Can You Spot the Difference?

Strike a Pose...2012

Strike a Pose...2012

I'll Remember...2012

Strike a Pose...2012

NFL Now Wants M.I.A. to Pay $16.6 Million

The NFL is now demanding $16.6 million from M.I.A. in the ongoing case surrounding her brief middle-finger gesture during the 2012 Super Bowl halftime show, according to The Hollywood Reporter. This follows the NFL's two-year attempt at getting $1.5 million dollars from her—claiming that M.I.A.'s "offensive" finger happened "in flagrant disregard for the values that form the cornerstone of the NFL brand and the Super Bowl." According to the NFL, M.I.A. breached a pre-show agreement to maintain the NFL's "reputation for wholesomeness".

The NFL's additional $15.1 million comes in "restitution"—the number was arrived at based on the alleged value of exposure M.I.A. received for appearing in Madonna's performance, and what an advertiser would have paid for this time, reports The Hollywood Reporter. In other words: The NFL seems to be equating M.I.A.'s seconds-long bird-flip with a fee for the most expensive commercial spots that exist on television.
M.I.A.'s lawyers responded in a document filed Friday: "The claim for restitution lacks any basis in law, fact, or logic." According to The Hollywood Reporter, M.I.A. also said "the continued pursuit of this proceeding is transparently an exercise by NFL intended solely to bully and make an example of Respondents for daring to challenge NFL."

M.I.A. is attempting to dismantle the NFL's claims at "wholesomeness,", bringing up halftime performances by Michael Jackson, Prince, and even Madonna that included lewd gestures. Her lawyers also point to recent NFL scandals involving racial slurs, bullying, and head trauma.

M.I.A. wrote on Twitter:

@madonna ummm ..... can i borrow 16 million ?

— M.I.A (@MIAuniverse) March 17, 2014

Can You Spot the Difference?

1997                                                                 2012

Madge'c

Gives Good Face...

Strike a Pose...2012

MDNA TOUR TORONTO

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Madonna's Music All About Making Money

The first time I saw Madonna was at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1984 when she wore a trashed-out wedding dress and crucifixes and was grinding on the floor like a possessed Barbie doll in heat while singing Like a Virgin.

It was like watching a John Waters’ film. It was horrifying and hypnotic at the same time. It wasn’t that her performance was so good that it fascinated me, but that she was so horrible that had me riveted to the TV. You didn’t know what she was going to do next.

That’s Madonna for me. The first big video pop celebrity to grace MTV, Madonna proved you didn’t have to be a talented singer, songwriter or even performer to be a pop icon. All you had to do was keep yourself in the public eye and success would be yours.

Madonna was never about the music. Her whole career has always been about making Madonna a big celebrity. She’s reinvented herself so many times you forget just how long in the tooth she really is and how long she’s been in the business. Strangely, her music hasn’t changed much over 30 years. Like a Virgin, Papa Don’t Preach, Justify My Love, Vogue, Like A Prayer. She rarely strays from the sexually empowering disco format.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d be a hypocrite if I complained about the way she uses sex. But it’s the sex I find interesting, not Madonna.

Queen of Reinvention

Face it. She really isn’t much of a singer or an actor. But over the years, she’s shown herself to be adept at surrounding herself with more talented people. She and her producers are so adept at recycling hits she’s become known disparagingly by industry insiders as the Queen of Reinvention.

I think Madonna’s more of a powerful businesswoman than a recording artist. Over her 30-year career, she’s shown an extraordinary knack for anticipating, and manipulating the marketplace. Her latest tour is a good example. MDNA. The European reviews have been mixed to lousy at best. Yet, she can still demand, and get, top ticket prices for her Monday, Sept. 10 at Scotiabank Place top out at $350+ a ticket.

I think she views music the way Calvin Klein designs jeans. While all music is a commodity, Madonna takes music marketing to fast-food giant McDonalds-scale levels. How many can I sell? And like Klein, she knows the quickest way to sell your product is with a sexy image. Madonna is the musical equivalent of Brooke Shields in jeans. When she kissed Britney Spears, it wasn’t sex. It was a business contract. An exchange of sex for power.

She’s like a champion boxer who doesn’t know when to quit. There seems to be something dark and hungry that drives her on. What that is we may never know.

Denis Armstrong's Top 5 Appallingly Bad Madonna Songs

1. Vogue - A song about posing, this has to be THE worst Madonna song ever. Without a decipherable melody or story, it’s actually not a song at all, but an instructional video on how many ways you can look like a constipated fool.

2. 4 Minutes - Not even Justin Timberlake can rescue this prodding mess, and she looks like his mother in the video. Not only is it pointless, it’s the opposite of sexy.

3. Give It 2 Me - Did she write this on Twitter? This disco dazzler was surely written using fewer than 140 characters, which is about 120 too many.

4. Girl Gone Wild - Wow. The act of contrition opens this bit of disco thunder best saved for the gay strip club. About as erotic as an oil change.

5. Justify My Love: Not for the song, which I think is cool, but Madonna’s performance as the hot temptress in the video. Pure lime-green Jello. About as sexy as kissing your aunt. I’m guess Guy Ritchie never saw this video.

SOURCE

Humm...This author is a bit jaded, but he included this cool pic from The Virgin Tour so I give him credit for that at least?

Madonna Hits Home Run ...MDNA TOUR NYC

Have Madonna And Elton John Buried The Hatchet?‎

Only last month Elton took his latest pop, comparing Madge to a fairground stripper.  So when the pair bumped into each other at a posh restaurant in the south of France last week, fellow diners couldn’t be blamed for hiding behind their breadsticks.

But the stars have finally managed to put their public battle behind – as they kissed and made up in front of everyone eating at La Petite Maison in Nice. A source said: “Elton goes to the Petite Maison for dinner fairly regularly as it’s near his villa in Mont Boron.  

“But Madonna was also there for a bite before her show, which was down the road and didn’t start until around 10.30pm.  “Just as he was leaving, he went over to talk to Madonna and they were laughing and smiling.”

The insider added: “They even hugged each other.”  Perhaps that snowball does have a chance in hell.

Madonna, Mistress of the Show

Madonna’s sold-out Bell Centre concert Thursday is a contender for show of the year. Musicianship? Less solid, but didn't trouble fans who stood, sang and shouted approval all night

MONTREAL - Who would have the chutzpah to argue that Madonna’s sold-out Bell Centre performance Thursday night was anything but the show of the year?

Mind you, that is not to say the frenetic, overheated aerobic eye-popper was the concert of the year. The Madonna oeuvre has very little to do with musicianship, songcraft or art – at least not in the conventional sense. Nor is she a great singer.

For almost 30 years, our Madge has been making serviceable pop records, some of the best-loved of which were mixed into a set heavy on songs from her latest disc, MDNA, during Thursday’s two-hour extravaganza.

When you strip away the hoopla surrounding her various guises, her once-daring sexual envelope-pushing, her celebration of her celebrity and her bad-Catholic girl pose, what’s left? An entertainer who, admittedly, outdoes all her imitators and progeny when it comes to dancefloor pop – a point made clear when she slyly incorporated Lady Gaga’s Born This Way into Express Yourself.

And such hits as Like a Prayer, sung near the end of the set, might even have been a religious experience for some 16,000 adoring fans who had stood up, sang and shouted their approval almost non-stop all evening.

Even so, from the opening moments of her set (which started only at 10:15), the primacy of the presentation was clear: dancers, clad as monks, rang a bell and swung an incense-filled censer before Madonna descended in a confessional to open the show with Girl Gone Wild.

Before you could say “abrupt left turn,” however, the singer and her dancers were packing heat. Aggressors were shot during Revolver, at the end of which Madonna aimed her gun right into the audience (wonder how that will play when she does the show in Denver, Colorado, in October?).

As the singer continued on her revenge rampage – possibly making an artistic point, but not with any clarity – blood spattered all over the back screen during Gang Bang. Repeatedly. The audience cheered and fists were raised in the air. Chillingly.

After that, it became impossible to keep up with the sheer madness happening on the elaborate stage, with its two cakewalks converging at a point deep into the audience on the floor. Slackline athletes, up to 20 dancers on stage at some points, costume changes, video links with remixes, Autotune, a “Free Pussy Riot” chant, segmented platforms raising up and down as the performers negotiated their footing … it was hard to take it all in. Rarely did Madonna dial it down to simply deliver a song, as she almost did, quite effectively, during Papa Don’t Preach.

Nonetheless, the superstar’s virtually continuous motion was absolutely astonishing for a 54-year-old performer, and certainly enough to put wannabes half her age to shame. The forceful nature of her movements, however, did raise curiosity about how the vocals continued to sound so smooth.

In the end, the clubby backbeat made the quality of the tunes beside the point – as did the hard-to-debate idea that this was, more than anything else, a pop spectacle no act would want to follow. But like a meal consisting entirely of sundaes, it became numbingly hard to consume after a while.
As midnight went by and she closed the night with the DJ motif of a high-energy version of Celebration, you had to look hard for signs of fatigue on Madonna’s face. And the fans? They could have stayed all night.



SOURCE

Madonna's makeup artist shares the star's beauty products and looks from her MDNA tour

Inarguably as important as the music and theatrics, Madonna's look always takes centre stage.

A glam squad of four, including Madonna’s key makeup artist, Gina Brooke, is standing by at the ready backstage during her MDNA concert tour to work with pit-stop efficiency. Through a bevy of costume changes, this deft team quick-changes Madonna’s makeup and sometimes her entire look in a mere minute and a half between sets.

While there’s a need for speed, makeup application involves dexterity and care, especially when working around the eyes. Brooke, a native New Yorker, has worked with Madonna and other celebrities for 10 years, beautifying them for special events, videos and photo shoots. She is leading Madonna's makeup for MDNA - which made its first Canadian stop in Montreal Thursday - as well as her last three tours.

“I designed two main makeup charts to cover Madonna’s three makeup looks for the current MDNA tour. After our initial 45-minute pre-show makeup application, I’ve got one and a half minutes to change Madonna’s look two times during each show. Any glitch is potentially disastrous, as the show keeps rolling,” says Brooke.

Mirror, Mirror… on the wall.

Who's the Queenest of them all?  Opening the Euro stretch of her Born This Way Ball tour with sass, Lady GaGa gave fans in Helsinki, Finland a peek at her bum in an apparent dig at Madonna.   As you know, her Madgesty has been covering GaGaloo's Born This Way during her MDNA tour. And many speculate this to be a spike in the diva domination war following her comments that the GaGa single was a "reductive" homage to Express Yourself.

But Gaga clearly just doesn't give a f*ck!   With a flash of her thong she told the crowd:

"I don’t give a f*ck what people say. We don’t give a f*ck — we know the truth!"

And then, in true diva fashion, she went right into playing a move of Madonna's own game and covered the Queen's Like A Prayer.   So not only did GaGa take Madonna's signature thong flash, she covered one of her own singles, obviously in response to Madge covering her own. Oh and in case you missed it — Madonna has a song entitled I Don't Give A on MDNA. So GaGa's introduction to the chess move was LOADED!!

And while GaGa also says the rebellious line in Bad Kids, the fact that one of Madonna's recent songs holds the same title is still an interesting note speculated by MANY in connection with GaGa's thong flash. Just sayin!

UPDATE: Despite reports claiming she covered Like A Prayer, other sources insist that is not the case. Seeing as there is no video of the performance, we're forced to believe the latter.

Strike a Pose...2012

Bazzar Outtakes

The MDNA Tour - In Madonna's Own Words

My show
Is a journey.
The journey of a soul from darkness to light
It is part cinematic musical theatre.
Part spectacle and sometimes intimate Performance art.

But above all its a journey
From darkness to light
From anger to love
from chaos to order.

It's true there is a lot of violence in the beginning of the show and sometimes the use of fake guns - but they are used as metaphors.
I do not condone violence or the use of guns.
Rather they are symbols of wanting to appear strong and wanting to find a way to stop feelings that I find hurtful or damaging. In my case its wanting to stop the lies and hypocrisy of the church, the intolerance of many narrow minded cultures and societies I have experienced throughout my life and in some cases the pain I have felt from having my heart broken.

Ultimately as we follow through the journey of my story, the audience can see quite clearly what I see -
That the enemy is within and the only way to survive Disappointment Disapproval Judgment Heartbreak Jealousy Envy And Hatred Is with Love - not with revenge - not with guns and not with violence.

In spite of all the chaos and darkness and intolerance we seem to be encountering more and more in the world,
We cannot allow our anger or bitterness to swallow us up.
We come to understand that
There is an innate and pure love inside us all and we have to find a way to tap into it.

And we can't do it by being victims or placing the blame or pointing the finger at others.
But by recognizing that the enemy is within
And when we come to terms with it
And accept it
And struggle to change ourselves,
Then we can change the world without hurting anyone and we can inspire others to do the same.
When you watch a film there are usually good guys and bad guys to help illustrate this point, Sometimes I play both.
I enjoy acting out this journey.
For none of us are perfect and we all have our own journey of growth to go on.
I know people can relate to it.
It's very important to me as an artist that my show not be taken out of context.

It must be watched with an open heart from beginning to end. I am sure if it is viewed this way, the viewer will walk away feeling inspired, Invigorated and will want to make the world a better place.

And this of course was always my intention.