Fans from Outer Space
You may have clearly noticed our banner today. We can’t show you any photo of our images from the Paris promo gig for Hard Candy because – unlike
other Madonna fansite webmasters, who were offered a ticket or even had the chance to sit there with press – we were not invited at the show.
The webmasters of this site can call themselves “long time Madonna fans” as we’re following and admiring the career of this woman since 1984, when it all began.
As long time M fans and as people who run a website which some say it’s “prominent” as a primary source of Madonna news and a place that work hard everyday to fight the prejudice and preconceived notions members of the media have on Madonna, we must admit that we are extremely sad to know that people from Madonna’s camp – who originally seemed willing to help us to attend one of the European shows – simply decided we didn’t deserve to be there last night.
It is indeed something devastating to people who have been fans for 24 years and that have always done their best to present the “other” side of Madonna to members of the media who read this site and explain she is not someone “who shops for babies in Africa, putting them in a shopping chart to take them home”, or “someone who simply jumps on a cross during her tour to offend other people’s religious beliefs”. Not to mention keeping a site open against all the odds coming from “jealous fellow webmasters” who have deliberately working on an anti Madonna Tribe campaign going on for several years now, and the nasty words and uncalled offences coming from other fans on several other forums because “they could do it much better than us”,
but indeed not caring to find the time to do it.
The first thing coming to mind last night was closing down this site and forum and say why bother more? We are doing our best to promote this artist in the best possible and professional way we can, caring about out graphics and layouts and we’re not even worth receiving a response from the people who previously said to contact them at a later time. With this we are not implying we are “better fans” than someone else, but simply saying that true fans, who deserve to enter promo shows are not only the ones who book planes even without having a ticket or that camp out in front of venues, because that’s what we have been told and apparently this whole site, that takes a lot of time and money to run at these standards does not qualify us as “true fans”. Good to know!
We still don’t know if we will keep on going with the site now. MadonnaTribe will be celebrating it’s fourth birthday this May and it really seems we’ve been online forever. As we wrote in an open letter to Liz Rosenberg, that we’re sure won’t receive any answer, in which we were trying to pass along the impressions of ALL the many real fans from, Italy, Spain, UK other parts of France dissapointed on how it first seemed impossible to get tickets and then more that 500 tickets were handed in the street at the last time, we won’t be here complaining and say “Madonna should
remember who put there where she is”. Simply because it was Madonna’s talent and hard work that have put there where she is. But acknowledging the hard work some fans do for free to promote the best image of this artist who is often mistreated by the media, shouldn’t be something seen by the management and publicists as it comes from outer space and that fans should not only be treated as extras when they are shooting a documentary.