all about Madonna

Apart from Michael Jackson, no one has made pop music as much about looking as listening than Madonna.
And at the Wachovia Center on Wednesday – where the Material Mum will perform again last night, before playing Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City on Sunday – there was plenty to see.
Many a pose was struck, starting with the world’s most famous woman emerging from a disco ball in full dominatrix landed-gentry gear, complete with riding crop and horse-hair ponytail protruding from her top hat.
The opening song, “Future Lovers,” from last year’s electro-groove collection, Confessions on a Dance Floor, was inconsequential, though it tantalizingly did give way to Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” Madge did feel love from the adoring, largely female, significantly gay intergenerational audience, who didn’t seem to mind the balmy temperatures, apparently the result of some air-conditioning blowers being turned off to preserve the singer’s precious vocal cords.
The Devon Horse Show was never like this: Before that opening tableaux was finished, Madonna had ridden bareback on one of her super-athletic male dancers, and laid in a barn with a horse in a prerecorded video. She ran through her tepid new single, “Get Together,” and performed “Like A Virgin” while gyrating on a saddle anchored to a stripper pole.
For that, she was accompanied by a video montage of steeplechase horses and riders falling, as Madonna herself did in August – ill-timed, considering the uncertain fate of horse-hero of the moment, Barbaro. There also were X-rays of her own injuries, thus letting fans who wish to get more than skin-deep see her not only in the glorious flesh, but also the broken bone.
That, of course, was just for starters. The hyper-energetic two-hour show also included, in its most desperate attempt to shock, a disappointingly static reading of “Live to Tell” in which the pop-star-as-Christ-figure wore a crown of thorns and was attached to a crucifix – all to better absorb the suffering caused by AIDS, gang violence and child abuse in the world.
And that wasn’t the only point in the evening in which the focus shifted from Madonna’s body – which despite its nearly 48 years is nothing short of fabulous – to the body politic. An interlude of video clips of bad guys – Richard Nixon, Saddam Hussein, Adolph Hitler – was followed by the aging agent provocateur emerging in black leather and fake-fur collar, electric guitar strapped on, for a Ziggy-Stardust-meets-Sonic-Youth version of “I Love New York.” A truly terrible song, it included an improvised, profane reference to the president.
When not weighed down by pretension, Confessions on a Dance Floor hearkens back enjoyably to a pre-AIDS disco era of innocence and sexual liberation. Musically, the most successful numbers were those free of too much high-concept staging and blessed with catchy tunes, such as “Sorry,” “Jump,” and the aerobicizing closer, “Hung Up.”
That went for the old hits as well, and it would have been nice if she’d done more of them. Her singing – supplemented by two backup singers and a turbaned Yemeni named Isaac – was effective all night, though whether there was any electronic vocal reinforcement was impossible to say.
Madonna’s current musical collaborator, an imperturbable Brit named Stuart Price, led a four-piece computer- and keyboard-driven band that tended to treat everything with an undifferentiated bass-heavy throb.
The bass kept “La Isla Bonita” from being as bouncy as it should have been, but couldn’t stand in the way of “Lucky Star” or “Music” which quoted the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno,” and found the star strutting her stuff in a white three-piece suit, Tony Manero-style. That was fitting – and form-fitting – because ambition, like John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever, has always been Madonna’s main subject.
Refusing to take no for an answer, at one point she scolded fans for not being enthusiastic enough: “If you’re going to be my front-row bitches, you got to give it up.” And on Confessions’ “Like It or Not,” she sounded the familiar theme that Madonna is quite comfortable being Madonna: “You can love me or leave me,” she sang. “Cause I’m never gonna stop.”
Don’t worry, Madge, we wouldn’t have dreamed of thinking that you would.

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