Bitch, She’s Still Madonna
On Madonna's Celebration Tour
Last night at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, the crowd was restless. It was 10:43 PM and Madonna had yet to take the stage. If you’re a Madonna fan, you’re used to waiting. I waited for hours until nearly 1:40am at Red Rooster in Harlem two years where she appeared for a pop-up performance in celebration of the Madame X documentary release. After a mini-concert she led us through the streets of Harlem for a group sing-a-long to “Like a Prayer.” It was one of the most electric moments I’ve ever experienced in my life. At the actual Madame X tour, a concert I enjoyed but I’d categorize as “mostly good,” she kept us waiting with our phones locked up. So this time, joining Madonna for the Celebration Tour on the first night of its North American leg, I was at least glad we got Honey Dijon spinning until 10PM and that Queen Mother Madonna appeared shortly before 11PM.
The show opens with the pulsating William Orbit-produced anthem “Nothing Really Matters,” one of the standout tracks of Ray of Light1. In 1998, the lyrics “Now that I am grown, everything’s changed, I’ll never be the same, because of you,” were about the birth of her daughter Lourdes Leon. Now, in 2023 after a life-threatening illness and a knee injury, the lyrics take on a new morbid tone. The Celebration Tour finds Madonna grappling with her own mortality for possibly the first time in her career. The pop icon whose career has spanned four decades always reinvented herself with each album cycle, aiming to look forward instead of looking back2, but here she is launching a nostalgia tour. At first, it felt almost like a cash grab, but after the year Madonna has had, the tour began to feel like a defiant scream at the passage of time. She was forced to stop looking forward for the first time in her life and now that she’s survived, she’s grateful for her past, her fans, and she wants to celebrate not just where she came from, but everyone who’s played a part in her evolution.
Madonna begins with her ‘80s dance tracks from her Danceteria days like “Everybody” and “Burning Up,” while also throwing in “I Love New York” for the city that birthed her. I personally find “I Love New York” to be the only skippable song on Confessions of a Dance Floor, but I digress… she has a lot to thank New York for! The dance music is quickly thrust into the AIDS epidemic during “Live to Tell,” where she sings as images of friends and other artists lost to AIDS flash on the stage. If it feels abrupt and too soon for such a sad moment in the tour, it mirrors the abruptness of the disease itself. The single, which was released in March 1986, would’ve still been on the radio in the summer when one of her close friends and collaborators Martin Burgoyne became ill with AIDS and died later that fall. It places Madonna’s fervent support of the LGBTQ+ community in context. At the height of her career, many of her friends were dying and she’s still haunted by their ghosts.
We follow this with the spectacular instrumental of “Act of Contrition,” where several male dancers appear on a spinning contraption in a mixture of religious and fetish costumes. Madonna soon appears to sing, “Like a Prayer,” one of her best songs and one of the gaggiest renditions I’ve seen of the performance (and I marched through the streets singing this with her, mind you). The version sung was the 7” Remix Edit featured on her 2022 Finally Enough Love album, which sounds electric in an arena. The spinning contraption was used again soon after for a dance break to her and Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul” (The Queens Remix), which segued into “Vogue.” It was a clever bit of synergy between her and Beyoncé, one of the biggest acts in music right now, who was inspired by Madonna. In a show about looking to Madonna’s past, this moment (and another later in the show where Kevin JZ Prodigy’s vocals were mixed into “Bitch I’m Madonna”) brought Madonna at least into the present era of music, if not propelling her into the future.
The tonal swings of the show after this became a bit of whiplash, particularly since I’d been sitting in Barclays for hours. We went from sexy “Erotica” vibes and then somehow we were back in the “Vogue” era and then she was a futuristic cowboy singing “Die Another Day” and “Don’t Tell Me.” And I didn’t particularly need a rendition of “The Beast Within” or “Mother and Father” or that song so she loves so much, “La Isla Bonita.” The Madame X Tour was a good time to rest that latter song, I think. But for an artist who rose to prominence by being a vibrant dancer on stage, Madonna still managed to captivate even if her injury prevented her from fully hitting steps. Her dancers mostly danced around her, but she saved all her energy for an insane light show where she flew above the audience, dancing in a cage for “Ray of Light,” and then boogied with her dancers for “Bitch I’m Madonna” and “Celebration.”
The show tore. I was tired and exhausted, but grateful to see one of our living icons give every bit she has of herself with the audience that has loved her for so many years. Videos from the European leg of the tour showed her sad, almost angry with herself at times, and on the verge of tears. When she sang a cover of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” you could tell that she really did just survive one of the hardest battles of her life. You can almost forgive the kooky Michael Jackson, Kara Walker-esque shadow dancing moment and all of the newspaper headlines about how she courted controversy over the years. One, she’s an August Leo and she will always be talking about herself and the other celebrities who she knew. Second, she’s been through some shit! This was another bit of synergy with Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour. The Renaissance film reveals that Beyoncé herself underwent knee surgery before she tackled her European then North American leg. It’s unfortunate that the divas we love feel so compelled to nearly kill themselves to deliver a promised stage show to their fans, but they’ve shown us for decades that they’re superhuman… and even if we know this not to be true, it’s important for them to believe it. Last night, I left Barclays center on a (ketamine) high and a grin on my face. Bitch, she’s Madonna. The one and only.
My fave track is actually “Candy Perfume Girl,” and its Portishead-esque trip-hop beat.
Well, except Hard Candy which was maligned for having the same pop production as everything else on the radio in 2008 but has since stood the test of time as an iconic album that features some of her best dance tracks and some of Timbaland and Pharrell’s best production
Totally