all about Madonna

14 (last week : 27) Madonna – Hung Up

Singles :
1. Hung Up (32 500)

Albums
1. Confessions on a Dance Floor (122 000)

A new documentary about Madonna gives fans an insight into the mixture of hard work and spirituality which drives the singer – but despite its title, there are few fresh revelations for fans.
I’m Going to Tell You a Secret, which will be screened on Channel 4 next month, follows her 2004 tour from the dancer audition stage through to the final performance.
The two-hour film is directed by arty pop video director Jonas Akerlund and executive produced by the singer herself, more than 20 years after her first hit.
It gives an authorised perspective on her personal life, including her interest in philosophy and theology.
Some of her favourite passages, from sources as varied as the Old Testament and her own pen, punctuate the film.
“Light is immortality,” Madonna – a student of the mystical Jewish teachings of Kabbalah – says in a voiceover at one point.
“It’s a place where there is no pain or suffering.”

Disturbing images
The documentary opens with Madonna reading a section of the Book of Revelations about “the coming of the beast”, over images of wolves and the singer herself being restrained.
This will be the opening film for her stage show.
A renowned perfectionist, Madonna, 47, takes the preparations very seriously.
“When you are putting together a show, it’s like being in wartime,” she explains. “There’s a unity.”
She sits in on the dancer auditions to have her say on the selection.
After watching the hopefuls, the former full-time dancer realises how far she has come.
“I’m glad I’m not a dancer any more,” she says. “It’s a dog’s life.”
Prayer is clearly an important part of Madonna’s preparations.

Personal philosophy
She gets her dancers to join hands in a circle shortly before they take to the stage.
She tells them to lead the audience: “I want you to inspire them to be a better version of what they are already.”
The backstage footage is mixed with live performances of hits like Vogue and Like a Prayer, along with newer material like Hollywood.
Madonna’s more politicised stance sees her dancers perform American Life in army uniforms in front of a backdrop film containing images of war and religion.
Backstage, she explains she feels the urge to “wake people up”.
“You’ve got to give people solutions or they will fall asleep again,” she explains.
Away from the stage, fans get an insight into her improved relationship with her father, with whom she often battled after her mother died in 1963.
Father Sylvio even gives his view on Kaballah: “I’ve read some of the books she’s given me and there’s nothing in it that isn’t in the Scriptures.”
Madonna’s own children appear throughout, with daughter Lourdes saying she wished she saw her her mother more when she was touring.

Home life
The singer admits her relationship with British film director husband Guy Ritchie is not “easy” at times.
“I thank God every day I am married to a man who makes me think,” she says.
Ritchie appears regularly, wrestling with Madonna’s bodyguards in the gym, hiring a London pub for his birthday or singing along to his favourite Irish folk songs.
Elsewhere, she is shown writing poems to thank her personal assistant and taking her dancers for a character-building evening watching classical pianists in Paris.
“I feel like I know so much more than I knew before,” she reveals.
“Sometimes fun is over-rated.”
Those hoping for shock revelations about media-savvy Madonna may be disappointed by the film but she clearly wants her audience to know she is more responsible as she nears 50.
“I’ve a huge ego and I need to change,” she says at one point.
“Knowing is the beginning.”
source : bbc.co.uk

Madonna as you’ve never seen her before. the singing sensation gets personal when she agrees to videotape her everyday life for ABC News – starting with good morning kisses from her kids and her first cup of coffee and breakfast to private workout sessions and getting ready for a night on the town to promote her new album.
Madonna also talks candidly to Cynthia McFadden about her recent fall off of a horse and her road to recovery; recent headline making comments in her documentary, her religion and her new dance album.
The report airs on ‘Primitime’ on Thursday 17 November (9:00-11:00pm E.T.) on the ABC Television Network.
source : abc

Given the cold shoulder Madonna’s 2003 album American Life received by critics and audiences alike ” it may have gone platinum, but it was her first album ever not to have a single enter the Billboard pop Top Ten (in fact, its title track barely cracked the Top 40) ” it’s hard not to read its 2005 follow-up, Confessions on a Dance Floor, as a back-to-basics move of sorts: after a stumble, she’s returning to her roots, namely the discos and clubs where she launched her career in the early ’80s. It’s not just that she’s returning to dance music ” in a way, she’s been making hardcore dance albums ever since 1998’s Ray of Light, her first full-on flirtation with electronica ” but that she’s revamping and updating disco on Confessions instead of pursuing a bolder direction. While it’s true to a certain extent that contemporary dance music is still recycling and reinventing these songs ” besides, anything ’80s is in vogue in 2005 ” coming from Madonna, it sounds like a retreat, an inadvertent apology that she’s no longer on the cutting edge, or at least an admission that she’s inching ever closer to 50. And no matter how she may disguise it beneath glistening layers of synths, or by sequencing the album as a non-stop party, Confessions on a Dance Floor is the first album where Madonna seems like a veteran musician. Not only is there a sense of conscious craft to the album, in how the sounds and the songs segue together, but in how it explicitly references the past ” both her own and club music in the larger sense ” the music seems disassociated from the present; Madonna is reworking familiar territory, not pushing forward, in a manner not dissimilar to how her former opening act the Beastie Boys returned to old-school rap on their defiantly old-fashioned 2004 album To the 5 Boroughs. But where the Beasties are buoyed by their camaraderie, Madonna has always been a stubborn individual, working well with collaborators but always, without question, existing on her own terms, and this obstinate nature is calcifying slightly into isolation on Confessions. There’s no emotional hook in the music, either in its icy surface or in the lyrics, and the hard-headed intention to deliver a hardcore dance album means that this feels cold and calculated, never warm or infectious. Of course, Madonna has always been calculated in her career, often to great effect, and this calculation does pay off some dividends here. Taken on a purely sonic level, Confessions on a Dance Floor does its job: with the assistance of co-producer Stuart Price (Bloodshy & Avant produce two tracks, Mirwais produces one, while another was originally produced by Anders Baggee and Peer Astrom), she not only maintains the mood, but keeps the music moving nicely, never letting one track linger any longer than necessary. This is shimmering music falling just short of sexy, yet it’s alluring enough on the surface to make for a perfect soundtrack for pitch-black nights. That’s what the album was designed to do, and it works well on that level. It works well as a whole, but as a collection of individual tracks it falls apart, since there is a distinct lack of melodic or lyrical hooks. But Confessions wasn’t intended to be pop music ” as the title makes clear, it was made for the dance clubs or, in other words, Madonna’s core audience, who will surely be pleased by this sleek slice of style. But the fact that she’s making music just for her core audience, not for the mass audience that she’s had for 20 years, is yet another indication that Madge is slyly, slowly settling into her new status as veteran (or perhaps as survivor), and while she succeeds rather handsomely on those modest terms, it’s more than a little odd to hear Madonna scaling back her ambition and settling for less rather than hungering for more.

Rated :3.5/5

source : allmusic.com

Not since David Bowie have a pop star’s changes in image been pored over as much as Madonna’s. Her last incarnation, the radical chic look of American Life, was a dud, so now she has gone back to basics. No more beret and camouflage pants (so anti-war, darling!) – it’s time for purple pedal pushers and leather jacket, feathered hair and big glitterballs: disco meets imperial Rome.

She showed off her new guise this week with a mini-gig at the London venue where she made her first British live appearance, in 1983. North London’s Camden Palace – now trading under the more exotic name of Koko – was transformed into a Madonna shrine for the occasion. Her name was emblazoned in lights outside, vast images of her were projected on to surrounding buildings and scrums of people hung about hoping to catch a glimpse of her.

Her set was brief, a mere five songs. Madonna understands that star power requires mystique, a way of controlling or rationing one’s publicity: not an easy task in a country with such a rapacious tabloid press and celebrity stupefied population as Britain. Is it coincidental that her stature has slipped since moving there? There’s not much mystique in being nicknamed “Madge” or being snickered at for having eccentric spiritual beliefs and looking like a middle-aged mum.

The lA

Madonna leaving her Pilates class in London (November 17 2005)

Were you impressed with how 47-year-old Madonna could still get into the groove at her exclusive album launch gig?
Well, just wait until you hear what the high-energy pop queen got up to on the dancefloor at her after-party.
Although she told the select crowd at her concert at Camden’s Koko Club that she was out of shape after falling off her horse, her floor-grinding, orgasmic gyrating still looked pretty exhausting to us.
And when she went off to London’s Kabaret Prophecy nightclub with her showbiz pals to continue the celebrations, she was at it again.
Partygoers report that she engaged in a full-scale dancing competition with Gwyneth Paltrow, Stella McCartney and Sharleen Spiteri.
“We couldn’t believe it. Madonna had a dance-off with friends and her own dancers,” says the Daily Mirror’s spy.
“Stella and Sharleen were out at the first hurdle and Gwyneth Paltrow left early too. But Madge kept dancing until 2am. Guy Ritchie kept cheering and encouraging her. It was electric.”
To fuel the revellers through their Monday night fever shenanigans there were two giant £10,000 bottles of Cristal champagne and Kabbalah water aplenty.
The Mirror reports that the canapes from posh restaurant Nobu cost £15,000, while The Sun claims the food bill was closer £20,000.
Either way it was a pretty pricey – and sweaty – night by the sound of things.
source : skynews

Hung Up was at #1 on TRL today. Click here and keep voting for Madonna.

Madonna’s career, as multifaceted as a mirror ball, gets a fresh shine and a retro spin with a dense and dizzying return to the club culture that hatched her 20 years ago.
The 47-year-old Kabbalah student, yoga pretzel, kiddie-book author and lady of the English manor rediscovers her inner disco diva in the feverish Confessions on a Dance Floor (*** 1/2 out of four).
Out today, it’s a giddy rebound from the stern political and spiritual turn she took on 2003’s American Life.
At the moment, she isn’t protesting or proselytizing. Her aim is to entertain. And maybe mop the dance floor with a few pop ingenues trespassing into her groove.
The ballad-free Confessions opens with the smashing Hung Up, cleverly built around a sample from ABBA’s Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight). The song is an exceedingly rare instance of the Swedish supergroup granting access to its pop goldmine, and the track sets the tone for an electronic dance-pop bonanza.
Let It Will Be has a radiant psychedelic vibe reminiscent of Ray of Light. The synth-heavy Future Lovers is a trippy delight, and Kraftwerk knockoff Forbidden Love is a knockout.
Isaac, splicing a Hebrew chant to sonic shimmer, succeeds as global-pop exotica despite fuzzy lyrics and a clunky spoken-word coda. (Madonna denies the charge of some kabbalists who say the song exploits one of the Jewish sect’s ancient mystics.)
The music is passed off as “future disco,” but it really is a vibrant flashback spiked with the contemporary precision-tooled wizardry of co-producer Stuart “Les Rhythmes Digitales” Price, the musical director on Madonna’s Drowned World and Reinvention tours.
Madonna isn’t so much reinventing herself as reinforcing her royal status in pop as the Queen of Clubs.
Her voice, vastly improved since that ’80s squeak, sounds pretty and unfettered (even when computerized) as it rides over tense waves of blip-whoosh-thrum technoise and blissful snap-crackle beats.
Like an extended club mix, each song segues into the next, creating a shifting hypnotic pulse.
The music is so heady and charged that the lean melodies, which can get trampled under throbbing rhythms, are forgivable.
There’s no excuse, however, for cliches, nursery-rhyme simplicity and tired topics, such as the price of fame in How High. Surely Madonna is capable of wittier couplets than “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but your names will never hurt.”
Yet such missteps scarcely impede the furious momentum, and it’s unlikely listeners will be pondering Madonna’s self-empowerment mantras as she’s causing a commotion on the dance floor.
Again.
Rated : 3.5/4
source : teenmusic