all about Madonna

Visit MTV.com to listen to Madonna’s new album, Confessions On A Dance Floor.

from DrownedMadonna : Today the new German trendcharts (CD sales) have been published and Madonna’s Hung Up is on number 1.

Ticking clocks. Sirens. Pounding, nonstop, irresistible beats. And somewhere in the midst of it all, things ” particularly a voice ” that sound familiar, but also don’t sound much like anything you’ve heard before …

Madonna’s new album, Confessions on a Dance Floor (out November 15) borrows from the past ” even from her own past ” to create a sound that’s classic but also new. And it works.

The album merges elements of ’70s disco, ’80s electro-pop and present-day club burners, but it also allows us a peek into Madge’s mind, with her thoughts on love, religion and fame bubbling into the album’s frothy mix. “Ergo Confessions,’ ” she says. “Is [the title's meaning] coming together now?”

Heavily self-referential, the album might find Madonna singing about the weighty topics that informed her last LP ” Kabbalah, questioning fame and the material world ” but the lyrics come with the sweetener of thumping, pulsing, shimmering dance beats. You can understand the words, but the songs aren’t diatribes like those on her last album, 2003’s American Life. (There’s also, thankfully, no rapping.) The beat is paramount: The songs are even segued together, so that one runs seamlessly into the next.

“When I wrote ‘American Life,’ I was very agitated by what was going on in the world around me,” Madonna says. “I was angry. I had a lot to get off my chest. I made a lot of political statements. But now, I feel that I just want to have fun; I want to dance; I want to feel buoyant. And I want to give other people the same feeling. There’s a lot of madness in the world around us, and I want people to be happy.”

Fair enough. Madonna started writing the material with collaborator Stuart Price (who also works under the noms du disco Jacques Lu Cont, Les Rhythmes Digitales and Thin White Duke) with the intention of scoring a movie musical. But the movie ended up not happening, so she turned the beats around. “That’s how it all started,” she says. ” ‘Let’s go disco!’ ”

She brought aboard Mirwais AhmadzaA

More HQ Pictures from Harry Potter Premiere in London are added to the gallery.

Madonna was more Queen Of Strop than Pop last night when she discovered her new album has been leaked on to the internet – costing her a fortune in lost sales.
The star has gone to great lengths to keep Confessions On A Dancefloor under lock and key until its worldwide release on November 14.
Not even music critics could get a copy of the CD for review. They were forced to go to her record company HQ to hear it.
But last night I was contacted by Madonna fans who had illegally downloaded the album for free.
The first single, Hung Up, is out today and Madge’s new dance album has been hailed as a return to spectacular form. She is furious to find someone had posted copies of the album online.
A source close to the star told me: “Madonna has gone all out to make sure this album wasn’t pirated ” but she has failed.
“She was fuming when she found out the security had been breached and she has ordered her aides to find the culprits.
“The CDs are watermarked. Even people who work for her were not given copies ” they had to go and listen to it at the record company like everyone else.
“She worked really hard on this album and believes it’s wrong that fans can just download it for free.”?
Madonna has been one of the strongest campaigners against music piracy.
Unfinished versions of the tracks from her album Music appeared online months before release.
She tried to avoid the problem with American Life by posting fake tracks on illegal networks.
When fans tried to download them they got a furious Madonna barking: “What the f*** do you think you are doing?”?
Madonna defied her 47 years and looked sensational in a purple leotard to perform Hung Up at the MTV Europe Awards in Lisbon last week.
source : thesun.co.uk

HQ Pictures from Harry Potter Premiere in London are added to the gallery.

…Thousands of fans including pop star Madonna descended on central London on Sunday for the world premiere of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” the fourth installment of a hugely successful series of films…
source : reuters

She’s still a dancing queen (Pop CD of the week)

On the cover of her new album, Madonna is striking a pose. She’s clad in Eighties-via-Noughties club bunny couture, almost breakdancing. The ‘o’ in her name has been replaced by a mirrorball. The title seals the deal: here is sleek, electronic dance music, it says, the like of which we have not heard from Madonna since the best bits of 1998’s Ray of Light. There are nudges and winks here and there that suggest, moreover, that this is the kind of frothy Madonna confection we haven’t enjoyed since the Eighties, when hot pink was last considered flattering.
Artists hate admitting that their old stuff is usually better than their middle period, but here is Madonna, quoting snatches of her old lyrics and rediscovering the rap-chat last heard on ‘Vogue’. On ‘I Love New York’, she begs the forgiveness of the city she forfeited for a large estate in Wiltshire and a new life as Mrs Guy Ritchie. You get the distinct impression, too, that the sometime Queen of Pop has taken stock of reactions to her last couple of albums – 2000’s not-exactly-epoch-making Music and 2003’s poor-selling American Life – and has decided to give the people what they want: a high old time. Gone is the self-imposed task of opposing war or writing the Great American Album; back is the imperative to entertain. To paraphrase the Arctic Monkeys, she’s remembered that she looks good on the dancefloor.
A retrenchment it may be, then, but Confessions is, on balance, a solid success. Inside, the 12 tracks flow seamlessly, in what used to be called an extended disco mix. The first single, ‘Hung Up’, sets the throbbing agenda. It’s a monster of a tune, arrayed in homage around a sample of Abba’s ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!’. This is only the second time ever the Swedes have allowed their pop motherlode to be mined in this way, and Madonna and her new sonic fixer, Stuart ‘Jacques Lu Cont’ Price have made disco gold with it. Regrettably, nothing afterwards quite matches ‘Hung Up’s tight exuberance, but Mrs Ritchie, Price, Mirwais and a brace of latterday Swedish pop manufacturers such as Murlyn and Bloodshy & Avant make a good fist of trying.
The sounds on this record are deliriously saturated, the dynamics piquantly tooled. There are songs about falling in love and having a good time. The only major glitch on the ears is the way Madonna and her henchmen rely overmuch on synthesised string rushes, the kind of thing that makes trance records so cheesy. You wish, too, that the melodies were a little tougher and that you weren’t so pleased when recognisable references (such as the Giorgio Moroder throb that animates ‘Future Lovers’, or the Daft Punk nod on ‘Forbidden Love’) jump out at you.
But these are minor details. The next single, ‘Sorry’, sees Madonna taking a lover to task over an insistent dance-pop rush. ‘Let It Will Be’, meanwhile, is a kaleidoscopic track whose subtle synth hook and percolating equanimity make it an obvious candidate for single number three, if the pop law didn’t state that third singles must always be ballads.
Spendidly, there are no actual ballads at all. The nearest thing is ‘Isaac’, the controversial song of praise to a kabbalah figurehead that has reportedly dismayed kabbalahists. It’s the album’s most glaring mis-step. Not for its subject matter per se, but for the shonky world-pop fusion instigated by the Hebrew chant that underpins the track.
The ballad-shaped hole on Confessions is also filled by ‘How High’, a spot of pumping self-analysis that does the thoughtful work of the album. It does this very well, with Madonna pondering the value of her fortune and fame. We should hastily move past ‘Push’, a clunky vocal melody passed off as a love song to Guy, and celebrate the final track. ‘Like It or Not’ adopts the glam stomp currently owned by Goldfrapp and runs with it, ending Confessions on a jaunty, jubilant note.
You might wonder what a spiritually inclined mother of two who rides and hunts and insists on being called Mrs Ritchie at film premieres is doing making a record for decadent, metrosexual night creatures to jack their bodies to. But hang the contradictions; these confessions are worth taking.
source : guardian (thanks to hector/mnation)

Hung Up – She might be knocking 50 but Madge proves she still knows what makes a hit single. In this case it’s a large slice of Abba’s Gimme Gimme Gimme, a thumping bassline and her best pop chorus since Into The Groove. Easy when you don’t have to try.
source : sundaymirror (thanks to hector/mnation)

18 HQ Pictures from Wetten Dass are added to the gallery.

67 Video Captures from Wetten Dass ? are added to the gallery.