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air1975

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Posts posted by air1975

  1. 14 minutes ago, Samo said:

    I don't know, I think the RH promo was better, I think we forget a lot of it.  She was inescapable release week, Howard Stern Show, a whole week on Ellen, Brits, Grammy's, I Heart Radio Awards, Coachella, radio interviews, Jimmy Fallon, Johnathan Ross (full episode,), 2 part Today Show Interview, New York Times, New York Daily News, Time, Out, Us Weekly, Billboard magazine interviews, V, Interview, MOJO, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair Italia magazine covers, she also did a huge 2 day press junket of interviews where she gave dozens of interviews that aired on every entertainment show all over the world (E, Entertainment Tonight, CNN etc), Madonna as the face of Versace's 2016 ad campaign

    I do not recall much promo for RH era. This era definitely sticks out much more to me!

     

    This era's promo shits all over the RH promo. This era rocks! 

  2. 5 minutes ago, vertigokane said:

    Yep—I listened to the leaks from HC, MDNA, and RH, and it made the release day experience anticlimactic. Not doing it again. Hearing an album for the first time from the physical CD somehow makes it more “real” to me.  

    This.Its so hard but waiting till Friday!  

     

    The anticipation is part of the experience 🙂

  3. 2 hours ago, Samo said:

    I think and hope you're right, unfortunately  unlike Like a Prayer or Ray of Light, the general public won't be aware of it or even that she still makes new music.  The PR campaign has been "rough" at best.  The PR campaign for Rebel Heart was much better and none of the GP is aware of that album

     

    Madame X should be everywhere, talk show spots playing different characters, Netflix special, major fashion magazine covers etc 

     

     

    I think PR has not been perfect but its not bad. We've gotten 

    multiple lyric videos

    3 proper music videos

    Vogue Italia cover and Vogue UK cover

    Cover in the French magazine (name eludes me right now) 

    Tour announcement 

    BBMA performance

    Eurovision performance

    Some radio interviews in the US

    NYT article and controversy 

    Graham Norton coming up 

    Today show coming up 

    Pride Island performance coming up. 

     

    I feel like its been a good mix of music videos/ print media/ planned interviews. My only complaint is that I wish there had been a concerted push on radio to get behind either Crave of Medellin - the radio strategy seems disorganized and half hearted

  4. 5 hours ago, Msig said:

    MadonnaTribe reports that the Italian press was invited to listen to Madame X yesterday, and their reviews have started appearing:

    Vanity Fair Italia: Very positive. The reviewer says that not everyone is gonna like it.

    Rockol: Mixed. The reviewers seems most impressed by "Come Alive" and "Faz Gostoso".

    Il Manifesto: Very positive.

    Ansa: Rather objective/neutral in its descriptions of the songs, but feels generally favourable.

    La Presse: Very positive. The reviewer describes  "Dark Ballet" and "Extreme Occident" as 'successful experiments', and mentions "Killers Who Are Partying" as a highlight.

    Paolo Giordano: Very positive. He mentions "Batuka" as one of the best songs on the album. 

    Pickline: Mixed. "Crave", "Crazy", "I Rise", "God Control" and Faz Gostoso" are mentioned as highlights.

    GingerGeneration: Generally favourable. The reviewer seems most impressed by "I Don't Search I Find", "Killers Who Are Partying", "Bitch I'm Loca" and"Faz Gostoso".

    Thanks for this info Msig! 

  5. 20 minutes ago, Kurt420 said:

    If I'm inundated with work, incredibly frustrated and scream "I feel like I'm drowning!!"....is that offensive to someone that lost a loved one in an actual drowning?

    If I work under someone that is just a straight up asshole with no consideration to anyone and I say it's like "working under Hitler"....is that offensive to people that DID live under his reign?

    If I'm having a HORRIBLE day and say "ugh....I just need to go and hang myself".....is that offensive to people that have lost loved ones to suicide or have attempted suicide themselves?

    I get migraines....if I get a bad one and say "I swear I have a brain tumor", knowing full well I don't of course, is that offensive to those that have survived brain tumors or those that have lost loved ones because of that?

    So many questions.....where is the line? 

    I think that's a tricky question to answer - I don't think there is a solid and easily discernible line. 

     

    Of course, there is a difference between saying "I'm dead tired" and "I'm working so hard, I feel like I'm in a Nazi concentration camp".. where exactly that line is - who knows? I guess its a matter of personal judgment, and sensitivity (either over-sensitivity or under-sensitivity). 

     

    I know I am in the minority on this board - but I feel that her comparing disappointment at an article/journalist to being raped was extreme, and makes her seem petulant and illogical. I also want the general public  to see the tender, warm, thoughtful, and generous side of Madge - the article did not show that. The article did paint her as demanding and fearsome in some ways. Madonna then reinforced that image with her social media rant. It frustrates me as a fan because I think this era is so terrific - and this stupid NYT controversy is taking bandwidth away from her amazing art. 

    Peace to all fellow fans. 

  6. 1 hour ago, articunocc said:

    i was raped man and i think the way she uses the word rape is tacky and tasteless and cringe, she should retire it because having a lukewarm interview on the new york times isn't the same as getting raped... end of

    I'm so sorry you had to go through that, articunocc.

    I see you are a new addition to the forum - welcome! As you can see, things can get passionate and heated around here. But - welcome to the Madonna fan community. I think one thing we can all agree on is - Long May She Reign! 

  7. 55 minutes ago, StrikeItUp said:

    I honestly didn’t think the article presented her in a negative way, it was more a collection of the paradoxical nature of Madonna’s actions vs what she says and how that’s changed over time (which she even said regarding “her truth”), which made sense. But overall it was a positive article.

    Madonna being critical of it is one thing. Her overreaction to it sounds excessive and makes her come across as a bit of a lunatic, with the whole patriarchy bit in the end. It just doesn’t help her case. Disappointing all around.

    THIS! Completely agree.

  8. I wish Madge had not lashed out on social media about this article - especially comparing it to rape (even if she has been raped herself). Its an excessive response from Madge, and off putting. I will always have love and respect for Madge - but fear that the general public will see her as a crazy loon. 

     

    I guess we are all human and make mistakes sometimes - as a celebrity, the mistakes are just out for all to see. Sigh. 

  9. 23 minutes ago, Lolasmommy said:

    Great article BUT I’ve got to thinking...why doesn’t Cher or Dolly Parton face the same  animosity as Madonna?

    i mean Cher & Dolly are both over 70 & still making music/performing whilst still running around in skimpy outfits & keen on  maintaining the same beauty looks they had in their youth plus continued surgery...

    Cher & Dolly don’t get half the shit Madonna does and are generally well loved by all

     

    I think there are 2 reasons: 

    1. Cher and Dolly are both camp artists to some degree (Dolly less so). This makes them safer for public consumption, as they are 'in on the joke'. 

    2. Madonna is provocative, challenging, makes no apologies for her age or sexuality - and comes off less than humble sometimes (because she does not bow down - that is who she is). The public finds a woman of her age, doing what she does, without campiness or cartoonishness - CHALLENGING. If she put out Donna Summer or Kylie type disco songs with no meaning/content/overt sexuality - she would be much more palatable and loved. But I, for one - am glad who she is! She is good for the music industry - whether they know it or not. 

  10. 4 minutes ago, Carey said:

    i think the next couple of decades are going to likely be her most provocative, she's in a full on war with society again (as she was in the early 90s) and we all know she's not going to back down.

    I really think one of her greatest legacies is going to be changing the paradigm for older women culturally. But indeed, she's probably going to be in for some of the worst criticism of her career, hold on tight because Madonna still doing it at 60, 70 and beyond, they'll want to burn her at the stake. This is just the beginning of a battle they started but she will win.

     

    Very interesting viewpoint - I can completely see it happening! 

  11. Madonna’s age isn’t relevant. Her music is

    Like many female artists, the singer has to put up with constant references to how old she is. It’s a double standard

    madonna
    ‘When men talk about women ageing gracefully, they are not acting out of concern. They’re telling them to know their station, to sit down and shut up.’ Photograph: Michael Campanella/Getty Images

    When the carping over Madonna’s age began in earnest, the focus wasn’t on her singing, or songwriting, or even her stagecraft. The problem, according to certain sections of the press, lay with her hands. “Why do Madonna’s hands look older than her face?” asked the Daily Mail in 2006. Such was the paper’s concern over the then 47-year-old’s apparently awful paws, a plastic surgeon was drafted in to provide professional analysis. “As a person ages [the] plumpness goes, making the hand look bonier and more veiny … less elastic,” he said sagely. Since then, close-ups of Madonna’s hands have been as much a tabloid staple as Victoria Beckham’s scowl or Amanda Holden’s sideboob.

    Music critics tend not to pass comment on a musician’s appearance – to do so would undermine the seriousness of their endeavour. But the assessments of Madonna’s 14th album, Madame X, have nonetheless brought more subtle kind of disparagement. “Perhaps the erstwhile Queen of Pop should be content with the role of Queen Mother of Pop now,” said the Daily Telegraph’s critic, going on to note that a woman who has shifted 350m units and broken every record for a female artist going hasn’t had a Top 10 hit in a decade. Even in the Guardian’s review, which was mostly positive, the theme of her age was never far away.

    Madonna is not alone in being seen through the prism of age. In 2014, looking ahead to Kate Bush’s live shows at Hammersmith Apollo, a (male) critic at the Independent cringed at the idea that she might start dancing. “However beneficial any yoga regime she might follow,” he said, “it’s simply unbecoming for a woman of a certain age to be prancing about, and certainly not in the leotard and leg-warmers of the 1979 shows.”

    In fighting to do her job at 60, Madonna is, as ever, blazing a trail. Do we really think that Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift will simply down tools when they reach 45 and take up knitting? The fact she is still annoying people by doing the job she has been doing for 35 years would suggest she’s a long way from being irrelevant. In the minds of her most vicious detractors – the ones that jeered with hilarity as “grandma” fell off the stage at the 2015 Brits – she would be better off binning the fishnets, putting on a nice cardie and waiting for death.

    Even the more moderate language used in relation to her is revealing. “Dignity” crops up a lot, as does “appropriate” and “growing old gracefully”. When men talk about women ageing gracefully, they are not acting out of concern. They’re telling them to know their station, to sit down and shut up. “People have always been trying to silence me for one reason or another, whether it’s that I’m not pretty enough, I don’t sing well enough, I’m not talented enough, I’m not married enough – and now it’s that I’m not young enough,” Madonna told Vogue recently. “Now I’m being punished for turning 60.”

    Tracey Thorn, the Everything but the Girl singer-turned-solo artist and author, last year shared her objections to being described as “a 55-year-old wife and mother” in a review by the American music writer Robert Christgau. “The more I think about it the crosser I’m getting,” she said on Twitter. “‘55-year-old husband and father.’ I’m trying to imagine it as a description in an album review. Nope. Can’t do it.” I have no right to throw stones here. In 2003 I interviewed Siouxsie Sioux, an artist I’d admired for as long as I could remember. Near the end of our chat I asked blithely if musical retirement was on the cards. She was 45. She gave me a proper bollocking, and pointed out – rightly – that I would never have asked a man that question.

    Ultimately it all boils down to what society deems alluring and acceptable. Older men, with their silver hair and laughter lines, are seen as stately and wise. Women of the same age are past it and embarrassing. Today, Iggy Pop (72) gets to run around shirtless during live performances. Nick Cave (61) dyes his hair and wears his shirts slashed to the waist; Elton John (72), who this year spoils us with a film, a memoir and a farewell tour, gads about in shades and diamante-encrusted suits. What links them, beyond their occupation, is that they get to decide how they conduct themselves and, crucially, when they stop working. And they get to do this without fear of criticism or vitriol. It’s high time female artists enjoyed the same privilege.

    Fiona Sturges is an arts writer specialising in books, music, podcasting and TV

  12. Guardian review is online. 

    https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jun/04/madonna-madame-x-review-her-most-bizarre-album-ever

     

    Madonna: Madame X review – her most bizarre album ever

    4 out of 5 stars.

    (Live Nation/Interscope/Maverick)

    The lows, featuring white-saviour narratives and witless lyrics, are really low. But by embracing Latin pop, Madonna sounds more natural than she has in years.

     

    We all get old, but never at the same age. Some of us are old when we’re children, bringing briefcases to school and talking to adults at family parties; others leave uni with the thrill that they never have to go clubbing again. Most of us think we’re doing pretty well, then we find ourselves nodding appreciatively at something in a Boden catalogue and suddenly death is real.

    For years, Madonna outpaced all of this. In 1996, Evita looked like ushering in her middle age, but she did an about turn, delivering convincing, idiosyncratic trip-hop on Ray of Light (1998) and convincing, idiosyncratic electro on Music (2000). Confessions on a Dancefloor (2005) was even better, its Abba samples and smooth deep house a way for her to stay out past 4am with dignity, rather than trying to score ketamine off teenage fashion influencers at the afters, musically speaking.

    But she couldn’t run forever. Perhaps it began pre-Confessions, when she kissed Britney Spears as if to parasitically extract her youth. Certainly by Hard Candy in 2008 she was playing catch-up, spurring Timbaland and the Neptunes to some of their tamest work, a good five years after their pomp. MDNA (2012) tried to keep pace with stadium EDM, while Rebel Heart (2015) struggled to get its head around a newly global, musically cosmopolitan pop market, and just randomly glued hip collaborators together. The woman who had once led was following, and sluggishly.

    To her credit, she has not done what many in her position would then do: lick their wounds and sell a jazz standards album to Radio 2 listeners. With Madame X, Madonna instead grits her teeth, puts on a glitter-encrusted eyepatch, looks in the mirror with seriously reduced depth perception and says: “Bitch, I’m Madonna.” And by drawing on the Latin influence of not just reggaeton-crazed recent pop but also her new home base of Lisbon, she has, at 60, produced her most natural-feeling, progressive and original record since Confessions.

    It’s also one of her most bizarre and sprawling, and features some of her worst ever music. Killers Who Are Playing finds this American multimillionaire – already not shy of white saviourhood – play empath to the world’s huddled masses: “I’ll be Africa if Africa is shut down. I will be poor if the poor are humiliated. I’ll be a child if the children are exploited …” We pause for presumably more of the same, this time in Portuguese, and then: “I’ll be Islam if Islam is hated. I’ll be Israel if they’re incarcerated. I’ll be Native Indian if the Indian has been taken. I’ll be a woman if she’s raped and her heart is breaking.” It’s well intended but fails to read the room – the room here being the entire planet.

    The dog’s dinner of Dark Ballet, aired in part at Eurovision, features vocodered vocals sung to a melody from the Nutcracker, and irritatingly gnomic pronouncements about commerce blinding us to reality. Extreme Occident, only available on the deluxe version for a very good reason, sees Madonna trying to “recover my centre of gravity” in a politically polarised world – a really worthwhile topic, but expressed in witless lyrics. “I guess I’m lost / I had to pay the cost / The thing that hurt me most …” (at this point you’re ready to bet your house on the final line being about a ghost, but no) “… Was that I wasn’t lost.” Tablas arrive with stupid kneejerk exoticism. It ends with her asserting “life is a circle” about 20 times.

    These shockers are suitable only for schadenfreude lovers or scholars of extreme camp, but another of these wildly messy tracks actually matches its vaulting ambition. God Control was presumably made after an all-nighter on Reddit – a rambling “Wake up sheeple!” screed that confronts gun reform, disenfranchised youth, democracy and the man upstairs. One section has her rap “Each new birthday gives me hope / that’s why I don’t smoke that dope”, and that her only friend is her brain – all with the peppy naivety of Tom Tom Club’s Wordy Rappinghood. And all of it set to hi-NRG disco with cascading strings and Daft Punk vocoders, for over six minutes. It is – only just – brilliant, and will become an equally beloved and despised curio among fans.

    All this baroque weirdness knocks the album off its axis, but most of its 64 minutes are actually full of very decent pop songcraft. Future is her go at pop’s next big trend, roots reggae, and while there is a slight, perhaps unconscious but audible white-person Jamaican accent, it is catchy and full-bodied, producer Diplo shamelessly ripping off the brass from Outkast’s SpottieOttieDopaliscious. She returns to Deeper and Deeper-style house on I Don’t Search I Find, its strings and fingerclicks a clear nod to Vogue. Crazy is beautiful and brilliantly catchy, a midtempo soul ballad that you could imagine Ariana Grande singing, but which has clever detailing like an accordion that has surely been influenced by Lisbon’s fado scene. The most emphatically Latin tracks are all strong, particularly Faz Gostoso with Brazilian superstar Anitta, whose frenetic beat is somewhere between baile funk and Angolan kuduro – another Lisbon-influenced rhythm that also flits through the polyrhythmic Come Alive. Bitch I’m Loco, the second track to feature Colombian star Maluma after lead single Medellín, is reggaeton roughage, but will be satisfying enough booming out of a club system. Perhaps there isn’t an absolutely diamond pop chorus on Madame X, but the singles I Rise, Crave, and Medellín all have elegant, sinewy melodies that twine around you rather than jabbing you into submission.

    Throughout, there is more density and musical adventure than at almost any other point in her career (perhaps this is the influence of Mirwais, who produces numerous tracks here and gave Music its fiendish intricacy). Her voice is remarkably plastic, pitched down one minute and up the next, into a Sia-like bleat and out into robotic polyphony. Often, around the seabed of the mix, is a swirl of aqueous psychedelic sound, profoundly different and much more interesting than her earlier R&B and EDM minimalism.

    Killers Who Are Playing ends with the questions: “Do you know who you are? Will we know when to stop?” The untamed, batshit Madame X suggests that Madonna doesn’t have the answer to either – and that her strength is in never knowing.

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