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Filmed in Lisbon, Portugal, the film captures the pop icon's rare and rapturous tour performance, hailed by sold out theatrical audiences worldwide. The unprecedented intimate streaming expe... Read all Filmed in Lisbon, Portugal, the film captures the pop icon's rare and rapturous tour performance, hailed by sold out theatrical audiences worldwide. The unprecedented intimate streaming experience will take viewers on a journey as compelling and audacious as Madonna's fearless pe... Read all Filmed in Lisbon, Portugal, the film captures the pop icon's rare and rapturous tour performance, hailed by sold out theatrical audiences worldwide. The unprecedented intimate streaming experience will take viewers on a journey as compelling and audacious as Madonna's fearless persona, Madame X, a secret agent traveling around the world, changing identities, fighting ... Read all

Ricardo Gomes
Sasha Kasiuha
James Baldwin
Dave Chappelle
54 User reviews
6 Critic reviews
62 Metascore
1 nomination

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Trivia Madonna made major rule for her shows for the audience not to have cameras or cellphones.

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Gonnabe2015
Oct 11, 2021
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October 8, 2021 (United States)
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Madonna: Madame X
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Runtime 1 hour 53 minutes
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Madonna: Madame X review – tour doc prostrates itself before queen of pop

This film lays out the impressive staging of a dramatic tour but is intent on capturing its subject from only the best angles

T his documentary opens with the old James Baldwin quotation about artists being here to disturb the peace, alongside a montage of the many controversies Madonna has sparked over the course of her career. There’s the quaint outrage she provoked in the Like a Virgin era; the Like a Prayer video with its flaming crosses, stigmata and snogging of a Black saint; the Sex book; the New York Post devoting its front page to an op-ed piece proclaiming her the “degenerate queen of sleaze” with the headline: “WHAT A TRAMP!”

Of course, the Madame X tour generated disquiet too, but not of Madonna’s traditional conservatives-clutching-their-pearls kind. The album it promoted was, by her standards at least, a commercial disaster – it entered the US charts at No 1, dropped 76 places the following week and vanished entirely the next. There were hotly denied claims that ticket sales for her series of theatre residencies were sluggish. Before Covid brought it to a premature end, the tour itself was pockmarked with cancelled dates, 16 in all, thanks to technical problems and injuries sustained by the singer, which underlined that the schedule was perhaps too punishing for its own good. In the US, there were reports of fans booing her for arriving on stage hours late: this being America, one enterprising audience member attempted to sue her . When a show at London’s Palladium ran over its allotted time, the venue dropped the curtain and turned the house lights up, prompting the singer to yell, “Fuck you motherfuckers! Censorship! Censorship!”

Clearly there is a fascinating behind-the-scenes documentary to be made about the Madame X tour, and the wider issue of not merely maintaining a career for 39 years but doing so at the absolute centre of pop: a fickle, ever-changing space that’s changed more dramatically than ever in recent years thanks to the advent of streaming. But the Madame X film isn’t it: a straightforward concert movie, the closest it comes to Madonna’s revealing 1991 documentary Truth or Dare is when you see a brief clip from Truth or Dare between songs.

It’s beautifully shot – so beautifully, in fact, that you wonder how they filmed it without impeding the live audience’s enjoyment – and occasionally subject to a little light updating: the footage of protests featured during opener Gun Control now includes those provoked by the murder of George Floyd, killed a couple of months after the Madame X tour ended. It can’t capture the sense of occasion that attended the shows – the excitement that a star of Madonna’s stature was playing smaller venues than stadiums – but it does allow the viewer to boggle at the sheer bullishness of her set. Not many artists with a back catalogue as rich in beloved, surefire anthems would choose to perform 11 songs from their new album and only seven old hits.

The staging is impressive and wilfully arty. It’s beautifully choreographed – the closeups on Madonna herself reveal a woman working extremely hard indeed and, judging by the occasional grimace, pushing herself through considerable pain – and the appearance by Cape Verde’s all-female Orquestra Batukadeiras is an untrammelled delight. But without the buzz of being there in person to carry you along, there are moments when the documentary lags.

Intriguingly, it was filmed in Lisbon, which is both the singer’s adopted home town and one of the few places on Earth where Madonna performing a succession of fado-inspired songs with lyrics in Portuguese – an entire section of the show was given over to these – is guaranteed to go down as well as Madonna singing, say, Hung Up or Into The Groove. You find yourself admiring Madonna’s desire to focus forward artistically and to recast her music as expressly political, while wondering if the songs from Madame X are really good enough to warrant so much of the spotlight.

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Grammy winner madonna stars in the highly-anticipated paramount+ concert documentary madame x , premiering on oct. 8..

Madonna is here to disturb the peace.

The consummate disruptor and pop music icon is at the center of the new Paramount+ documentary Madame X, premiering on Friday, Oct. 8, centered on the Grammy winner 's fourteenth studio album and Madame X tour in 2019.

"Artists are here to disturb the peace," the teaser trailer opens as Madonna is revealed on-stage in Lisbon, Portugal.

According to a press statement, the documentary will "take viewers on a journey as compelling and audacious as Madonna's fearless persona Madame X, a secret agent traveling around the world, changing identities, fighting for freedom, and bringing light to dark places."

Madame X features 48 on-stage performers including Madonna's children , international musicians and dancers and the all-female orchestra, Orquestra Batukadeiras . Madonna embarks on an equally epic adventure in a cinematic stage play that pairs her power ballads with scenes of democratic unrest , police brutality and other political issues. As the release states, the concert remains a "love letter to multiculturalism" inspired by Lisbon.

"Sharing my vision with global audiences has been profoundly meaningful to me," Madonna stated. "The opportunity to bring its message and the incandescent artistry of all involved to an even wider audience comes at a time when music is so deeply needed to remind us of the sacred bond of our shared humanity."

The Madame X Tour was created and directed by a team led by Madonna, including Jamie King as creative producer and Megan Lawson as co-director and lead choreographer. Additional creative contribution and choreography by Damien Jalet , costumes designed by Eyob Yohannes , musical direction by Kevin Antunes and set design by Ric Lipson for Stufish Entertainment Architects.

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Madonna’s ‘madame x’ documentary lands at paramount+, gets october debut.

The project from MTV Entertainment Studios will feature the record-setting and award-winning pop superstar performing new music, past hits and fan favorites.

By Abbey White

Abbey White

Associate Editor & News Writer

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Madonna ‘s highly-anticipated tour documentary Madame X is coming to Paramount+ and is slated to begin streaming exclusively Friday, Oct. 8.

ViacomCBS made the announcement Thursday, confirming that its streaming arm would debut the documentary this fall in the U.S., Latin America, Australia, the Nordics and Canada. The film will be made available to anyone outside of these markets to watch on MTV .

“Sharing my vision with global audiences has been profoundly meaningful to me,” Madonna said in a statement. “The opportunity to bring its message and the incandescent artistry of all involved to an even wider audience comes at a time when music is so deeply needed to remind us of the sacred bond of our shared humanity.”

Madame X was filmed in Lisbon, Portugal, and will feature the record-setting and award-winning pop singer performing new music, past hits and fan favorites as her Madame X persona, a secret agent that travels the globe and swaps identities while fighting for freedom and bringing light to the darkest of places. Offering a behind-the-scenes look at the 2019 and 2020 tour, the film will showcase the show’s 48 on-stage performers, musicians, dancers and her children, alongside the all-female Orquestra Batukadeiras.

The documentary follows the release of Madonna’s fourteenth studio album of the same name, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart in 2019, as well as a 22-minute documentary called The World of Madame X , which was also released in 2019.

Madame X comes from MTV Entertainment Studios and is directed by Ricardo Gomes and SKNX. Jamie King serves as creative producer and Megan Lawson as co-director and lead choreographer.

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‘Madame X’ Review: A Madonna Concert Film That’s Heavy on Message, Light on Euphoria

In concert in 2020, Madonna doubles down on her artist's moral commitment. But where's the joy?

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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“ Madame X ,” the new Madonna concert film, opens with a montage of some of the pop superstar’s most legendary performances, music videos, and shock-theater provocations: the infamous moments from the MTV Video Music Awards, the transgressive S&M imagery and Gaultier fashion, the tabloid headlines like “What a Tramp” and “Madonna Has No Shame” (how quaint in the age of Instagram!), the on-cue outrage from the Catholic Church. The film closes with a montage of oppressed people and groups from around the world set to Madonna’s onstage performance of “I Rise,” a song about the powerless standing up to fight the power. The opening montage reminds you of the impassioned and sometimes scandalous effusiveness of Madonna in her heyday; each clip gives off a buzz. The final montage is earnest to a fault, and the song, while working overtime to be an anthem, is serviceable and far from ecstatic. (I don’t think it would inspire many people to rise.)

In “Madame X,” we see Madonna toggling between two poles: the self-mythologizing pop enchantress and the regally committed savior of the masses. She tries to morph, seamlessly, from one to the other, playing up the idea that “artists are there to disturb the peace,” and evoking how much she has always been attacked for doing that very thing. Early on, she sits at a desk onstage, typing out a lengthy quote from James Baldwin, and by the end she has repeated the silhouetted typing number so often that we get the point: She herself is an artist just like Baldwin. Certainly, there’s a political dimension to Madonna’s art. At her height, she was a revolutionary, changing the possibilities for women, smashing more than a few ceilings to do so. For those of us who adore her, in song after song her passion and her message are inseparable. But one other thing that’s inseparable from those two things used to be her joy.

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“Madame X,” on the joy scale, feels drained. The show is a concert that plays, at times, like a lecture — or maybe the world’s most extended Oscar/Grammy star-makes-a-statement speech. But I don’t say that because I begrudge Madonna’s message. It’s just that she didn’t use to be so deadly serious and, at times, almost punitive about it.

Madonna, at her height, is one of the greatest live performers I’ve ever seen. She has put on transcendent shows, and the last time I saw her in concert, on the Confessions Tour in 2006 at Madison Square Garden, the show was held together by a rapture that was a form of reverence — her belief in life as a disco dream. But the mood of “Madame X” is quite different. It was filmed in January 2020 during Madonna’s six-night stand at the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon, Portugal, as part of her 11th concert tour, which marked the first time she had played in theaters and smaller venues since the 1985 Like a Virgin tour. Given that, you might expect that she’d be striving for a newly intimate connection with her audience. But the Madonna we see in “Madame X,” wearing robed layers and, for a while, a black eyepatch with a bejeweled X at the center of it, is an imperious figure: a film-noir diva alter ego (code name: Madame X), stern and formidable, demanding of her sway in the universe.

Her feminism has evolved. She now presents herself as part of a collective, a larger women’s consciousness, and as a mother in every sense — the mother of her children, but also the mother of a movement away from the entrapment of male attitudes. In a sense, she’s been singing about that her whole career, but now it’s more explicit, more pointed. She’s a “freedom fighter,” she tells us, “but fighting for freedom comes with a price, as we all know.” She lets us feel the price. Though she’s still striving, in theory, to have a good time, she comes off as a tad defensive, as if people were still unfairly attacking her, and all the years of it had gotten to her. But I don’t recall Madonna being persecuted in recent times for letting her erotic freak flag fly. The culture is now freakier than she is, and the biggest change in her career is that she’s no longer center stage.

Let’s be brutally honest: The songs from the 2019 album “Madame X” lack the X factor. The movie opens with “God Control,” which has a monotonous groove, and features Madonna filtered through excessive autotune (“We’ve got to wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up…” ). The second song, “Dark Ballet,” with its sample from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, is better, if only because onstage it features wood nymphs in animal heads with gas-mask eyes. But then Madonna does “Human Nature,” from “Bedtime Stories,” and the concert springs to life. It’s a song I’ve always heard as her explicit answer to David Letterman — to the atrocious way he treated her during her appearance on his show in March 1994, when he wielded his uptightness like a nightstick.

In “Madame X,” the song is beautifully staged, with a trumpet out of an old Fine Young Cannibals track, a female chorus, a set that’s like Caligari by Escher, and scolding finger shadows on the wall. The number seethes more than ever, as Madonna turns its ultimate line (“I’m not your bitch don’t lay your shit on me”) into a mantra. It’s followed by “Vogue,” which features a collection of Madonna clones on stage, in Ray-Bans and platinum hair and trench coats, and you’re struck, more than ever, by what a gorgeous song it is — a reminder, through its celebration of the liberating aesthetics of drag balls, of the faith that echoed through the ’90s.

But those are rare high points in “Madame X,” which keeps getting pulled into a kind of didactic austerity. I seriously don’t mean to pillory Madonna on the greatness of her past work, but a song like “I Don’t Search I Find,” with its one-chord ostinato, could be retitled “Confessions of Tedium on a Dance Floor.” The song has no hook! As the movie goes on, the feeling it gives you is that for Madonna, art has become all about weighing the dynamics of power. And that has dampened her showbiz instincts.

At one point, she brings on an ensemble of Batuque singer-dancers from Cape Verde, and as she joins their traditional performance, the number gives off a glow. But she segues from that into several songs done in a Latin idiom (much of “Madame X” was recorded in Lisbon, where Madonna had moved in 2017 so that her son could find the ideal soccer club — we should all have such revolutionary options), and the truth is that the songs are nondescript. That goes even for a reworked “La Isla Bonita” (one of my favorite Madonna songs) that here becomes a “one two cha-cha-cha” banality. Madonna’s art has always been about a great many things: sex, romance, danger, kink, womanhood, defiance, the impulse to express yourself, the right to be — and, more than anything, what holds all of that together: the euphoria of pop music. In “Madame X,” there are bits of euphoria, but they take a back seat to something more grounded: the lure of purpose. Frankly, the euphoria served more purpose.

Reviewed online, Oct. 7, 2021. MPAA Rating: Not rated. Running time: 116 MIN.

Production: A Paramount Plus release of an MTV Entertainment Studios production. Producer: Madonna, Sara Zambreno. Executive producers: Guy Oseary, Arthur Fogel.
Crew: Directors: Ricardo Gomes, SKNX. Screenplay: Madonna. Camera: John Garrett. Editor: Nuno Xico, Sasha Kasiuha. Music: Madonna.
With: Madonna.

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Madonna ‘Madame X’ Tour Documentary: Paramount+ Unveils Trailer (VIDEO)

Madonna performs onstage during the 2019 Billboard Music Awards

Madonna is coming to Paramount+ as her latest concert documentary, Madame X , is set to premiere on the streamer on Friday, October 8.

Directed by Ricardo Gomes and SKNX, the upcoming film documents the European leg of Madonna’s Madame X Tour. Filmed in January 2020 during the pop star’s six-night residency in Lisbon, Portugal, the concert features 48 on-stage performers, including Madonna’s children, musicians and dancers from across the world, and the all-female Orquestra Batukadeiras.

The doc will launch on Paramount+ in the U.S., Latin America, Australia, the Nordics and Canada. Fans outside of those territories will be able to watch on MTV.

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“Sharing my vision with global audiences has been profoundly meaningful to me,” the “Material Girl” hitmaker said. “The opportunity to bring its message and the incandescent artistry of all involved to an even wider audience comes at a time when music is so deeply needed to remind us of the sacred bond of our shared humanity.”

The Madame X tour started in September 2019 in support of Madonna’s 14th studio album (also titled Madame X ). The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, marking her ninth leader in the U.S. However, the tour suffered several setbacks due to Madonna’s recurring knee injury and eventually ended abruptly on March 8, 2020, three days before its planned final date due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In the show, Madonna plays the titular Madame X, “a secret agent traveling around the world, changing identities, fighting for freedom, and bringing light to dark places.” The multi-time Grammy Award-winner first shared news of the concert film last week when she posted a teaser on her Instagram page.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Madonna (@madonna)

“Madonna is undoubtedly the world’s biggest superstar, never ceasing to push boundaries and shape the pop culture landscape,” said Bruce Gillmer, Chief Content Officer, Music, Paramount+ and President of Music, Music Talent, Programming & Events, ViacomCBS. “She and MTV together have an incredibly storied history and we are thrilled to continue to amplify our partnership globally with the exclusive world premiere of Madame X streaming on Paramount+ this October.”

Madame X , Premiere, Friday, October 8, Paramount+

Madame X where to stream

Why Madonna’s Madame X Tour Is the Gloriously Insane Mess of Your Dreams

By Rob Sheffield

Rob Sheffield

Madonna has never shied away from taking chances. Thirty years after she set fire to the Eighties with the disco basilica Like a Prayer , she’s as gloriously weird as ever. Hence her excellent new Madame X tour, a testament to the genius in her madness. Instead of a full-blown tour, she’s doing these shows as residencies in intimate venues, starting with 17 nights at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House. The tiny rooms are the perfect place for Our Lady to strut her stuff. Like her Madame X album, the show is messy, but anyone who’s scared of a mess should avoid Ms. Ciccone entirely, because as any fan knows, her weirdness is where she finds her greatness.

The show follows Madonna’s adventures around the globe. “Everybody knows I moved to Lisbon to become a soccer mom,” she said on Thursday night. “I found myself alone, without friends, a little bit bored.” So after too many Sundays at her son’s soccer games, she started going out to Lisbon clubs and flipped for Portugal’s fado rhythms, which got her creative juices flowing again. As she announced, “From now on, I’m Madame X and Madame X loves to dance!”

The show started extremely late — she didn’t go on until nearly 11 p.m., which she kept joking about all night. “Forgive me if I kept you waiting too long this evening,” Madonna purred seductively, stretched out on top of a piano. “I don’t like to keep you waiting. But I have an injury. I have six kids. I have a LOT of wigs.” Then she had a couple of her dancers help her off the piano and improvised a pop melody: “I bet you had more sleep than meeee!” No rest for the wicked, indeed.

It was a cellphone-free show, with the audience’s phones locked into Yondr pouches that got unsealed at the end of the night. (Honestly, all shows should be this way.) Madonna kept mentioning how much she enjoyed looking into the audience and seeing our eyes as opposed to screens. “The eyes are the window of the soul. But there’s one window you’re forgetting.” She opened her legs, to a blast of orchestral music. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is what it’s like to have Mozart coming out of your pussy! I am one classy broad!”

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The Madame X songs work much better in a theater setting — the album has always felt more like a soundtrack to a stage spectacle, an Original Cast Recording, than an actual listening experience. She had a small army of dancers, plus scene-stealing musicians like trumpeter Jessica Pina and cellist Mariko Muranaka. One of the highlights came early on: “Human Nature,” one of her most enduringly great Nineties hits. She turned it into a stripped-down confession, writhing athletically before doing a bongo solo. It ended with Madonna surrounded by 11 black women — including three of her daughters, Stella, Estere and Mercy James — chanting, “I’m not your bitch!” Madonna yelled at the end, “Have we made ourselves cleeeear ?” Just in case, she handed the mic to the very young Stella, who said, “Hashtag #TimesUp!” For good measure, the ladies sang an a cappella chorus of “Express Yourself.”

The show opens with a motto from James Baldwin: “Art is here to prove that all safety is an illusion…Artists are here to disturb the peace.” Fighting words, but Madonna lived up to them in “God Control,” an elaborate production number with cops attacking the dancers under a video montage of news footage. Points were made, including gun control, police brutality and why Madonna doesn’t approve of smoking dope.

Her comic banter was as stellar as the music — she was loose, salty, spontaneous, thriving on her closeness with the crowd. At one point, she crashed in a vacant seat next to a London fan named Dan, flirted, drank his beer, apologized for going on so late, drank more of his beer (“I come from a long line of alcoholics”) and then said, “Dan, you’ve been a great crowd, but I need to get on with my journey.” As she explained, “Freedom is the theme of this show. And the theme of my life, for that matter.”

The night’s two big emotional powerhouses came near the end. She sang “Frozen” all alone, visible behind a video screen of her eldest daughter Lourdes doing an interpretive dance, with her “MOM” knuckle tattoo. It was a beautifully simple moment — just the singer, the daughter and that song, a show-stopper from the album ( Ray of Light ) where she fully embraced her hippie-mama spirituality. It also demonstrated that for all her love of theatrical excess, she’s a singer before she’s anything else. The night climaxed with a full-choir “Like a Prayer,” a moment that felt sacred yet also sleazy — the ultimate Madonna combination.

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Madame X has the global sprawl of her 2001 Drowned World Tour, which this fan would definitely have to pick as her best live show ever. She included a a fantastic fado interlude, starring the Portuguese guitarra of 16-year-old Gaspar Varela. Madonna sang a fado chestnut made famous by his great-grandmother, the late Celeste Rodrigues. There was also a showcase of Batuque musicians from Cape Verde, the all-female Orquestra Batukadeiras, working a centuries-old percussive tradition. She picked up her guitar to cover the Cesária Évora classic “Sodade” — a fangirl moment very much in the Madonna tradition, because what makes her a pop genius is the way she moves so fluidly between fangirling and creating her own art. It echoed her last tour, when she covered Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose,” which somehow wound up as Lady Gaga’s big drag-show performance in A Star Is Born . (Don’t be surprised if “Sodade” shows up in Gaga’s next Oscar-winning film?)

As always, she focused on new material, doing almost all of the erratic Madame X . (Alas, not “Bitch I’m Loca.”) But the most powerful moments came when she revamped her classics. “Vogue” became a B-movie fantasia with a troop of femme fatales in a black-and-white film noir cityscape, wearing blonde wigs, shades and trench coats. She strummed “La Isla Bonita” as a guitar cha-cha. “This is my striptease right here,” she announced. “This is as X-rated as it’s gonna get tonight.” Then she peeled off one glove, in homage to Rita Hayworth in Gilda and Natalie Wood in Gypsy . One of the night’s big musical surprises: “American Life,” which holds up remarkably well, as she vented her eccentric political rage with Mirwais Ahmadzaï’s vintage Francodisco frisson.

The stronger songs from Madame X came alive in this setting — especially “Extreme Occident,” “Crave” and “Crazy,” where she dropped to her knees before one of her dancers and sang, “I bend my knees for you like a prayer,” a foretaste of the “Like a Prayer” climax to come. She did “Medellin” with a video boost from Maluma. She did just one verse of “Papa Don’t Preach,” as an excuse to change the key line to “I’ve made up my mind / I’m not keeping my baby.” (The song could have used that tweak back in 1986, but better late.)

The crowd was camp as Christmas and twice as loud, gathering Madonna worshippers from all over the world, dressed to the nines. Shout out to the silver fox rocking his vintage “Frankie Say Relax” T-shirt. (Bet he’s the same guy wearing that shirt in the new Beastie Boys Book , in the photo of fans outside their 1985 NYC show as Madonna’s opening act.)

In some ways, this show is Madonna’s version of Springsteen on Broadway , scaling down to an intimate theatrical setting to tell one account of her life story. It’s yet another bond for these two oddly linked legends, who’ve been topping charts together since the days when Like a Virgin went up against Born in the U.S.A. In June, Madonna’s latest concept album debuted the same week as Bruce’s Western Stars cowboy trip , giving them the Number One and Two albums. How gratifying that these two Eighties icons are not only still topping the charts, they’re doing it with their wildest, most experimental work. We chose well when we picked these two as our heroes, right? As Madame X proves, Madonna will never be the kind of superstar who repeats her successes, sticks to her strengths, or plays it safe. Instead, she’s getting weirder with age. Thank all the angels and saints for that.

“God Control” “Dark Ballet” “Human Nature” “Vogue” “I Don’t Search I Find” “Papa Don’t Preach” “American Life” “Batuka” “Fado Pechincha” “Killers Who Are Partying” “Crazy” “La Isla Bonita” “Sodade” “Medellin” “Extreme Occident” “Frozen” “Come Alive” “Future” “Crave” “Like a Prayer” “I Rise”

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Madonna Announces Vinyl Release Of ‘Madame X’

Madonna has announced the vinyl release of Madame X: Music From The Theater Xperience , a 3LP set showcasing live versions of 22 songs spanning the pop sensation’s career.

The set includes two previously unreleased performances – Sodade and Crave (featuring Swae Lee). Madame X: Music From The Theater Xperience will be available on 22 September and is available to pre-order now.

pre-order madame x: music from the theater xperience vinyl here

Madonna’s Madame X Tour captivated sold-out audiences worldwide with its unparalleled intimacy. This rare and unforgettable experience was beautifully documented in Madame X , her 2021 concept film and digital soundtrack.

Madame X: Music From The Theater Xperience was recorded in January 2020 in Lisbon, Portugal. It was Madonna ‘s first time performing live in smaller venues since her 1985 Virgin Tour . Notably, her 2008 Sticky & Sweet Tour still holds the record for the highest-grossing concert tour ever by a female artist.

The Madame X tour introduced the world to Madonna’s fearless persona, Madame X, a secret agent traveling the world, changing identities, fighting for freedom, and bringing light to dark places. Mesmerising performances of several songs from Madame X (Madonna’s 14th studio album) are part of the soundtrack, including Dark Ballet, I Rise, and I Don’t Search I Find, which topped the Hot Dance Club Songs chart in 2020 to become her 50th No 1 hit. The soundtrack also features live versions of global favourites Vogue , Human Nature, Like A Prayer , and Frozen .

Madame X: Music From The Theater Xperience will be released as a 3LP set on black vinyl, as well as a special limited-edition 3LP picture disc, available exclusively through Madonna.com, Rhino.com and Warner Music Group D2C stores around the world.

With over 300 million records sold worldwide, Madonna reigns as the best-selling female artist of all time. Her celebrated career has earned countless accolades, including seven Grammy Awards, 24 ASCAP Pop Music Awards, and numerous international trophies, including BRIT, Bravo Otto, Danish Music, Edison, GAFFA, International Dance Music, Ivor Novello, Juno, MTV, and World Music Awards, among many others. In 2008, she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

MADAME X: MUSIC FROM THE THEATRE XPERIENCE

3LP Tracklisting

Side A 1. Intro 2. God Control 3. Dark Ballet 4. Human Nature

Side B 1. Vogue 2. I Don’t Search I Find 3. American Life 4. Batuka

Side A 1. Fado Pechincha (featuring Gaspar Varela) 2. Killers Who Are Partying 3. Crazy 4. Welcome To My Fado Club (Medley) 5. Medellin (featuring Maluma)

Side B 1. Extreme Occident 2. Breathwork (Dance Interlude) 3. Frozen 4. Come Alive

Side A 1. Future (featuring Quavo) 2. Like A Prayer 3. I Rise Side B – bonus Tracks

1. Sodade * 2. Crave (featuring Swae Lee) *

* Previously Unreleased

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‘Give Me Joy’

May 23, 2024 issue

Madonna; illustration by Andrea Ventura

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Madonna: A Rebel Life

I was eight, and I wore a black tulle petticoat from Marks and Spencer. Madonna’s Blond Ambition Tour came to London’s Wembley Stadium for three nights in July 1990, after Tokyo, Los Angeles, Paris, and Rome. My mother took me after having spent hours on the phone to get tickets, which had a silvery seal when they came. I still have the stub, as well as the Like a Virgin cassette that was pretty much the only thing I played in my brown Fisher-Price tape recorder. The BBC broadcast the second show live to the nation, and asked Madonna not to swear—so she did, fourteen times in one minute. What I remember from the concert I went to the next evening was the bubbly joy of dancing to “Holiday” and the liberating joy of watching her gyrate to “Like a Virgin.” That night I—a shy, bookish suburban girl—got to sing and dance and pretend I was free.

One of Madonna’s greatest talents as a performer has been to understand, and play with, the contradictions of womanhood. The bride is always shadowed by the whore, and so many of her performances say, This isn’t tragic; joy is almost always possible. In a 1994 article and interview for Esquire , Norman Mailer predicted that the video for “Like a Virgin,” which shows Madonna writhing on the tip of a gondola and being carried over the threshold of a palazzo, was going to get “richer” the more it was looked at—that it was a sort of poem made of juxtaposed images that would open up with time. “I’ve come to the conclusion,” Mailer added, directly addressing Madonna—who by this point had sold millions of records, produced three blockbuster world tours, starred in mainstream and art house movies, and sold out the first print run of a photo book of her sexual fantasies—“that you are a great artist. It’s on record now.”

Simply by the numbers, Madonna is the best-selling female recording artist of all time, and the only woman of the five all-time best-selling recording artists—a category that includes the Beatles, Elvis, Queen, and Michael Jackson. It could be said that Beyoncé is a better singer, Shakira a better dancer, Taylor Swift a better lyricist, or Britney Spears a better confessional autobiographer, but Madonna is mother. To others, Madonna is better understood as a performance artist than as a pop star. I can see it: Carolee Schneemann, Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono, and others used their art to force people to think about violence, racism, and feminism years before Madonna arrived in New York, but there is nevertheless something of the same unabashed body confidence of Schneeman’s Meat Joy in Madonna’s navel-baring video for “Lucky Star.”

Mary Gabriel’s Madonna: A Rebel Life is the most comprehensive biography of the singer to date, and aims to make the case for her importance. Gabriel—whose previous book, Ninth Street Women , was a joint biography of the painters Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell—has corralled an unimaginable amount of material and spoken to many of Madonna’s closest friends, though not to Madonna herself. She argues that Madonna’s greatest significance is social—her support of people of color, gay rights, and women’s liberation in a hidebound industry—rather than artistic. The singer is a “lightning rod,” Gabriel says in her prologue, “an irritant, sometimes even to her fans.” But, apart from maybe the Dreyfus Affair, do controversies last?

Madonna’s genius, rather, is not just for controversy, or for pressing on the fissures in femininity, or for her bold support of once-unpopular causes, or for the video-playlets she brought to MTV . It is for doing it all with no apology, in the service of a particular sort of female strength. From this perspective, certain aspects of her career make more sense: her outspokenness, her rebellion, her thirst for change, her conical bra, her references to the female performers before her, the many times she’s come close to sabotaging her career.

I cringe a little at Gabriel’s argument. I don’t think that Madonna necessarily needs to be socially important; trying to push her into a higher cultural category does everyone a disservice, and fails to see the obvious glory in being a pop star. I value her now for the same things I valued her for when I was eight: she makes me dance, and she is always willing to smash a shibboleth. As I watched her sing “I Will Survive” when her Celebration Tour came to Brooklyn’s Barclays Center this past December, I realized that my favorite of her qualities might be her defiance.

Madonna was born of Madonna. Her mother, Madonna Fortin, was the daughter of a timber merchant in Bay City, Michigan; her father, Tony Ciccone, was an engineer at Chrysler whose parents had arrived in Pennsylvania from Abruzzo, Italy. Do I need to tell you her religion? (Her paternal grandmother’s bedroom was decorated with rosaries.)

Born in 1958, the first daughter of the family, baby Madonna became Nonni, a little grandmother, to her daddy. She once said that when, as a small child, she sought comfort in the night, the feeling of her mother’s silk nightdress, and a kiss on her forehead, was “heaven.” When Madonna senior was twenty-eight years old and pregnant with her sixth child, she discovered that she had breast cancer, most likely from exposure to radiation during her work as an X-ray technician. In 1963, a few months after her eldest daughter’s fifth birthday, she died, and the young Madonna’s heart was “ripped out” of her chest. The casket was open at the funeral; her mother’s lips were sewn shut.

Her father’s reaction was to remarry quickly and impose discipline on his children. Madonna’s was to rebel: “I was just one angry, abandoned little girl.” In junior high, she appeared onstage with fluorescent green-and-pink hearts and flowers painted onto her clothes and body; her father lowered his camera and decided against recording the moment. In high school, she discovered Joni Mitchell ( Court and Spark was “my bible for a whole year”), Anne Sexton (“Her ideas and her imagery were so bold”), and dance, taking classes with the first person who saw something in her—Christopher Flynn, who had been Robert Joffrey’s assistant in New York and now ran his own studio in Rochester, Michigan, about twenty-five miles north of Detroit.

Flynn demanded a “thinking dancer” and took Madonna to her first gay club. “Until that point, I kept seeing myself through macho heterosexual eyes,” Madonna said later. “I suddenly thought, ‘That’s not the only way that I have to be.’” As a girl in her hometown of Pontiac, she’d danced to 45s in driveways with the Black girls in her neighborhood. Now she’d found another community that allowed her to understand herself, one that would look out for her, and that she has continued to give back to in various ways: printing PSA s about AIDS in the liner notes of Like a Prayer , promoting condom use, coming to many of her dying friends’ bedsides.

Madonna went to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1976, having won a four-year dance scholarship. There she began dating Stephen Bray, a Black musician who went on to train at the Berklee College of Music; they later wrote “Into the Groove” and “Express Yourself” together. Although sex with him was good, she didn’t want to “do it all the time,” her Michigan roommate reported Madonna saying in a memoir. * In fact, she seems to have been much less concerned with sex in her late teens and early twenties than you might imagine. Instead, she was falling for the films of Resnais and Pasolini, and enamored of the idea of making it in New York City.

Her legend goes like this: in 1978 a nineteen-year-old Madonna, having dropped out of college, gets in a cab at LaGuardia and tells the driver to take her to the “middle of everything.” After cab fare, she has $35 and a plan to audition for the Alvin Ailey company; she carries a small suitcase in one hand and a large doll in the other. The driver drops her off in Times Square, and within four years of that moment, she hears a song of her own on the radio for the very first time.

But as Madonna herself told the Los Angeles Times in 1984, during those early days she cried with loneliness at the Lincoln Center fountain, not knowing that there was dancing happening outside of plush auditoria. She lived among cockroaches in Hell’s Kitchen and spent her days at the Martha Graham School once she learned that it was where to master Ailey’s style. That first year in New York, she was raped at knifepoint after asking a stranger for a coin to make a phone call. She didn’t tell her father, “because he would have said, ‘What were you wearing?’” and she didn’t speak about the assault in public until 1995. When she addressed the rape in a post–Me Too interview with Vogue , it didn’t seem like a buried trauma; it didn’t even seem like the origin of her feminism. “I’d rather not be a victim,” she said. “It’s there like all the other experiences—the good, the bad and the ugly.”

By the spring of 1979 she was auditioning, learning drums and guitar, writing songs, performing in no-budget movies. She fired her first manager and worked on demos with Bray instead, passing her tapes to the DJ s at the Roxy and Danceteria, where she became a regular. “She was never some dingy white chick who slept around with the guys,” Fab 5 Freddy remembered—rather, she toyed with them, earning her the tag “Boy Toy.”

One tape made its way to Seymour Stein of Sire Records, who was laid up in the hospital at the time after “blowtorching the candle at both ends” in order to find talent for his label. In Madonna, he thought he had found his Florence Nightingale—“I liked the hook, I liked Madonna’s voice, I liked the feel, and I liked the name Madonna . I liked it all”—and invited her to the cardiac ward to meet him. “What I saw there was even more important than the one song I heard,” Stein said. “I saw a young woman who was so determined to be a star.” Her first single, “Everybody,” was released in October 1982 without her face on the sleeve because the label didn’t know whether to promote her music as white or Black. Within a month it was playing on the radio. She’d made it.

Sort of. She’d become popular, but that wasn’t the same as becoming an artist. Her friendship with Martin Burgoyne, who lived in her apartment building, gave her admission to the New York scene proper. He introduced her to Maripol, the art director at Fiorucci, who loaded her with rubber bracelets and dropped her waistlines below her belly button. She met, and started dating, Jean-Michel Basquiat; she partied with Andy Warhol; she learned to make a record from Reggie Lucas, who wrote “Borderline” for her; she hired Michael Jackson’s manager, Freddy DeMann; she also dated John “Jellybean” Benitez, who had a song in his pocket with lyrics—“Just one day out of life/It would be-ee, it would be so NICE ”—that were an escapist response to the humiliations of Reagan’s America. Her first album, Madonna , was released in 1983, just before her twenty-fifth birthday. After performing on American Bandstand, all sinuous hips and bouncy skips, she was asked what her dreams were. “To rule the world,” she said, and laughed.

It was with the downtown scene in mind that she pushed her performances further. She first sang “Like a Virgin” at Keith Haring’s inaugural Party of Life in 1984, with lengths of white lace in hand—a performance that morphed into the palazzo scenes in the video, and then into her notorious appearance at the first MTV Video Music Awards in September 1984. Madonna didn’t win anything, but she had a giant three-layer wedding cake constructed on the Radio City Music Hall stage. As she sang, she slid down the swagged and rosetted gâteau layer by layer, leaving her plastic husband behind, as if moving from the fantasy of marriage to its reality. By the end of the performance, her tulle skirt was around her waist and her suspender-belted thighs were showing: the bride stripped bare and the notion of marriage as a woman’s best destiny destroyed.

The image of the virgin was perfected by the fashion photographer Steven Meisel, who shot her at the St. Regis hotel, reclining on satin pillows with a bouquet in her hand for the front cover of the Like a Virgin album. On the back, Madonna is fastening her shoe from the edge of the hotel bed, looking fleshy and sated from the momentous night before. The image of the whore was crystallized in Susan Seidelman’s 1985 movie Desperately Seeking Susan : Madonna played the eponymous Susan, strolling East Seventh Street and eating cheese puffs like an “indolent, trampy goddess,” as Pauline Kael put it in The New Yorker . That movie argued with remarkable ease that wifedom in Fort Lee, New Jersey, with a microwave oven and a jet-black Ford convertible, was nothing compared to life with a Bleecker Street Cinema projectionist whose ex-girlfriend has just taken the refrigerator.

Madonna’s performances of “Like a Virgin” have formed a chain of associations over her career. After 1984’s rebellious bride, in 1987 she performed the song like a screwball heroine in winged glasses with eyeballs sprouting on springs from her nipples, then in 1990 as a girl in a harem discovering that she can give herself pleasure, then in 1993 as a Marlene Dietrich–style cabaret singer turning her v ’s into w ’s (Gene Kelly’s suggestion), then in 2006 as an equestrian back in the saddle after being thrown, then in 2012 as a sweaty showgirl seducing her pianist at an upright. In 2023 she returned to that first live performance, mixing the song with Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and letting two performers dressed as a young Michael and Madonna dance in silhouette together, as if Jackson’s death had not intervened. With each idea the song is returned to us, its message about the unlikely wonder of falling in love shiny and new.

It is regularly said that Madonna can’t sing, and it’s true that she doesn’t have the instrument of, say, Celine Dion (her father’s favorite singer). But as Patrick Leonard—with whom she wrote “Like a Prayer,” “Cherish,” “La Isla Bonita,” and “Frozen”—noticed, she “puts across a vulnerable quality that you can’t copy.” It’s the voice of a performer rather than a singer, telling the story with squeaks, sighs, and exclamations as much as with melody. The “hey!” in “Like a Virgin,” you have to admit, is doing a lot of work (not to mention the swallowing “ah”). Her dancing, too, has come in for criticism, but you can find ballerinas with long extensions who would not think to angle their chins the way Madonna does. Performance is about style. It is a particular curl of the hand that makes a Margot Fonteyn, and it is a certain type of courage that makes a Marina Abramović. Madonna has both.

Because Madonna has changed so much—all those virgins, some hardly innocent—one could say that she is authentic only in her desire for attention. (Warren Beatty, a former lover, said in Truth or Dare , the concert movie she made with Alek Keshishian of the Blond Ambition Tour, that she didn’t want to live “off camera,” a comment whose jealous ring might not make it entirely untrue.) But like a drag show, she often seems to be simply showing femininity up. If it’s this easy to put on a dress, then might it be just as easy to put on a suit? It is all performance: being filthy in bed and sweet to your dad, shouting orders at the workers and lapping milk like a pussycat (as she does in the David Fincher–directed video for “Express Yourself”). With “and” instead of “or” you access the optimism of resilience. If the choice is change or die, Madonna never says die.

In 1985 Madonna went on her first tour. Legions turned up for the Virgin Tour in red lipstick and fingerless gloves: the look of a bad girl applied with the discipline of a good girl. Madonna worked hard; she told Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune that she ended the evening of each date of her tour by reading—Joyce, Fitzgerald, Salinger—and eating sorbet. She didn’t smoke or drink or do drugs, and she got up earlier than everyone else to work out. At her hometown show in Detroit that May, she cried while singing “Crazy for You” to Sean Penn, whom she married that August on her twenty-seventh birthday. She wore her wedding veil over a bowler hat: “I don’t know what that was supposed to mean,” Warhol, one of the guests, wrote in his diary. She later often said that Penn was the love of her life, but their marriage ended definitively when the police were called to their home in 1988. (Penn successfully sued the film director Lee Daniels for $10 million in 2016 for repeating the long-standing rumor that he had been abusive to Madonna, which they both deny.)

Like a Prayer , released in 1989, is the “divorce album” she made as the relationship broke down, capturing its intensity in gospel and funk, with Prince occasionally on guitar. “Cherish” is the result of an attempted reconciliation; “Till Death Do Us Part” is the glass-smashing bitter end. Seven years into her career, she was so valuable to the music industry that when she asked that the liner notes be perfumed with patchouli, to recall the incense in a Catholic church, the record company said yes. I remember catching the scent of the pale blue paper as I learned the lyrics, not knowing why my tape smelled so good.

The lyrics to “Like a Prayer” were written in an hour, and channel the voice, Madonna said, of a girl passionately in love with God. Around that time, Madonna’s father shared with his children letters their mother had written to him before they were married, which Madonna’s brother Christopher described as “loving and sweet…God this and God that.” In “Like a Prayer” Madonna sings, “I hear your voice,” and in the video, directed by Mary Lambert, that voice tells her not to let white men get away with framing a Black bystander for attempted rape and murder. She shelters in a church, where she prays to a statue of a Black saint who looks very much like the accused. The saint comes alive to whisper something in her ear and kiss her once on the forehead, then make out with her on a pew, giving her the strength to report what she’s seen to the police (though not before dancing in front of burning crosses in a chocolate-brown slip once worn by Natalie Wood). The Black man is freed on her testimony. Part of the album cover photo shoot, by Herb Ritts, took place at a Los Angeles graveyard. The dark-haired, thirty-year-old Madonna is revealed as a beauty, momentarily contradicting Hilary Mantel’s description of her as the “plain girl’s revenge made flesh.” In one image she leans on a cross like she is waiting to be kissed; in another she prays as if she knows that she looks best down on her knees.

Madonna appears in a cemetery again in Truth or Dare , when she and her brother take lilies to their mother’s grave in Bay County, Michigan. The gravestone is gray and low like an open book. Madonna lays down her tribute and then lies down herself, her ear to the granite like a pillow. It occurred to me, watching her do this, that it might have been difficult for Madonna to remember what her mother’s voice sounded like. She had been five when her mother died, nearly thirty years before. But you can hear the voice better if you press your ear to the ground.

One of the minor disappointments of my thirties was that the owner of the club my friends liked to go to after the London pubs closed would refuse to play Madonna songs, no matter how much we begged. Dancing with my girlfriends to “Like a Prayer” is one of my great pleasures. At a roof party in Bethnal Green, a noise curfew threatening, my boldest friend commandeered the Spotify account and used our last ten minutes to play it. In sisterly solidarity, we shouted the lyrics into the air.

Every time this happens I am surprised how deeply “Like a Prayer” has burrowed into the feminine imagination. The fantasy the song offers is one of being understood without having to explain yourself, of being together while affirming our aloneness. I have sung it so many times in my bedroom that singing it with other women, even with my eyes closed, feels ecstatic. They feel it too—and isn’t that one of the reasons we listen at all?

And yet: Madonna attempted to monetize the song’s controversies (a deal with Pepsi fell through when they saw the burning crosses). The gospel choir is borrowed from a culture that isn’t her own, one example of a pattern of appropriation that has been somewhat less than reciprocal. Yet that carelessness can be the origin of some of her best work, as epitomized by a project that dates from 1990, when Judith Regan of Simon and Schuster proposed that Madonna write a book of women’s sexual fantasies in the mold of Nancy Friday. The following summer Madonna took charge of the project herself, deciding that it would be a book of photographs called Sex , and published it in October 1992.

I’d never seen a copy of Sex until last August, when I sat among the scholars at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s library to look at it. The museum copy has a custom-made cardboard modesty sleeve, which screeches open, thanks to Velcro dots. The book itself is big, two hands high, with metal covers that remained cool even as I handled them. The pages are rough, the sort of paper that’s hungry for ink, and the images crisp, mostly black-and-white but with washes of process magenta, blue, and cyan. The Velcro, size, and binding meant I couldn’t conceal that I was looking at Madonna naked, Madonna having a threesome, Madonna posing à la Courbet’s L’Origine du monde —which the Musée d’Orsay tucks in a side room. Reader, I blushed.

The book is hardly The Second Sex —what words there are, written in a persona called Dita, don’t rise above the level of a Harlequin novel—but it does argue for the importance of women’s sexual pleasure. I knew that I would find a stylized depiction of a rape in the book, and here it was: two men tugging at Madonna in a high school gym, textbooks spilled on the waxed wooden floor and her sweater pulled above her breasts. I saw a provocation, yes, but also an image of rape made by a survivor, and I wondered what posing for that photograph had meant to her. Was it an attempt to reinterpret what happened in 1978? By contrast, the year after Sex came out, in Abel Ferrara’s Dangerous Game you could see Madonna’s character, Sarah, an actress, be raped for a film within the film, then get up and scream at the actor for not having acted at all. In Sex she decides to pull her rape into her own erotic fantasies, and in the film she tears apart the male artists who harm women in the name of art. Both seem, in my view, to be not unfeminist strategies.

Halfway through Sex there is a beautifully composed, and hot, picture of her leaning over a full-length mirror masturbating, watching her own cheeks bloom pink with orgasm. Another page shows thirty-eight images of her kissing a male partner in bed, her smitten eyes on his, a laugh on her lips. The book is gorgeous and daring. What’s so terribly wrong with enjoying sex anyway, she’s saying, and will not stop saying. So much of what Madonna still stands for was established during the first third of her career: her initial themes have variations, like the reinterpretations of her own songs, that bring us ever back. You can’t keep going if there is no pleasure, though God knows women have tried.

When Sex was published, Martin Amis called it the “desperate confection of an aging scandal addict” (Madonna was thirty-four)—which was, as they say, the least of it. “I lost confidence in humanity,” she said of the ad feminam attacks of the time. “I lost confidence in…being able to feel there was a certain level of behavior that I could depend on in other people.” Even Mailer, who was sent not to bury but to praise her, asked her whether she could conceive of “ending up a porny queen” in a different life. “That’s so hard to say,” she responded, diplomatically.

Is Sex art or attention seeking? Does it rise above titillation? The book is in the collection of the Met; a thirtieth-anniversary edition is available from Saint Laurent for $2,200. It has a political use: in the foreword Madonna says Sex takes place in “a perfect world, a place without AIDS ,” but that here on Earth “condoms are not only necessary but mandatory,” a message she had been repeating for years by the time it first came out, as she had watched many of the people who were important to her early in life, such as Christopher Flynn and Martin Burgoyne, die of AIDS . The book also has something to say about sexual etiquette: no sex before the fifth date, she writes, which isn’t bad advice (I’ve tried it).

I think there is an answer to the book’s conundrum to be found in the spirit in which it was made: its creation was a “rush,” Madonna said. She had “the best time.” She is often grinning in the book when you think she should be open-mouthed and moaning. “The whole thing,” she said, “was like performance art.”

And maybe it’s the “like” that’s truly clinching. “She’s a performance artist who had a genius to take it mainstream,” Jeffrey Deitch, Madonna’s gallerist, once said. At its worst, her work can feel like it should be more meaningful, and sometimes it doesn’t land well. A recent example is her 2019 video for “God Control,” which depicts a nightclub massacre in order to make a plea for firearms legislation. Instead of being welcomed, the video was in fact condemned by the teenage campaigners who inspired it, who did not want their experiences used as entertainment. In 2006 she performed “Live to Tell” strapped to a mirror-ball crucifix, and one can only imagine weariness in Cardinal Ersilio Tonini’s call for her excommunication, not the Church’s first. In Brooklyn in December, she sang “Like a Prayer” surrounded by male dancers making out in Jesus loincloths, and I found myself laughing. But when it lands—as in “Like a Virgin”—no one does it better.

If the political strand of the performance sometimes falters, the autobiographical strand is steadier. This category of song documents either her attempts to deal with her fame, such as “Keep It Together,” or the way the birth of her daughter Lourdes in 1996 fulfilled her as no crowd can, such as “Drowned World/Substitute for Love.” (She has since had more children, including four adopted from Malawi, where she has built schools and a pediatric wing of a hospital.) During the Madame X Tour in 2019, Lourdes, who also studied dance at the University of Michigan, appeared as a giant prerecorded projection in triplicate dancing to “Frozen” while her mother sang, tiny and real, at the center of the stage. No longer the lover’s complaint it had been in 1998—“You’re frozen,” Madonna sings, “your heart’s not open”—the song became a maternal lament. Her daughter’s heart, this time, isn’t open. The dynamics of love, whether the object is a withholding lover or an adventurous daughter, remain the same.

Madonna will not be with us forever: she dances much less vigorously onstage, she needs ever-longer periods of rest even to be able to perform, and she nearly died last June from a bacterial infection. Both Prince and Michael Jackson, her collaborators and rivals from the era before streaming, died from overdoses of pain medication to treat injuries from decades of performance. She has resolved, in one of the most conventional decisions in an unconventional career, that her face will no longer age. But we are lucky to have grown up in the age of Madonna. She has stood not for tradition but for freedom: to love who we love, to change at will, to say what we want, to earn money, to court fame, to desire more than we’re given. We should want our heroines to be bad girls like her. It leaves us, in the real world, freer.

Choosing Pragmatism Over Textualism

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Joanna Biggs is a Senior Editor at Harper’s Magazine and the author of A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again , which was published last year. (May 2024)

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Madonna’s Celebration Tour pulls record 1.6M fans into the groove at Rio’s Copacabana

Madonna in a black corset, plaid miniskirt singing into a microphone in her right hand on a stage

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More than a million music fans gathered at Brazil’s iconic Copacabana beach to prove their love to Madonna over the weekend.

The “Get into the Groove” and “Vogue” pop diva concluded her career-spanning Celebration Tour with a bang over the weekend, treating fans in Rio de Janeiro to a free beach concert on Saturday. “This really happened,” the singer reminisced in an Instagram video shared Sunday.

The Instagram clip shows an aerial view of attendees assembling on the sandy Brazilian strip, which stretches more than 2 miles along the coast. While some fans danced on the beach, others hosted house parties in nearby beachfront apartments and hotels, the Associated Press reported.

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“This place is magic,” the 65-year-old singing icon said during her show, which also featured appearances from Brazilian artists Anitta and Pabllo Vittar.

An estimated 1.6 million people gathered for Madonna’s Celebration Tour finale, Brazilian outlet G1 reported, citing Rio City Hall’s tourism agency. The event was also broadcast on Brazilian network TV Globo. Even before a million-plus fans descended on Copacabana over the weekend, Madonna announced in late March that her send-off would be her “biggest gig yet.”

“The show will be free of charge as a thank you to her fans for celebrating more than four decades of her music over the course of the epic global run of the tour,” her website said.

Saturday’s concert broke Madge’s personal attendance record — 130,000 fans at Paris’ Parc des Sceaux in 1987 — by more than tenfold. Madonna also bested the record previously held by the Rolling Stones’ 2006 Copacabana concert , which drew 1.5 million people.

ARCHIVO - Madonna habla en los Premios MTV a los Videos Musicales en el Barclays Center el 12 de septiembre de 2021, en Nueva York. Hacer videos instantáneos es la próxima ola de inteligencia artificial generativa, al igual que los chatbots y los generadores de imágenes antes. Y la estrella del pop Madonna se encuentra entre las primeras en adoptarlo. El equipo de Madonna utilizó una herramienta de IA de conversión de texto a video para crear imágenes en movimiento de nubes arremolinadas que aparecen en su gira de celebración en curso.(Foto Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, archivo)

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” @Madonna makes history in Rio tonight marking the largest ever standalone concert for any artist, with over 1.6 million fans attending as she closes The Celebration Tour,” Live Nation announced on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday.

Madonna’s Celebration Tour launched in October, months after she was hospitalized for a bacterial infection last June. The Grammy winner brought her headline-generating tour to Inglewood’s Kia Forum for several nights in March.

Times critic Mikael Wood wrote that the singer’s Celebration Tour “ was curiously short on joy. ”

“A pop concert is a theater of personality and craft, not one of plot or character development,” he added. “But a narrative this messy needed more razzle-dazzle.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - MARCH 28: Comedian Paul Rodriguez entertains at the Conga Room during a farewell show after 25 years in business. (Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)

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Madonna says her kids’ ‘enthusiasm’ kept her going while on tour after ‘near death’ hospitalization

Madonna may be the reigning Queen of Pop , but she’s a mother first.

As the “Vogue” singer approaches her 80th show on her “Celebration” tour, she took a moment to appreciate how much her six children have helped her get to this point after being hospitalized last year before the tour began.

“I need to acknowledge my incredibly talented children who carried me through,” Madonna wrote on her Instagram page on Thursday, adding that each of them has brought “their own unique talent to the stage.” She also wrote that their “enthusiasm kept me going.”

Her post included a series of photos of her children performing with her on stage as well as some behind-the-scenes moments.

Madonna’s children figure prominently in her “Celebration” tour. Her daughter Mercy James, 18, plays the piano, delivering a beautiful mid-show rendition of her mother’s song “Bad Girl” off the 1992 album “Erotica.” David Banda, her 18-year-old son, plays guitar in the show, while her 11-year-old twins Stella and Estere act as DJ and runway model during the “Vogue” sequence.

In Madonna’s last tour, 2019’s “Madame X,” her oldest daughter Lourdes Leon appeared as the sole dancer in a video centerpiece set to the singer’s 1998 classic track “Frozen.” She also shares son Rocco Ritchie, 23, with director Guy Ritchie.

“Rehearsals began over a year ago with almost a 2 month break waiting for me recover from a near death experience,” she wrote on Thursday. “They never stopped practicing. They never stopped cheering me on and supporting me.”

Madonna said her kids all continued going to school while they pushed through rehearsals, an achievement she is “so very proud of.” Also on Thursday, David and Mercy posted to their respective Instagram Stories in what appeared to be graduation garb, marking their graduation from high school.

“If all of them choose something different later in life, they will never forget this year of blood, sweat, and tears,” Madonna wrote at the end of her post this week. “Nor will I.”

Last June, Madonna’s friend and longtime manager Guy O’Seary announced she was in the ICU after developing a “serious bacterial infection.” CNN later reported that the pop icon was released from the hospital days later, recovering at home.

She kicked off her “Celebration” tour in October in London after a delay due to the health scare.

During a December tour stop, she told the audience that she was put into “an induced coma” while hospitalized and that she “pulled through” by thinking, “I’ve got to be there for my children. I have to survive for them.”

Madonna will perform her 80th “Celebration” tour show on Friday in Mexico City.

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MADONNA's NIKI HARIS & DONNA DE LORY (on Working w/ Madonna, Recent Health Scare & Celebration Tour) - I BEHIND THE VELVET ROPE

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Niki Haris and Donna De Lory step Behind The Rope. Niki and Donna, that is. As Madonna’s world wide Celebration Tour continues to break records worldwide one stop at a time, we could think of no one better than Niki and Donna to chat about the full anthology of their careers on the road and recording with Madonna in many countries, for many tours, on many songs, throughout many decades. Who’s That Girl, Blond Ambition Tour, The Girlie Show Tour, The Downed World Tour and everything and anything in between, we cover it all. Niki and Donna open up about meeting Madonna, the audition process, early life on the road with Madge, highs, lows, misconceptions, getting banned in Italy, “Truth or Dare” and more. They talk famous friends like Sandra Bernhard, Madonna’s men like Warren Beatty, Sean Penn and Guy Ritchie, family and children, how Madonna has changed over the years, recent years Madonna such as Madame X, Rebel Heart, MDNA and so much more. Finally, Niki and Donna discuss Madonna’s recent health scare, what really happened, the media’s obsession with Mama M’s looks, age and younger suitors and how no one should ever count out the Queen. Of course, we also chat Niki and Donna’s solo careers and current projects as well! @nikiharisofficial @donnadelory @behindvelvetrope @davidyontef BONUS & AD FREE EPISODES Available at - www.patreon.com/behindthevelvetrope BROUGHT TO YOU BY: GOHENRY - gohenry.com/VELVET (Set Your Kids Up For Success w/ The Best Debit Card & Financial App For Kids 6 to 18) VIIA - viiahemp.com (Use Code Velvet For 15% Off + One Free Sample Of Their Sleepy Dreams Gummies. 21+) HELLOFRESH - HelloFresh.com/velvetropefree (Use Code velvetropefree For Free Breakfast For Life on America’s #1 Meal Kit) QUINCE - quince.com/velvetrope (Get Free Shipping and 365 Day Returns on Elevated Luxury Without Paying Luxury Prices) INDEED - indeed.com/velvet (Seventy Five Dollar $75 Sponsored Job Credit To Get Your Jobs More Visibility) LIFEMD - lifemd.com/VELVET (Visit lifemd.com/VELVET To Start Your Weight Loss Journey Today) WOOGA (Download June’s Journey Now on your iOS or Android Device) JONES NATURAL CHEWS (Best Natural Treats For Your Dog - Available At a Pet Store Near You) ADVERTISING INQUIRIES - Please contact [email protected] MERCH Available at - https://www.teepublic.com/stores/behind-the-velvet-rope?ref_id=13198 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Madonna attracts 1.6M fans for free concert in Brazil to wrap up her Celebration tour

RIO DE JANEIRO − More than a million people thronged Brazil's Copacabana beach for a free Madonna concert on Saturday, braving the heat to see the end of her "Celebration" world tour .

The sand and oceanfront boulevard around Rio de Janeiro's famed beach were filled for several blocks by a crowd the city estimated at 1.6 million.

Many had been there for hours or even days to get a good spot, while richer fans anchored in dozens of boats near the beach and onlookers crowded beachfront apartments.

Firefighters sprayed water before the concert, when temperatures exceeded 86 degrees Fahrenheit, to cool fans gathered near the pop queen's stage, and drinking water was distributed for free. Temperatures were around 81 F during the late night show.

Review: Madonna tells fans it is 'a miracle that I’m alive' at Celebration tour concert

Madonna, 65, performed songs such as "Like a Prayer," "Vogue" and "Express Yourself" for more than two hours starting at 10:45 p.m. as she wound up the greatest hits tour that started late last year.

"Rio, here we are, in the most beautiful place in the world, with the ocean, the mountains, Jesus," Madonna told the crowd, referring to the city's huge mountaintop Christ the Redeemer statue. "Magic."

Brazilian pop artists Anitta and Pabllo Vittar, as well as younger musicians from samba schools, participated in the show.

More than 3,000 police officers were deployed around the concert area, where the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart have also drawn million-strong crowds. The authorities used a crowd-management strategy similar to their handling of the city's famous New Year's Eve celebrations.

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Brazilian authorities have stepped up their vigilance to head off heat-related health problems after a young Brazilian fan died from heat exhaustion at one of Taylor Swift's Eras tour shows last year.

Rio's state and city governments said they spent 20 million reais ($3.9 million) on the concert, while the rest was financed by private sponsors. The authorities estimate the concert could bring about 300 million reais to Rio's economy.

Contributing: Leonardo Benessato, Renato Spyrro, Rodrigo Viga Gaier, Sebastian Rocandio and Sergio Queiroz in Rio de Janeiro, and Andre Romani in Sao Paulo

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Madame X Tour
The Madame X Tour was the eleventh concert tour by American singer Madonna, in support of her fourteenth studio album, Madame X (2019). It began on September 17, 2019, at New York City's BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, and ended on March 8, 2020, at Paris ' Grand Rex.An all-theater tour, it was the singer's first time playing small venues since the Virgin Tour (1985); she had previously shown ...
Madame X (2021)
Madame X: Directed by Ricardo Gomes, Sasha Kasiuha, SKNX, Nuno Xico, Megan Lawson. With Madonna, James Baldwin, Dave Chappelle, Estere Ciccone. Filmed in Lisbon, Portugal, the film captures the pop icon's rare and rapturous tour performance, hailed by sold out theatrical audiences worldwide. The unprecedented intimate streaming experience will take viewers on a journey as compelling and ...
Madame X (2021 film)
Madame X is a 2021 documentary concert film starring American singer-songwriter Madonna, chronicling her Madame X Tour. [1] Written and produced by Madonna herself, the film was shot in January 2020 when she held her concerts in Lisbon, Portugal at the Coliseu dos Recreios. [2] The film was directed by Ricardo Gomes and SKNX (Sasha Kasiuha and ...
Madame X
Experience an awe-inspiring performance from Madonna in Madame X, streaming October 8 exclusively on Paramount+.Try it Free! https://bit.ly/3Bs8pmBFollow Par...
Madonna: Madame X review
Of course, the Madame X tour generated disquiet too, but not of Madonna's traditional conservatives-clutching-their-pearls kind. The album it promoted was, by her standards at least, a ...
Go Inside Madonna's Madame X Tour In Heart-Pounding Documentary
Madonna is here to disturb the peace. The consummate disruptor and pop music icon is at the center of the new Paramount+ documentary Madame X, premiering on Friday, Oct. 8, centered on the Grammy ...
Madame X
Paramount+ presents the intoxicating world of Madonna's Madame X. The exclusive global premiere of Madonna's new concert documentary will begin streaming on ...
Madonna's 'MADAME X' Tour Documentary Lands At Paramount+
Madonna 's highly-anticipated tour documentary Madame X is coming to Paramount+ and is slated to begin streaming exclusively Friday, Oct. 8. ViacomCBS made the announcement Thursday, confirming ...
Paramount+ To Debut Madonna Tour Doc 'Madame X', Unveils Trailer
Madonna is coming to Paramount+. The pop star, whose Truth or Dare documentary is widely considered one of the most interesting of the 1990s, is bringing her latest film Madame X to the ViacomCBS ...
Madonna
The Madame X Tour will then resume in early 2020 with performances at the Coliseum in Lisbon, the Palladium in London and at the Grand Rex in Paris. Madonna is the best-selling female solo touring artist of all time and has the highest-grossing concert tour ever by a female artist with her Sticky & Sweet Tour (2008-2009) at $408 million.
'Madame X' Review: A Madonna Show Heavy on Message, Light on Euphoria
"Madame X," on the joy scale, feels drained. The show is a concert that plays, at times, like a lecture — or maybe the world's most extended Oscar/Grammy star-makes-a-statement speech.
Madonna
If you are to attend one of Madonna's upcoming Madame X Tour shows in the US, please note that to ensure ease of entry, doors will open at 7:30PM, three hours prior to the show's 10:30PM start. However, due to anticipated admission processing time please arrive no later than 9:30PM. The show will be approximately 2 hours and 20 minutes long.
Madonna 'Madame X' Tour Documentary: Paramount+ Unveils Trailer (VIDEO)
The Madame X tour started in September 2019 in support of Madonna's 14th studio album (also titled Madame X). The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, marking her ninth leader in the U.S.
Madonna Madame X Tour: She Shows Off Her Glorious Weird Genius
Madame X has the global sprawl of her 2001 Drowned World Tour, which this fan would definitely have to pick as her best live show ever. She included a a fantastic fado interlude, starring the ...
Madonna
You're watching Madonna perform 'Frozen' during her 2019/2020 'Madame X' Theater Tour.- Download/stream the 'Madame X' live album: https://m.lnk.to/MadameXpe...
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MADAME X TOUR CREDITS. BACK TO TOUR PAGE. SHOW. Created and directed by Madonna. Jamie King - Creative Producer. Megan Lawson - Co-Director and Lead Choreographer. Damien Jalet - Creative Advisor. Luigi Murenu & Iango Henzi - Creative Consultants. Carla Kama - Associate Creative Producer.
Madame X (album)
Madame X is the fourteenth studio album by American singer and songwriter Madonna.It was released on June 14, 2019, by Interscope Records.The album became her final studio album under the three-album contract with the record company. The record was creatively influenced by her expatriate life in Lisbon, Portugal, after relocating there in summer 2017 when seeking a top football academy for her ...
Madonna Announces Vinyl Release Of 'Madame X'
The Madame X tour introduced the world to Madonna's fearless persona, Madame X, a secret agent traveling the world, changing identities, fighting for freedom, and bringing light to dark places. Mesmerising performances of several songs from Madame X(Madonna's 14th studio album) are part of the soundtrack, including Dark Ballet, I Rise, and I Don't Search I Find, which topped the Hot ...
'MADAME X: MUSIC FROM THE THEATER XPERIENCE' VINYL RELEASE
The Madame X tour introduced the world to Madonna's fearless persona, Madame X, a secret agent traveling the world, changing identities, fighting for freedom, and bringing light to dark places. Mesmerizing performances of several songs from Madame X (Madonna's 14th studio album) are part of the soundtrack, including "Dark Ballet," "I ...
'Give Me Joy'
In 1985 Madonna went on her first tour. Legions turned up for the Virgin Tour in red lipstick and fingerless gloves: the look of a bad girl applied with the discipline of a good girl. ... During the Madame X Tour in 2019, Lourdes, who also studied dance at the University of Michigan, appeared as a giant prerecorded projection in triplicate ...
Madonna's Celebration Tour: 1.6M fans attend final show in Rio
April 5, 2024. " @Madonna makes history in Rio tonight marking the largest ever standalone concert for any artist, with over 1.6 million fans attending as she closes The Celebration Tour ...
Madonna says her kids' 'enthusiasm' kept her going while on tour after
In Madonna's last tour, 2019's "Madame X," her oldest daughter Lourdes Leon appeared as the sole dancer in a video centerpiece set to the singer's 1998 classic track "Frozen." She ...
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Madonna, Live Nation and Maverick have announced a series of rare and intimate performances to take place exclusively in theaters, giving fans an opportunity...
MADONNA's NIKI HARIS & DONNA DE LORY (on Working w/ Madonna, Recent
Niki Haris and Donna De Lory step Behind The Rope. Niki and Donna, that is. As Madonna's world wide Celebration Tour continues to break records worldwide one stop at a time, we could think of no one better than Niki and Donna to chat about the full anthology of their careers on the road and recording with Madonna in many countries, for many tours, on many songs, throughout many decades.
Madonna
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Madonna closes Celebration tour with free show in Brazil for 1.6M fans
0:04. 1:30. RIO DE JANEIRO − More than a million people thronged Brazil's Copacabana beach for a free Madonna concert on Saturday, braving the heat to see the end of her "Celebration" world tour ...
Madonna
Madonna's official web site and fan club, featuring news, photos, concert tickets, merchandise, and more.
Madonna
A fan montage of some fan videos, videos shared by M herself on her Instagram and some more. Audio from Las Vegas Nov. 10 show.Thanks a lot to everyone who h...
The Celebration Tour
The Celebration Tour [1] [2] foi a décima segunda turnê da cantora norte-americana Madonna, visitando cidades da América do Norte, Europa e América do Sul ao longo de 81 shows. [3] [4] A turnê iniciou-se em 14 de outubro de 2023 na The O2 Arena em Londres, Inglaterra, e foi encerrada em 4 de maio de 2024, com um concerto gratuito na Praia de Copacabana no Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.

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Madonna Announces Vinyl Release Of ‘Madame X’

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‘Give Me Joy’

Madonna’s Celebration Tour pulls record 1.6M fans into the groove at Rio’s Copacabana

Madonna’s Celebration tour is a messy victory lap that needs more razzle-dazzle

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Madonna attracts 1.6M fans for free concert in Brazil to wrap up her Celebration tour

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