex that also quoted one of her biggest hits, “Vogue.” What’s a Madonna concert without a little blasphemy? “Holy Water” staged the Last Supper as an orgy, including a stunt where Madonna mounted a spinning cross while standing atop a dancer dressed as a nun. It’s probably just as well that Pope Francis avoided Chicago on his American visit.

The defiant attitude, the provocati posturing that defined her early rise to stardom played a part in the show, but these poses felt tired – yesterday’s shock is today’s act of desperation. Fortunately, the attitude became more playful and introspective as the show proceeded through its four major set pieces.

Half the set list was drawn from the commercially underperforming “Rebel Heart,” even though the singer has more than three dozen top-10 hits, mostly from the '80s and '90s. But even the hits she reprised were often reconfigured, from the jazzy “Material Girl” to the ukulele-led “True Blue.” Whereas her 2012 tour flirted with darkness and death – yes, Madonna can do Goth, too – the current two-hour performance had a lighter, warmer, more personal tone. There were smiles and something approaching vulnerability.

For “Like a Virgin,” Madonna dialed down the bump and grind for a solo performance that came across as quietly celebratory, as though dancing by herself in a darkened bedroom. A solo “La Vie en Rose” may not have approached the towering heartbreak of Edith Piaf’s signature version, but Madonna delivered it with a rich tone that would’ve been beyond her during her hit-making prime.

With fans packed closely around her on a heart-shaped stage in the middle of the arena, she prefaced “Who’s That Girl” with a statement: “I’m still trying to figure out who I am.” Who needs shock appeal when you’ve got Madonna psychoanalyzing herself on stage?

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Yeah and one of the things about this tour is that, for the most part, the Rebel Heart tracks sound quite good among the classics. It's not like Ghosttown and Rebel Heart are huge letdows coming off Who's That Girl, they very much keep the quality at a high level. Same with LFL and La Isla Bonita.

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Yeah and one of the things about this tour is that, for the most part, the Rebel Heart tracks sound quite good among the classics. It's not like Ghosttown and Rebel Heart are huge letdows coming off Who's That Girl, they very much keep the quality at a high level. Same with LFL and La Isla Bonita.

I totally agree. the album is good on its own and the new songs totally sound great and mingle well with old hits in the show.

i think they are bitter.

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Hard Candy gave us: GI2M, Devil wouldn't recognize you, Miles Away, Heartbeat...

MDNA gave us: Gang Bang, Fallin' Free...

Rebel Heart gave us: WAOM, Ghosttown, Devil Pray...

Right there is some of the best discography on Pop, ever. So easy to dismiss for idiots because of their lack of commercial success in US and UK radio and sales.

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This is a shall we say unique review of Boston. It's kind of academic but very interesting!

http://www.vanyaland.com/2015/10/01/live-review-at-the-altar-of-pop-worship-with-madonna-and-the-phantom-deity/

It’s a generally understood notion that songs are meaningless and trite, and that if one wants to be a productive member of society, avoiding music is a prudent choice. Songs are traps, or so goes this common wisdom, filled with, at best, fantasy notions and, at worst, dangerous and destructive ideas; even worse are artists, who attempt to peddle their songs as a means of stringing them together into a narrative arc which, by using a nice beat and/or a catchy melody, can fool an innocent passerby into conflating their own emotions with that of the artist. The master artists, the ones who amass fortunes with multi-decade careers, are experts at this storytelling, creating a proxy persona through the proliferation of recorded songs — often resulting in the creation of a phantom deity, plastered on t-shirts and advertisements and music videos, that speaks to society and culture conveying ambiguous messages within a framework of relatability and emotional resonance. The artist’s perceived drama becomes real within the psychic æther of our shared mental space, our aspirations and fears and fantasies.

Although music is a powerful tool of persuasion, this artist-as-locus-point-of-psychic-power phenomenon is a relative rarity; only a few individuals have managed to punch through the noise of our current electronic lifestyle to overlay their own emotional map onto the waiting cortex of society as a whole. One of the most powerful of these musical artists has entranced, globally, at least three distinct generations of susceptible media consumers: her name is Madonna Louise Ciccone, and she is not just a master musician but a grand wizard able to spin gold out of the dross that is the raw emotional flotsam burbling violently beneath the surface of her haughty persona.

Madonna honored the City of Boston with her presence on Saturday night, September 26, arriving with an intimidating crew of dancers and musicians to a staged piece of formal pageantry fitting to an artist who is a full two-and-a-half decades into the regal phase of her career. Where she was once a scrappy street urchin, a failed ballet student gnawing at the table scraps of late-’70s NYC post-punk culture, by the end of the ’80s she ached to be more than an ephemeral pop presence competing with the likes of Cyndi Lauper or Pat Benatar. Her first taste of fame on the heels of hits like “Everybody” and “Holiday” were narcotic for the budding star — asked at the end of 1983 by Dick Clark what she hoped to achieve in the years ahead, she giggled “To rule the world!” The perversity of our pop culture world, the way that our celebrity machine occasionally lets dream actualization occur through will-to-power, allowed this wish to come true.

On Saturday night, to the opening whump of “Iconic”, amidst a squadron of dancers decked out in samurai-or-is-it-warrior-from-300 uniforms, Madonna, in a cage made of enormous metal spears, was lowered from the rafters. “If you try and fail, get up again/Destiny will choose you in the end,” she lustily intoned, chopping the air with flailing limbs emerging from her red kimono-slash-warrior-outfit. As the first line of the show, it was also the first lie of the evening, sending the audience the message that not only was her ascent to stardom a preordained result of her lengthy incubation period of struggle, but that the obstacles she continues to face as the most popular female musical artist of all time can all be bested by dogged determination.

If this is understood to be at the very least a kind untruth, it is also a bedrock moral foundation of American popular culture — Madonna’s strength as a force and a brand can be conferred to her following if they just allow themselves to be touched by the mental persuasion of determination as a weapon for personal triumph. When an artist such as Madonna is seen as an ’80s artist, it fundamentally has to do with that artist’s adherence to this maxim — if the existence of the cesspool of culture that is the 1990s has taught us anything, it is that basing cultural mores on failure and dispirited ennui tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The lie of determination is the fist in the air that allows musical art to infiltrate our minds and poison our reason, if only by deluding us that we are masters of our own destiny.

Madonna, though, of almost any popular musical artist, should be aware of the fallacy of this outlook, if only because of her oeuvre’s focus on the tragedy of love. In many ways, the true power of the brand of Madonna rests in the authenticity of her resilience in the face of this tragedy, and so many of her greatest songs mine the territory of finding strength in, or in the aftermath of, failed romance. The lead single from her new album, Rebel Heart, “Living For Love”, is a prime example of Madonna’s mastery of this emotion — the song hits a fulcrum point between the sadness of a relationship’s deterioration and the life-affirming determination to make the magic happen again. If there is cognitive dissonance in the concept, it is obliterated by the swelling house beats, courtesy of Diplo, and the powerhouse vocal performance. Power, dominance, absolute faith in an abstract notion of heaven-on-Earth-through-love, all convincingly hammered into the audience’s collective craniums by a hair-raising act of songcraft.

Madonna has a long history of being obsessed with the occupation of matador, as evidenced by the videos for both “Take A Bow” and “You’ll See”, a logical conclusion to her infatuation with all things Spanish that likely itself resulted from her immersion in NYC Puerto Rican culture that permeated so much of her earlier work (a number of her early singles are said to have been penned while pining for various Puerto Rican boys she would spy around the city whilst in her above-referenced street urchin phase). The twist in her current tour, during “Living For Love”, is that finally Madonna herself is the matador rather than pining for one — a significant shift from loving someone with a dangerous occupation to having the dangerous occupation oneself, with the minotaur/bull of the tour production a stand-in for the existential horror that is “living for love” knowing that it may indeed be unattainable.

Prior to donning the jewel-encrusted matador pants for her triumphant runthrough of “Living For Love”, Madonna had just completed a run of tunes that in many ways represents the quicksand miasma that love has come to mean to her triumphant public persona. Sex, adoration, fidelity, falling so deeply that there is no light anymore: in Madonna’s vivid lucid dreaming, love is a cave that one spelunks into until the only options are escape or death. The mini-set began with “Body Shop”, another Rebel Heart number, wherein Madonna relates her own body’s sexuality to that of a car, a Dali-esque trompe in line with, say, Deep Purple’s “Highway Star” or Van Halen’s “Panama”. “You can keep it overnight/You can do whatever you like/Working overtime”, she growls lustily, with a bevy of dancers in greasy mechanic outfits, not unlike Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” video except she’s Christy Brinkley pretending to be a car. You can hear Madonna’s royal status peering into the tune: she is herself clearly a hard worker, but pining for someone who works overtime is a clear lust for crossing class lines in search of a working class paramour whose drab uniform she can get dirty with her automotive fluids — it’s almost like a J.G. Ballard concept of pop music, confusing crude machinery with raw lust.

Madonna and her crew didn’t stay in this fantasy for long — first she did an abrupt switch to the ’50s recidivism of 1986’s “True Blue”, a gorgeous ode to being forever in thrall to an ideal lover, written for then-husband Sean Penn before harrowing accounts of domestic abuse led to an acrimonious split a few years later; then a lengthy excursion into primo early-’90s single “Deeper and Deeper”, a heartfelt disco anthem that could be about almost anything: a lost weekend of romance, an unending spiritual quest for meaning in a shallow, venal world, coming out as gay, or really almost anything that involves being immersed in something deep and expansive. Next she indulged in the jilted psychodrama of “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore”, basking in rejection and abandonment on an impromptu spiral staircase where she appeared to push a proxy lover off of a balcony.

As the staircase disappeared and her dancers scurried away, we heard the throbbing pulse of her breakthrough 1984 smash “Like A Virgin” — pounding and predatory, Madonna flung herself to the floor during the chorus, humping and rolling, microphone in hand. Just minutes before she had been flanked by some of the finest backup dancers in the world — but freed from the intricate choreographic mousetrap that is her typical stock-in-trade, she enthusiastically bounced around the floor, gyrating and thrusting in a way that was singularly liberating. Even in the middle of a hockey stadium filled to capacity with nearly twenty thousand screaming fans, Madonna so clearly relishes being able to close her eyes and dance as if she is the only person in the room; she never really seems free-er than when she can let it go in her own private world.

And what’s odd about that is that Madonna doesn’t seem like much of a private world person — among musical artists of her stature, it really is remarkable just how transparent she is about her life, her feelings, her loves and her struggles, especially in her songs. Saturday night’s show couldn’t help but spotlight the melancholy ambivalence the superstar clearly has about the realistic possibility for her to find a way to unite her strong desire for love with her eternal yearning for spiritual enlightenment. Which, put into layman’s terms, means that she has become, at 57, a decidedly cynical pop diva.

After a rip-roaring run-through of “Material Girl”, staged kind of like a 21st century Cotton Club, which featured Madonna in wedding garb tossing a bouquet into the audience, Madonna singled out a married couple near the stage, adressing the husband: “When you married this woman, I hope you gave her the three rings, did you give her the three rings of marriage? First, the engagement ring, then the wedding ring, and after that, a lifetime of suffer-ring.”

Later in the show, Madonna would emerge in a spotlight, solo with guitar in hand, to sing a plaintive run-through of Edith Piaf’s 1945 standard “La Vie En Rose”; a melancholy number about love having the ability to temporarily blind one to the sadness of the world, “Rose” is thematically similar to “Like A Virgin”. If Madonna seemed to come alive when able to focus inward on her solitary self, perhaps it’s because her career-long message, of the joy and sadness of choosing to live for love, is one that has oftentimes left her alone with nothing but her faith in that love. “Les ennuis, les chagrins s’effacent/Heureux, heureux à en mourir”, as the Piaf song goes: “My troubles, my grief are removed/I’m content enough to die.”

Edith Piaf lived an all-too-brief life filled with enough horror, sadness and tragedy to neuter her ungodly fame and the world’s adoration; and although Madonna’s life has in many ways been a walk in the park compared to Piaf’s war-ravaged mortal coil trip, it’s clear that she sees, in Piaf’s defiance in the face of romantic tragedy an inspiration. On Saturday, Madonna chose, more than usual, to indulge in her bittersweet romantic muse; after an opening salvo that saw her and her troupe conflating Catholic ritual with sexual fire in a manner that seemed utterly Madonna-esque to an extreme, she shifted gears, dialed down the attempts at shock and awe, and put her heart on display to a capacity audience ravenous for blood.

“I want to start a revolution of love!” Madonna proclaimed, positioning herself, as she has so many times before, as the ultimate erotic politician, aiming to mobilize the powerful force she has over an audience to evince some kind of change. What is her ultimate goal here: Awareness? Activism? To rule the world? Perhaps… or maybe it is just to find a way to universalize her own narrative, to use her power of song and dance to, at least for a brief time, quell the naysayers while also proving that love is possible even if not easy for her on a personal level. Even if mass art is mind control and music is but a tool to coerce human beings to work harder and in tighter rhythm for the benefit of their overlords, it is still occasionally possible for a genuine human message to come through even on the large bandwidth signals of mass pop culture. Madonna’s campaign for human dignity through spiritual pain and the ecstasy of dance is one such missive, and it’s clear that she will continue sending through this message until she finally merges with the infinite; we won’t know how lost we are until we no longer have her shining light to guide us.

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Yeah and one of the things about this tour is that, for the most part, the Rebel Heart tracks sound quite good among the classics. It's not like Ghosttown and Rebel Heart are huge letdows coming off Who's That Girl, they very much keep the quality at a high level. Same with LFL and La Isla Bonita.

Yes, the Rebel Heart songs sounded fantastic. Also, I hate reviews that start off with their little spiels of put-downs and personal opinions about albums plus discussing her age and image. Just review the concert itself. Wasting paragraphs with irrelevant stuff when they could be describing a lot more of the concert and performances.

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http://illinoisentertainer.com/2015/10/live-review-photo-gallery-madonna/

Madonna’s concert at United Center found the singer as provocative as ever at 57, pushing buttons and engaging a sea of adoring fans. It also found her confidently supporting the relevance of her current work, and having fun in the process.

Although Madonna gave a dazzling and audience-pleasing show, she clearly remains determined to live in the present. Half of the set list was drawn from her new album Rebel Heart. Several earlier pop hits like “Vogue” breezed by as snippets woven into other songs.

A spiked cage descended from the lights for opening number “Iconic.” Madonna emerged in an elaborate Asian-themed costume with black bodysuit and red robes. She was beset by adversaries in the form of her dance crew, bedecked in black-and-gold samurai-inspired attire with crucifix staffs.

“Tell me I’m no good, and I’ll be great,” she sang. Madonna has made a career of challenging naysayers and winning the love of her people, and she succeeded again at United Center.
“Chicago, are you with me,” Madonna asked, to the response of unanimous cheers. She then tore into party starter “Bitch I’m Madonna.” The song has more shock value than melodic staying power, but Madonna took its bravado to the max.

The show was divided into four major acts, and the first one presented Madonna as the boundary pusher. The song “Holy Water” was already a brazen ode to cunnilingus, but Madonna upped the ante with dancers in nun habits cavorting on stripper poles that doubled as more crucifixes. The piece was crowned by staging the song as The Last Supper, ending in a NSFW scene with Madonna lying on the table with her knees parted before a Christ figure.

“Devil Pray” blended religious imagery with a list of possible vices that could be tried in order to get high enough to see God. Close attention reveals Madonna’s lyrics as a cautionary tale, suggesting that a vocal minority in the room were willfully missing the point by cheering for those sins of excess and consumption.

The show’s remaining set pieces toned down the shock and amplified Madonna’s desire to connect and enjoy the moment. “Body Shop” featured innovative staging dynamics in a mock auto repair garage. Madonna then promised a prize at the end of the night to whichever side of the hall could sing the loudest to an old favorite (spoiler: it was a tie).

“It’s a subject that never gets old,” she said, sitting atop a stack of tires and leading “True Blue” while strumming a ukulele. “HeartBreakCity” was an emotional highlight, performed in the middle of the arena at the heart-shaped end of a catwalk. Upon a spiral staircase descended from the rafters, a dancer representing Madonna’s unfaithful lover threw himself into daring acrobatics just like our mothers told us never to do. As the song transitioned into “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore,” the cad was thrown by victorious Madonna from the top step.

A stripped-down arrangement of “Like a Virgin” allowed the sound of every singing voice in United Center to carry as Madonna pranced and ponied youthfully along the catwalk. The pulsing “Living for Love” was Madonna’s answer to Gloria Gaynor’s disco classic and anthem of post-heartbreak empowerment “I Will Survive.” The set was bathed in red light with a bullfighter theme, with male dancers as horned bulls and female dancers as matadors.

The tone continued with “La Isla Bonita” and a flamenco treatment for “Dress You Up.” The latter included bits of “Into the Groove” and “Lucky Star.” The least guarded moment in the show was among its most compelling. Madonna spent a few moments talking about the unpredictable nature of her life and times. “It leads me to asking myself the same question again and again and again,” she said, before performing an acoustic guitar duet of “Who’s That Girl.”

One of the most tuneful and melodic songs from the wide-ranging Rebel Heartalbum was performed next. During “Ghosttown,” Madonna spun a tale of romance and commitment in a time when the rest of civilization has bowed to the rule of “every man for himself.”

The final set piece created the atmosphere of big city, jazz-era class. Dancers in top hats and tails teetered atop tall flexible poles, swinging madly over the crowd in jaw-dropping choreography. “Music” was recast as a smoky lounge crooner before transitioning into a mash-up of tap dance and sinewy disco. During “Candy Shop,” Madonna’s entourage of elegant hedonists included a topless dancer adorned primarily by her pearls and tattoos.

“Material Girl” was naturally slotted into this segment of the show. Madonna sang from a balcony set, and discarded her suitors one by one to the stage below. Afterward, she declared that really, “I’m married to you,” indicating the audience. “You’re who I give all my love to. You’re who I write all my songs for. You’re who I spend all my time with. We do everything together except …,” Madonna paused, suggestively stroking the neck of her ukulele before continuing, “… rub each other’s feet.”

“But that can change,” she added. The show concluded with an intimate solo performance on ukulele of Édith Piaf’s signature song “La Vie en rose,” followed by a rowdy version of “Unapologetic Bitch” during which Madonna pulled a Britney Spears-styled drag queen from the crowd. A boisterous romp through “Holiday” was the encore, with flags of all nations underscoring the song’s message of global togetherness.

“In order to start a revolution of love, you have to have a rebel heart,” Madonna had said before performing her new album’s title song. While noting the condition that it required the motivation of love, she said, “In order to change the world, you have to rock the boat a little bit.” If one statement could capture Madonna in a nutshell, that would be it.

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Go to 'pure charts" on twitter. They seem to say M is gonna perform at the tidal thing. I cant post or translate now cuz im on my phone but check the account @purecharts they r official

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This is a shall we say unique review of Boston. It's kind of academic but very interesting!

http://www.vanyaland.com/2015/10/01/live-review-at-the-altar-of-pop-worship-with-madonna-and-the-phantom-deity/

"...we won’t know how lost we are until we no longer have her shining light to guide us."

So true!!!

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Anyone lacing a concert review with backhanded criticism of the album probably have never heard it and are just regurgitating previous media nonsense. Seems any dick can be a journalist with the freedom to pass on opinion as fact...and to have 'opinion' tainted by bullshit opinions of others. Say it enough and it becomes truth.

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Is there ANY truth to the rumor that at some point Madonna might swing back around near the end of her tour (or even at the end) and do more shows in NYC?

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She did say at the very end of Holiday as she was disappearing at the 9/16 NYC show ..."goodnight new york, i love you, you've been amazing, we'll be back." I thought it was an odd choice of words and so I think there may be additional NYC shows being worked out.

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She did say at the very end of Holiday as she was disappearing at the 9/16 NYC show ..."goodnight new york, i love you, you've been amazing, we'll be back." I thought it was an odd choice of words and so I think there may be additional NYC shows being worked out.

Well, no, that's a very obvious choice of words given there were 2 more shows in NYC after the first.

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http://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/music/brian-mccollum/2015/10/02/madonna-detroit-joe-louis-concert-review/73186940/

After three decades of this, you thought Madonna might start taking it easy?

Certainly not this Madonna, the one who brought ageless energy, flamboyance and flash Thursday night to a packed Joe Louis Arena, homecoming stop on the pop queen's Rebel Heart Tour. These days, the 57-year-old star seems eager to drive home a point: In a world brimming with pop contenders, there's still only one of her.

With her father and daughter looking on, Madonna also served up the most Detroit-centric show we've ever seen from an artist who for years has been accused of spurning her roots. There were pep talks about the city's resilience, celebrations of the city's comeback ("Watch out!"), even a shout-out to developer and "incredible guy" Dan Gilbert.

The spectacle had started with a big helping of new "Rebel Heart" fare to go with Madonna's latest foray into erotic religious imagery, her male dancers costumed as cross-bearing knights and their female counterparts as pole-dancing nuns. From there on through the euphoric "Holiday" encore, the two-hour-plus show kept up the brisk pace — a whirl of set changes, outfits that quickly went from lavish to skimpy, and tight, intricate dance numbers that often found their way down the lengthy catwalk.

In a defiant assertion of her relevance, Madonna has long used her tours to emphasize her latest music, and Thursday was no different: The set was loaded with "Rebel Heart" material, and when she did tap the older stuff, it got unapologetically reinvented. She strapped on a guitar to dial up the riff wattage of 1983's "Burning Up," and turned "Dress You Up" into a colorful, festive number complete with some rumba and a conga line. She and guitarist Monte Pittman doubled on ukuleles for "True Blue," and teamed up again with acoustic guitars on "Who's That Girl." "Like a Virgin" was stripped into a spare, throbbing number in a rare scene that saw Madonna alone on the stage, a shared moment of intimate nostalgia between artist and audience.

Elsewhere, the classics got nipped and tucked inside other numbers, leaving fans with brief tastes of songs like "Vogue," "Into the Groove" and "Love Don't Live Here Anymore."

Thursday brought a lean-and-lithe Madonna who balanced seriously intense performances with a lighthearted, sometimes mischievous spirit. For all the sizzle — the dazzling set pieces, the splashy visuals, the eye-popping interludes by her supremely skilled dance crew — it was a show that planted some genuine heart in the proceedings.

That was certainly the mood as she deposited ample Detroit devotion throughout. More than a year after providing financial support to several community organizations, Madonna name-checked two of them (the Empowerment Plan and Downtown Boxing Gym) from the Joe Louis stage, and spoke enthusiastically about her working relationship with Gilbert, the Quicken Loans magnate and downtown developer.

"Detroit made me who I am today, so I want to say thank you with these next few songs," she said while easing into a stretch that included "Rebel Heart," dedicated to her dad somewhere out in the crowd, 84-year-old Silvio Ciccone.

She also veered from her tour's stock set list to present a Detroit exclusive: a gentle version of 1998's "Frozen." The Motor City is "the heart of America," she explained, thus transforming the song's open-your-heart lyrics into a plea to the country to unlock Detroit's potential.

Still, it's hard to suss out precisely where Madonna stands on the topic her roots, given her recent dismissive remarks about Rochester Hills, the town where she actually grew up. A cynic might say she's out to have it both ways: scorning her native suburban culture while embracing the concept of "Detroit" now that it's finally cool.

But it's hard to look a gift horse in the mouth, and if Madonna wants to dive into the comeback of Detroit — a place she continually referenced as "we" — she'll be met with open arms, and should be. A city that has taken a fall "can only go up," she said Thursday night, "and I'm very proud to be part of that going-up process."

Daughter Lourdes Leon, in her second year at the University of Michigan, got her own personal tribute from Mom onstage.

Addressing the 18-year-old by her nickname Lola, Madonna gushed as she sat down with a ukulele for a winsome performance of Edith Piaf's French pop classic "La Vie en Rose." Lola, she said, was "the first person to teach me about love," and to top it off, was better at singing and speaking French.

"Thank you, Lola," she said. "You are my princess."

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http://www.macombdaily.com/arts-and-entertainment/20151002/review-madonna-shows-plenty-of-home-town-heart-at-joe-louis-arena

Motor City -- the home town girl is back!” Madonna declared near the start of her Rebel Heart Tour stop Thursday night, Oct. 1, at Joe Louis Arena.

And it was a proud home town girl at that.

The Bay City-born pop icon, who graduated from Rochester Adams High School, may have ruffled feathers earlier this year when she referred to the area as “provincial” on Howard Stern’s satellite radio show, but she was in Detroit booster overdrive during her action-packed two-hour and 10-minute spectacle. Acknowledging the city’s financial problems and bankruptcy she told the exuberant (though not sold out) Joe Louis crowd that, “You’ve got a lot of great things going on in Detroit right now,” noting her own involvement with entrepreneur and philanthropist Dan Gilbert in women’s empowerment and youth boxing programs as well as “some new schools we’re building.”

“Detroit is making a comeback people, so watch out,” Madonna said. “We got heart, baby. We’re in the heart of America. With all of its heart and all of this love we are gonna build this city back up. Believe that!” She also noted that “Detroit made me who I am today” -- and so did her father, Silvio “Tony” Ciccone, now a winemaker in Traverse City -- who was in the crowd on Thursday. Madonna thanked him “for making me so strong and instilling this drive in me to survive,” dedicating her performance of “Rebel Heart” to him.

She also gave a shout-out to her daughter Lourdes -- referring to her as Lola -- who’s in her second year at the University of Michigan and was also at Thursday’s show. “She’s the first person to teach me how to love,” Madonna told the crowd, and also credited her for inspiring Madonna to play the ukulele -- which she did on “True Blue” and Edith Piaf’s “La vie en rose,” which Madonna also sang in French.

So it was a happy homecoming, and Madonna certainly pleased her fans with her usual dazzling blend of intricate group dance routines, cutting edge fashions (six costume changes and about a dozen different looks), unrepentant bad-girl attitude and provocative physical and video imagery -- from scantily clad nuns and a carnal Last Supper scene during a medley of “Holy Water” and “Vogue” to plenty of sexually suggestive choreography and motifs set in an auto repair garage, a 1920s-style jazz cabaret, a bullfight and carnivale, and a Geisha-flavored routine during “Bitch I’m Madonna.” During “Heartbreak City,” which included a bit of Rose Royce’s “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore,” she and one of her dancers created an arresting physical dialogue on a spiral staircase at the end of the ramp that stretched deep into the arena floor, while “Material Girl” was performed with a line of tuxedoed suitors who Madonna summarily dismissed, pushing them one down a sloped platform.

You’d hardly call anything Madonna does modest, but the Rebel Heart Tour show was certainly one of her most relaxed productions, less focused on an overarching theme or story arc and more about delivering a bunch of intriguing and, often, boundary-pushing performances. The night’s energy was front-loaded, with the latter third of the show more chatty and ebb-and-flow -- and, at times, dragging -- but thumping versions of “Music,” “Candy Shop” and the buoyant encore “Holiday” came along in time to regain any momentum that was lost.

And while recent Madonna tours have gone relatively light on familiar material in favor of the then-new albums, Thursday’s show had a more fan-pleasing balance. A generous 10-song sampling from this year’s “Rebel Heart” certainly provided the framework, but Madonna nodded frequently to the past, albeit with new, often spare arrangements of favorites such as “Like a Virgin,” “Deeper and Deeper,” a medley of “Dress You Up,” “Into the Groove” and “Lucky Star,” and a hard-rocking treatment of “Burning Up” that featured Madonna on electric guitar. She performed “Who’s That Girl” acoustically and tossed in an unplugged version of “Frozen” especially for Thursday’s show.

After waving the Detroit flag for much of the night Madonna finished with an American flag as she was hoisted into the rafters at the end of “Holiday.” “My home town,” she said, “It’s so good to be home.” And you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone at Joe Louis whose feelings weren’t mutual.

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This is a shall we say unique review of Boston. It's kind of academic but very interesting!

http://www.vanyaland...-phantom-deity/

Its a generally understood notion that songs are meaningless and trite, and that if one wants to be a productive member of society, avoiding music is a prudent choice. Songs are traps, or so goes this common wisdom, filled with, at best, fantasy notions and, at worst, dangerous and destructive ideas; even worse are artists, who attempt to peddle their songs as a means of stringing them together into a narrative arc which, by using a nice beat and/or a catchy melody, can fool an innocent passerby into conflating their own emotions with that of the artist. The master artists, the ones who amass fortunes with multi-decade careers, are experts at this storytelling, creating a proxy persona through the proliferation of recorded songs often resulting in the creation of a phantom deity, plastered on t-shirts and advertisements and music videos, that speaks to society and culture conveying ambiguous messages within a framework of relatability and emotional resonance. The artists perceived drama becomes real within the psychic æther of our shared mental space, our aspirations and fears and fantasies.

Although music is a powerful tool of persuasion, this artist-as-locus-point-of-psychic-power phenomenon is a relative rarity; only a few individuals have managed to punch through the noise of our current electronic lifestyle to overlay their own emotional map onto the waiting cortex of society as a whole. One of the most powerful of these musical artists has entranced, globally, at least three distinct generations of susceptible media consumers: her name is Madonna Louise Ciccone, and she is not just a master musician but a grand wizard able to spin gold out of the dross that is the raw emotional flotsam burbling violently beneath the surface of her haughty persona.

Madonna honored the City of Boston with her presence on Saturday night, September 26, arriving with an intimidating crew of dancers and musicians to a staged piece of formal pageantry fitting to an artist who is a full two-and-a-half decades into the regal phase of her career. Where she was once a scrappy street urchin, a failed ballet student gnawing at the table scraps of late-70s NYC post-punk culture, by the end of the 80s she ached to be more than an ephemeral pop presence competing with the likes of Cyndi Lauper or Pat Benatar. Her first taste of fame on the heels of hits like Everybody and Holiday were narcotic for the budding star asked at the end of 1983 by Dick Clark what she hoped to achieve in the years ahead, she giggled To rule the world! The perversity of our pop culture world, the way that our celebrity machine occasionally lets dream actualization occur through will-to-power, allowed this wish to come true.

On Saturday night, to the opening whump of Iconic, amidst a squadron of dancers decked out in samurai-or-is-it-warrior-from-300 uniforms, Madonna, in a cage made of enormous metal spears, was lowered from the rafters. If you try and fail, get up again/Destiny will choose you in the end, she lustily intoned, chopping the air with flailing limbs emerging from her red kimono-slash-warrior-outfit. As the first line of the show, it was also the first lie of the evening, sending the audience the message that not only was her ascent to stardom a preordained result of her lengthy incubation period of struggle, but that the obstacles she continues to face as the most popular female musical artist of all time can all be bested by dogged determination.

If this is understood to be at the very least a kind untruth, it is also a bedrock moral foundation of American popular culture Madonnas strength as a force and a brand can be conferred to her following if they just allow themselves to be touched by the mental persuasion of determination as a weapon for personal triumph. When an artist such as Madonna is seen as an 80s artist, it fundamentally has to do with that artists adherence to this maxim if the existence of the cesspool of culture that is the 1990s has taught us anything, it is that basing cultural mores on failure and dispirited ennui tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The lie of determination is the fist in the air that allows musical art to infiltrate our minds and poison our reason, if only by deluding us that we are masters of our own destiny.

Madonna, though, of almost any popular musical artist, should be aware of the fallacy of this outlook, if only because of her oeuvres focus on the tragedy of love. In many ways, the true power of the brand of Madonna rests in the authenticity of her resilience in the face of this tragedy, and so many of her greatest songs mine the territory of finding strength in, or in the aftermath of, failed romance. The lead single from her new album, Rebel Heart, Living For Love, is a prime example of Madonnas mastery of this emotion the song hits a fulcrum point between the sadness of a relationships deterioration and the life-affirming determination to make the magic happen again. If there is cognitive dissonance in the concept, it is obliterated by the swelling house beats, courtesy of Diplo, and the powerhouse vocal performance. Power, dominance, absolute faith in an abstract notion of heaven-on-Earth-through-love, all convincingly hammered into the audiences collective craniums by a hair-raising act of songcraft.

Madonna has a long history of being obsessed with the occupation of matador, as evidenced by the videos for both Take A Bow and Youll See, a logical conclusion to her infatuation with all things Spanish that likely itself resulted from her immersion in NYC Puerto Rican culture that permeated so much of her earlier work (a number of her early singles are said to have been penned while pining for various Puerto Rican boys she would spy around the city whilst in her above-referenced street urchin phase). The twist in her current tour, during Living For Love, is that finally Madonna herself is the matador rather than pining for one a significant shift from loving someone with a dangerous occupation to having the dangerous occupation oneself, with the minotaur/bull of the tour production a stand-in for the existential horror that is living for love knowing that it may indeed be unattainable.

Prior to donning the jewel-encrusted matador pants for her triumphant runthrough of Living For Love, Madonna had just completed a run of tunes that in many ways represents the quicksand miasma that love has come to mean to her triumphant public persona. Sex, adoration, fidelity, falling so deeply that there is no light anymore: in Madonnas vivid lucid dreaming, love is a cave that one spelunks into until the only options are escape or death. The mini-set began with Body Shop, another Rebel Heart number, wherein Madonna relates her own bodys sexuality to that of a car, a Dali-esque trompe in line with, say, Deep Purples Highway Star or Van Halens Panama. You can keep it overnight/You can do whatever you like/Working overtime, she growls lustily, with a bevy of dancers in greasy mechanic outfits, not unlike Billy Joels Uptown Girl video except shes Christy Brinkley pretending to be a car. You can hear Madonnas royal status peering into the tune: she is herself clearly a hard worker, but pining for someone who works overtime is a clear lust for crossing class lines in search of a working class paramour whose drab uniform she can get dirty with her automotive fluids its almost like a J.G. Ballard concept of pop music, confusing crude machinery with raw lust.

Madonna and her crew didnt stay in this fantasy for long first she did an abrupt switch to the 50s recidivism of 1986s True Blue, a gorgeous ode to being forever in thrall to an ideal lover, written for then-husband Sean Penn before harrowing accounts of domestic abuse led to an acrimonious split a few years later; then a lengthy excursion into primo early-90s single Deeper and Deeper, a heartfelt disco anthem that could be about almost anything: a lost weekend of romance, an unending spiritual quest for meaning in a shallow, venal world, coming out as gay, or really almost anything that involves being immersed in something deep and expansive. Next she indulged in the jilted psychodrama of Love Dont Live Here Anymore, basking in rejection and abandonment on an impromptu spiral staircase where she appeared to push a proxy lover off of a balcony.

As the staircase disappeared and her dancers scurried away, we heard the throbbing pulse of her breakthrough 1984 smash Like A Virgin pounding and predatory, Madonna flung herself to the floor during the chorus, humping and rolling, microphone in hand. Just minutes before she had been flanked by some of the finest backup dancers in the world but freed from the intricate choreographic mousetrap that is her typical stock-in-trade, she enthusiastically bounced around the floor, gyrating and thrusting in a way that was singularly liberating. Even in the middle of a hockey stadium filled to capacity with nearly twenty thousand screaming fans, Madonna so clearly relishes being able to close her eyes and dance as if she is the only person in the room; she never really seems free-er than when she can let it go in her own private world.

And whats odd about that is that Madonna doesnt seem like much of a private world person among musical artists of her stature, it really is remarkable just how transparent she is about her life, her feelings, her loves and her struggles, especially in her songs. Saturday nights show couldnt help but spotlight the melancholy ambivalence the superstar clearly has about the realistic possibility for her to find a way to unite her strong desire for love with her eternal yearning for spiritual enlightenment. Which, put into laymans terms, means that she has become, at 57, a decidedly cynical pop diva.

After a rip-roaring run-through of Material Girl, staged kind of like a 21st century Cotton Club, which featured Madonna in wedding garb tossing a bouquet into the audience, Madonna singled out a married couple near the stage, adressing the husband: When you married this woman, I hope you gave her the three rings, did you give her the three rings of marriage? First, the engagement ring, then the wedding ring, and after that, a lifetime of suffer-ring.

Later in the show, Madonna would emerge in a spotlight, solo with guitar in hand, to sing a plaintive run-through of Edith Piafs 1945 standard La Vie En Rose; a melancholy number about love having the ability to temporarily blind one to the sadness of the world, Rose is thematically similar to Like A Virgin. If Madonna seemed to come alive when able to focus inward on her solitary self, perhaps its because her career-long message, of the joy and sadness of choosing to live for love, is one that has oftentimes left her alone with nothing but her faith in that love. Les ennuis, les chagrins seffacent/Heureux, heureux à en mourir, as the Piaf song goes: My troubles, my grief are removed/Im content enough to die.

Edith Piaf lived an all-too-brief life filled with enough horror, sadness and tragedy to neuter her ungodly fame and the worlds adoration; and although Madonnas life has in many ways been a walk in the park compared to Piafs war-ravaged mortal coil trip, its clear that she sees, in Piafs defiance in the face of romantic tragedy an inspiration. On Saturday, Madonna chose, more than usual, to indulge in her bittersweet romantic muse; after an opening salvo that saw her and her troupe conflating Catholic ritual with sexual fire in a manner that seemed utterly Madonna-esque to an extreme, she shifted gears, dialed down the attempts at shock and awe, and put her heart on display to a capacity audience ravenous for blood.

I want to start a revolution of love! Madonna proclaimed, positioning herself, as she has so many times before, as the ultimate erotic politician, aiming to mobilize the powerful force she has over an audience to evince some kind of change. What is her ultimate goal here: Awareness? Activism? To rule the world? Perhaps or maybe it is just to find a way to universalize her own narrative, to use her power of song and dance to, at least for a brief time, quell the naysayers while also proving that love is possible even if not easy for her on a personal level. Even if mass art is mind control and music is but a tool to coerce human beings to work harder and in tighter rhythm for the benefit of their overlords, it is still occasionally possible for a genuine human message to come through even on the large bandwidth signals of mass pop culture. Madonnas campaign for human dignity through spiritual pain and the ecstasy of dance is one such missive, and its clear that she will continue sending through this message until she finally merges with the infinite; we wont know how lost we are until we no longer have her shining light to guide us.

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Great writing!!!

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