Madonna: Classic Or Dud

A friend, about 22 years younger, is going no questions asked. I'm surprised.

Oh I’m sure production-wise it’ll be amazing, I just have my reservations

Yeah, it's been decades since she phoned in a tour, based on what I've seen

We lucked out and got face value tickets for the LA show.

yeah, I found the fan club presale password on Reddit last night and there were a few tix left last night

as of now, idk

Tour delayed. I guess she was in the ICU for a bacterial infection? Scary.

Jesus

https://preview.redd.it/dx9l31hs8t8b1.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=7ddad0025559ac50a5d159bbba39b4f99c4a7af4

yikes - get well soon madge!

Get well soon

She has been discharged from the hospital, good news.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66058349

FWIW, Susan Siedelman is appearing at Roxy Cinema in NYC on Thursday, July 27, to do a Q&A for a post-screening discussion of Desperately Seeking Susan which starts at 7pm.

I love the joke with the pyramid jacket – where Susan tells the guy in the thrift store (when she’s trading it for the boots) that it belonged to Jimmy Hendrix… and when Roberta comes in later, asking about it, the guy looks her over and tells her it was owned by Elvis Presley.

North American summer tour cancelled.

We saw her last night at Madison Square Garden. For all the complaints about late start times, once the show gets going it's a non-stop barrage of the Great Pop Canon - rename the tour Madonna's Machine Gun of Hits. The show ends abruptly and ridiculously (not unlike a shootout) running right up against MSG's power-off deadline. It's bass heavy - some songs slam when they should groove. The Michael Jackson tribute interstitial is weird and uncomfortably longer that it should be (like a bad SNL sketch) but ignorable coming after a spectacular "Rain." OTOH, she sounds great and the setlist is unstoppable. Old age and treachery beats youth and exuberance again. I can't imagine anything better from a Madonna show in 2024.

Spoilers here: https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/madonna/2024/madison-square-garden-new-york-ny-43accf6f.html

oh shit

Act VI
Bedtime Story
Ray of Light
Rain

!!!

I think if the poll was run again, I'd vote "Don't Tell Me" as #1

I love this report thank you!!

I talked my wife into going with her friends, she's going to have a blast. What I love about Madonna tours is that while any number of pop pretenders understand spectacle, very few have the personality to do something particularly compelling with it. To their credit Swift and Beyonce both seem to have learned the right lessons from larger than life presentations of the past, but erstwhile peers like that are few and far between.

I was going to sit this out even though I've never been to her shows, but a friend who's a diehard fan treated me to a show when his partner couldn't go, and it was a pretty great spectacle - honestly, maybe the best I've ever been to in terms of production design. (Maybe the one U2 show I saw had the best set piece thanks to that enormous rocketship/claw thing, but Madonna had like a bazillion different sets that were all amazing.)

huh

For the first time on a Madonna tour, there was no live band – according to musical director Stuart Price, this is to let the original recordings shine.

yeah, I noticed TV shows also stopped hiring real string musicians, to let those EastWest plugins shine

lol

No one wants to say “to save some dough”

"Ok Madonna, we've looked at the tour budget and we are a little over. We could either cut the light show, or cut the musicians, what do you think?"

Madonna brought Kylie onstage for a couple songs last night in L.A. and i think the earth's axis shifted.

My wife was there... she thought it was a little odd that they performed "I Will Survive" (and then played just a few bars of "Can't Get You Out of My Head"). Her overall review of the show was mixed...

pretty obvious it was just a quick cameo, maybe somewhat impromptu based on Kylie being in town at the time, and that they'd have to do a couple songs they would both know, just a couple logical picks. def more about the iconic moment being created and not the production values.

Apparently it was the slot in the show where she normally does "Express Yourself."

Which she apparently does acoustic, for some reason, right?

Oh, I don't know... she said "I Will Survive" was acoustic.

She took a pic of Lenny Kravitz walking up the aisle... she also saw Jeff B3zo$ there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1RAd9hPhUU

yes, this acoustic number is part of the show and she’s been alternating between I Will Survive and Express Yourself. there is also the vogueing competition segment, and a different guest judge gets invited in each city (we got pamela anderson in vancouver), so perhaps the plan was to have kylie as a guest judge and they decided to use the occasion to do something more?

She called out a person from the stage for sitting down only to discover they were in a wheelchair!

yeah that was pretty cringe

still in awe of how amazing her show was last night. her voice was pretty much destroyed by the end of the show last night (she was drinking Jager all night on stage and yelling, so no shocker), but she's never been known for being a great singer (though sadly that did cause her to outright ruin "Take a Bow", lol).

but the entire show was beautiful, the theatrical jaunt through the decades of her life were incredible, and considering how hateful our Governor is to the LGBTQIA2S+ community, it was great to see something so sex positive and openly celebratory of all orientations and identities in our state. didn't hurt that the song choices were ace - "Bad Girl" was incredible, "Live to Tell", "Everything", "Burning Up" were some of my favorites. she did fully lip sync "Ray of Light", which is not unexpected, but that was incredibly staged.

but man I wish she'd stop demanding her shows be at 84 degrees, god that was hot. lol.

she was drinking Jager all night

gross

lol otm.

I was kinda side-eyeing her, "you want the arena at 84 degrees for your voice and yet you're ruining it anyway by drinking that all night".

Was it a prop, like David Lee Roth's "Jack Daniels" bottle that was full of iced tea?

I thought DLR (and Michael, and probably EVH, for sure Alex, who had a trash can by his set for barf) was drinking the real thing, but he accused the Clash of drinking iced tea.

I was close (courtesy Hagar's memoir):

They would wake up Al about twenty minutes before show-time. There was always a case of tall Schlitz cans. He would shotgun three or four beers and get his buzz on. He would walk out onstage with a couple more cans in his hands, pound those, and drink the rest of the case during the two-hour show. The crew would put out these big rubber trash cans for him to piss in during the show. After practically every song, he’d piss in the trash can, pound a couple of beers, and start playing again. Sometimes he’d really be fucked up. In the middle of a song, he’d just get up off the drums to take a piss or chug a beer. Eventually he started wearing one of those helmets with beer holders on the side, and straws. At the end of the tour, he needed some help.

xxpost kind of the reverse, she was drinking out of a Budweiser bottle all night, then explained that it wasn't really filled with Budweiser, that it was Jager.

(possible it was water and she was kidding, but judging by how raspy and dry-mouthed she seemed, I doubt it).

my mom was dancing and singing throughout the whole show

Guy Pratt, the British sessioneer who's played with Pink Floyd among other giants, breaks down his fantastic bass part in "Like a Prayer." Check out his playing at 12:00.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yluPCLc1ltg

That is one of my favorite clips of all time, pretty sure I've posted it somewhere on ILX once or twice.

(His book is great, btw, especially if you want some colorful Robert Palmer tales.)