Nothing holds back Madonna. Not love, not pop expectations, not tastefulness, not religion, not the laws of physics. Her Drowned World Tour, which started its sold-out five-night run last night (though July 31) at Madison Square Garden, is a 105-minute pop spectacle as performance art, devoted to the idea that Madonna can do what she wants. Her fans, theoretically, are welcome to take it or leave it. Of course, nobody left - not with the promise of one more startling costume, gimmick, pose or dance number just ahead. If Madonna wants to wear 26-foot sleeves, or knock around dancers in punk haircuts and gas masks, or ride a mechanical bull while sneering at an ex, then so be it. "Don't ever tell me to stop," she warned.
As her career approaches its third decade, Madonna represents the triumph of willfulness. Madonna at 42 is the strongest survivor of the music video explosion of the early 1980's, and she is still latching on to current dance rhythms and fashions, still coming up with melodies that leap out of radio speakers. The Drowned World tour, her first since 1993, was a virtually automatic sellout across Europe and the United States; a show on Aug. 26 is to be telecast on HBO. She has a pop skill that's rarer than musicianship: she keeps people curious. And on tour, she repays that curiosity with a performance that sets out to amaze and repel at the same time. Madonna became a mother and wife in the years between tours, but she shows no signs of mellowing.
Defiance is a rock attitude, not usually a pop one, so she arrived on stage unsmiling, in a punky top and a shredded plaid skirt. She sang "Substitute For Love," in which she has second thoughts about trading fame for love. Then she strapped on an electric guitar to turn "Candy Perfume Girl" into a two-chord stomp.
From there, the tour's choreographed vignettes went globe-hopping, from flying martial-arts out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, to a cowboy-hatted number like a raunchier Oklahoma, from an averted samurai execution (with a swordsman swinging wide over a kneeling Madonna) to tango choreography backed by an instrumental from Evita. There were contortionists, gymnasts, even a quasi-Flamenco dancer with castanets. The video screen showed religious rituals like baptisms, Sufi dervish ceremonies and Buddhist prayers while Madonna sang "Secret," which preaches that self-love is the key to happiness.
The music moved from electronica to hard rock to ballads, but it came almost entirely from Madonna's two most recent albums, "Music" and "Ray of Light," though she tacked on two older, friendlier love songs, "La Isla Bonita" and "Holiday," near the end.
It has been a long time since Madonna styled herself as a boy toy; now everyone, boy or girl, is her plaything. What comes through her songs is an adamant determination. While her music still seeks to please pop ears, Madonna has long since given up flirting. And if she's narcissistic, her narcissism is backed up by the fact that people have been watching her for all those years. The concert was a set of angry kiss-offs ("Human Nature"), non-apologies ("Nobody's Perfect"), nightmares ("Mer Girl," by far Madonna's strangest song), self-help manifestoes ("Frozen"), and meta-physics ("Ray of Light," in which she flies faster than light). "What It Feels Like For A Girl," Madonna's quasi-feminist statement, turned up twice: first as a near-instrumental with Japanese anime cartoons showing a girl pursued, trapped and sexually abused, and later sung in Spanish with a pumping electronic beat.
Madonna has, as always, been diligent. Her voice sounded fuller and smoother than previous tours, and she confidently exposed it in the ballads "You'll See" and "I Deserve It," post-breakup songs that insist she'll recover. She picked up a guitar every so often, playing a punk girl at one point and a country gal (singing a ditty about cannibalism with a put-on Southern drawl) later. And while she danced more sparingly than she has in previous tours, she still made herself an object of authority and desire.
The female dancers and the two female backup singers often came forward to share Madonna's steps. The male dancers, however, followed her slavishly, throwing themselves at her only to be spurned. At one point, they were suspended high overhead by their feet, arduously curling themselves upward only to fall back again.
Through it all, Madonna made a display of arrogance, tossing off profanities, striking tough postures and glaring more than she smiled. She represents self-love backed by plenty of gym time and a whole troupe of devoted flunkies - enough to delight an audience she only seems to disdain. "Music makes the people come together," she sang in the finale - together, that is, if Madonna is in charge.
Madonna's tours have always had a method to their madcap spectacle, but "Drowned World" makes the singer seem smaller than life.
Evidence of Madonna's iconic status was as easy to spot as roots among the bottle blondes outside the First Union Center in Philadelphia the night of the U.S. debut of her "Drowned World" tour. Gay men strutted around in material boY T-shirts, mall rats in "Like a Virgin"-era lace guzzled beer from brown paper bags, and everyone from grandparents to toddlers shimmied in the parking lot's "Fan Zone" as a P.A. system blared early hits like "Lucky Star."
Inside, however, Madonna aggressively thwarted any attempts at hero worship -- and even at times her audience's expectations -- with a show that offered few hits and even a few literal "fuck yous" directed at her fans: She greeted the audience not with "Hello, Philadelphia!" but "Fuck off, motherfuckers!," and she shouted to a video clip of Austin Powers that "you can fuck off, too!" before launching into "Beautiful Stranger." On the surface, it seemed a brave move, especially considering that her eighties contemporaries like U2 are crisscrossing the country on victory-lap tours that all but cater to audience whims.
Yet if that was Madonna's nod to punk rock's antipathy toward the audience -- complete with a bondage outfit and a T-shirt that read mother on the front and fucker on the back -- limp ballads like "I Deserve It" and "Nobody's Perfect" didn't live up to her attitude. And that was only the first of four sections, dubbed "Rock 'n' Roll Punk Girl," "Geisha Girl," "Cyber Cowgirl," and "Spanish Girl/ Ghetto Girl." All aimed for highbrow abstraction with obtuse choreography but conveyed their sources (in order, Vivienne Westwood, Ang Lee, J. G. Ballard by way of Dolly Parton, and a flamenco-crazy Jennifer Lopez) without much reinterpretation. And the cowgirl skit soured into contempt with "The Funny Song," a Hee Haw-crude country-and-western send-up about domestic violence.
There were a few stunning visual moments -- particularly a pair of dancers unfurling the 26-foot-long sleeves of Madonna's kimono during "Frozen." But none captured the sense of purpose of past tours like "Blonde Ambition," the early nineties polysexual free-for-all that gleefully mocked eighties prudishness. And none captured the garish humor that makes her so iconic in the first place, from her roll on the floor in a wedding dress at the MTV Video Music Awards to her ludicrously camp bed-humping during "Blonde Ambition." Madonna is a frustratingly small stage presence, too, mostly standing motionless or strumming rudimentary chords on an acoustic guitar; she was overshadowed by acrobatic dancers and clips from her own videos.
The music was equally airless, a shock given that the show's musical director is Stuart Price, a British electronica wunderkind known for upending dance-music conventions. His own sense of daring escaped only near the end of the show -- with a version of "Holiday" that mixed in the silky retro-disco sound of the club hit "Music Sounds Better With You" and a performance of "Music" that spliced in beats from Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express." The show's all-too-abrupt end was, inadvertently, its truest punk moment. As Johnny Rotten himself once said, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"
By the time she finishes a raucous version of "Candy Perfume Girl" three songs in by shouting "fuck off, motherfuckers", you know that Madonna's Drowned World Tour sets out to intimidate the audience as much as to entertain them. With a list of dark and arty references ranging from manga videos to Derek Jarman's ancient punk film Jubilee, this was never going to be a feel-good Greatest Hits show. A culture vulture par excellence, Madonna has always fuelled her mainstream pop with an avant garde sensibility, but Drowned World pushes that sensibility right in your face. It's a tribute to her incredible graft, magnetic appeal and, above all, her supreme ability at making pop music that this show is not taking place in a little art gallery off the Lower East Side, but at sold-out enormodomes around the world, the latest being the 15,000-capacity London Earl's Court.
And art is what it is - the choreography alone leaves any other pop show in the dust. After a stunningly exciting version of "Drowned World/Substitute For Love," sung (superbly - she's in fantastic voice throughout) by Madonna on a platform that rises up above the stage, a nine-strong troupe of gasmask-clad dancers take the stage for "Impressive Instant," some encased in rolls of black mesh. If the Royal Ballet performed in a rubber fetish club, this is what it would look like.
Then Madonna straps on her guitar and, practically cross-eyed with concentration, performs "Candy Perfume Girl." Courtney Love once famously accused her of being a vampire; as the song rises to a wall of white noise, you can only conclude that she had a point. Madonna, of course, would take this as the highest compliment. Whether pole dancing for "Beautiful Stranger," doing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style martial arts in "Sky Fits Heaven" or rebooting "Holiday" to incorporate Stardust's "Music Sounds Better With You" (just as an enterprising bootlegger did a couple of years ago), Madonna stays creatively young by sucking the best out of the surrounding culture. Purists will carp, but it's a two-way thing. If most musicians put a tenth of the creative energy into their shows as Madonna has into this one, we would all be a lot better off.
However - as you've probably gathered by now - she didn't exactly do all the hits. By the time "La Isla Bonita" rolls around, the relief in the audience is palpable and Madonna also finally seems relaxed. An ecstatic encore of "Holiday" and "Music" (the latter medleyed with Kraftwerk's "Trans Europe Express") underlines how easily she could have brought the audience to collective orgasm by simply reeling out her classics. But it really wasn't that kind of show. Yes, the absence of "Like A Prayer" was criminal. But as an assertion of pop music's long lost ability to challenge and provoke, Drowned World couldn't have been better. Anyway, Madonna can keep all those old songs for her farewell tour. On current evidence, that should be in about 2040.
It's a Mad Mad world worthy of a Broadway-style revue, or so it would seem to Madonna, who played the second of two sold-out shows at Chicago's cavernous United Center on Thursday.
In just 105 minutes, Madonna went from plaid-clad gutter punk to pimp-strollin', Latina fly girl without batting an eye. In between, fans were treated to stripped-to-the-waist muscle boys dangling from the ceiling, high-wire judo exercises, Kabuki-esque theatrics replete with a swordsman, a disturbing Japanimation rape sequence projected on a towering screen and Annie Oakley-style gun-slinging. Oh, and she sang too. And played guitar.
Keen Madonna watchers and anyone who subscribes to HBO know that Mad's Drowned World Tour 2001 is broken into four distinct acts: Brit-Punk, Shogun-a-Go-Go, Cowgal and Flamenco Fabulous. The material draws largely from her two most recent records, "Ray of Light" and "Music." The dancing is dazzling and Madonna's voice has never sounded better.
Because the staging is so massive, there seems to be little room for spontaneity. Anyone who caught the HBO broadcast of the show from Detroit on August 26 and paid up to $250 for a ticket would recognize that Drowned World is nearly identical in each city it visits. Even the scant in-between-song banter is similar. The show's more inspired moments came when she wasn't being propelled through the air attached to a support wire or straddling a mechanical bull.
Three numbers stood out, and during each one, Madonna demonstrated her new hobby of guitar playing. She forlornly strummed "I Deserve It," while sitting atop a bale of hay. When she sang "I have no regrets/There's nothing to forgive/All the pain was worth it," you could feel her wrenching journey through mega-stardom. Re-working two older songs, "Secret" and "La Isla Bonita," into gorgeous acoustic sing-alongs, made them feel loose, fresh and sexy.
The chaos of the modern age was well represented during the techno-tinged dance numbers. Strobe lights flashed as Madonna and company ran through "Impressive Instant" and "Ray of Light." During a haunting rendition of "Frozen," the sleeves of Madonna's kimono spanned the stage while projected Japanese characters flitted across them.
The lack of older material didn't necessarily faze fans, although they cheered loudest during "La Isla Bonita" and "Holiday"--funkily re-cast with rapping provided by longtime (and much admired) backup singers Niki Harris and Donna DeLory, and a sampling of Daft Punk's "One More Time."
By the show's closer, "Music," you have to question the meaning of Drowned World. Indeed, it's bang for your buck, but for someone as stridently supportive of artistic vision as Madonna, there's got to be a point, right? But then you remember that, earlier in the show, she told the crowd, "I don't know why people give the Midwest a bad rap. People are crazier here than anywhere else."
Maybe that's the point: the over-the-top insanity of humanity. And surely if anyone was destined to illustrate that, it's the trendsetting, globetrotting, omnipresent Madonna.
Get busy, because we've got some shopping to do. Our lives might have seemed full enough before the lights dimmed on Friday night at MCI Center, but 105 minutes and umpteen costume changes later, Madonna's "Drowned World Tour" proved otherwise. We're underdressed. We lack cool props, like samurai swords, fake hay bales and a mechanical bull. And we need an entourage of super-buff gymnasts who can get gym- nasty dangling upside down in mid-air, wearing nothing but a thong and a frown.
Madonna brought all of this and more to town, creating seamless -- though strangely joyless -- musical theater that gripped through sheer choreographed exertion. Since last she toured in 1993, the software of concert technology has been upgraded a few times, mostly as a result of the 'N Sync vs. Backstreet Boys competition for the love and summer job money of teen pop fans. Madonna eyed the mark set by these whippersnappers and willed herself a few yards past it.
She might have landed even another yard or two ahead if the show had kicked off anywhere close to its 8 p.m. start. Instead, it was an hour and 45 minutes late. As she explained in an apology near the show's climax -- one of the few times she addressed the crowd -- our heroine was stuck for hours on the runway at LaGuardia, grounded by the torrential rain of Friday afternoon.
The wait for showtime, unfortunately, was a moist and sticky ordeal because the air conditioning near the stage was turned off. For $253 a seat, you'd think they'd throw in a little fresh air. Caresse Henry, Madonna's manager, said in a phone interview Saturday that the AC is always off at the start of the Drowned show, to prevent the concert-opening stage smoke from blowing directly onto the audience. But given the length of the delay, she added, MCI staffers should have kept the room frosty until the production started. The wait and the humidity were quickly forgiven. Focusing almost exclusively on her two most recent albums, "Music" and "Ray of Light," the show seemed to begin in Scotland after it's been hit by a hydrogen bomb. Madonna arrived sporting a black-and-white kilt, and was slowly shuttled forth on a platform billowing with an ankle-high shroud of legend-enhancing fog.
Somebody has been teaching Madonna to play the guitar, and by the third number, "Candy Perfume Girl," she was having a Metallica moment, soloing with an electric six-string perched on a thigh. Her fretwork has an endearing play-by-numbers quality, as if she has memorized exactly where to put her fingers and when. She strums, in other words, a little like she curses. After her solo, when she climbed back on top of her riser and shouted a 12-letter expletive, it was as though she were reading from a script: "Shock crowd with naughty word here."
There's plenty of sex in this show. Some of the more limber backup singers have bummed moves from strip clubs, while Madonna does a few of the compulsory crotch grabs and some floorboard grinding. But the erotic dial has been turned down a little on this tour to allow for a bit of mock violence -- at one point Madonna pretends to kill a guy with a rifle, one of the show's most idiotic moments -- and some Broadway- style drama.
The most elaborate of these scenarios came in the show's second quarter, which unfolded in the figurative Far East. After surviving a brush with an angry, blade-wielding samurai (a close call set to the tune of "Nobody's Perfect"), Madonna moved the action to China and became an air-walking kung fu warrior, straight out of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." With the help of some bungee cords, she and a few lady friends played at knocking the stuffing out of some of the male backup dancers. With a good dozen players bounding around and scissor-kicking, this has to be the first pop music production with an air-traffic control problem.
Up next, Madonna in designer hillbilly couture, sitting alone at the front of the stage, strumming an acoustic guitar in a cowgirl hat and embroidered jeans for the song "I Deserve It." Like a lot of the cuts from "Music," her latest album, this one is a threadbare ditty, little more than a guitar and a vaporous beat, a sound better suited to a mid-size rave than a 20,000-seat arena. In concert, these and other "Music" numbers were bulked up by the band, which had a higher profile than you might have expected and which vamped during the many minute-long intervals when Madonna was offstage changing. The dancers, too, added heft, turning "Don't Tell Me" into what looked like a line dance in a leather bar. For "Human Nature," that mechanical bull appeared and spun Madonna up, down and sideways in a lascivious slow grind.
Before the night was over, there were stops in Spain, with Madonna dolled up like a matador's honey for a Spanish-language rendering of "What It Feels Like for a Girl." Then on to Pimp Madonna, who strutted in a fur and urged the audience to scream "ho" each time she screamed "pimp," then segued into "Holiday," her only oldie of the evening.
The song selection made clear that Madonna doesn't need to peddle nostalgia to sell seats. Aside from flashes of her former selves on a video screen, little was made of her previous incarnations. Her fans are now divided fairly evenly among gays, women about 24 years old and an amazingly wide variety of hetero- boomers who remember "Lucky Star" and the ragamuffin of "Desperately Seeking Susan." She's ceded the teenagers, it seems, to the likes of Britney. That might explain why there was a buyer's market for tickets outside MCI, where seats were going for as little as $25.
The Drowned World Tour has niftier gadgetry than any of Madonna's rivals working the circus end of the pop world, but she never seemed to revel in any of this production's gaudy pageantry. Unlike, say, Bon Jovi or Cher, she's impervious to her own kitsch. She never implicitly says, Yes, this is pretty goofy, huh? Here I am, a nearly 43-year-old mother from Michigan, dressed as a geisha and pretending to plead for my life before an Asian dude with a sword. Even during the campiest bits, like the Meiji-era material, which ranked right up there, she never breaks character.
Entertainment is her religion; she could no sooner laugh at herself than the pope could giggle at his hat. Our job, as disciples, is to marvel at the production values of her sermons and have a good time. And if we buy a cowboy felt hat ($70) or a "Too Fresh Camouflage Camisole" ($29.95) at the concession stand, we'll save ourselves a trip to the mall.