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Join me for a little history lesson:
First, the earth cooled.
Then there was The Virgin Tour. And Madonna
saw what she beheld, and it was good.
Hot on the heels of the blossoming “wannabe”
fashion craze and the box office hit Desperately Seeking
Susan, Madonna proved to audiences that she was going to
win the superstar sweepstakes against Cyndi Lauper. The
Like a Virgin album, released in November 1984, was churning
out single after hit single – with accompanying videos
on the new basic cable darling MTV – when Madonna
launched her forty-date roadshow in March of 1985.
Except for a quick trip to Toronto, this first tour (with
opener Beastie Boys) was an exclusively American affair.
Armed with lots of mascara, several costume changes (including
a rehash of that famous wedding dress), and simple, fluid
dance moves – all the better to concentrate on the
then-thin vocals stretched to their limits – the first
introduction to Madonna Live was impressive, a quintessential
1980s spectacle. With a nod to Michael Jackson and sets
reportedly pilfered from Prince, Madonna demonstrated with
flash and spunk why video did, indeed, kill the radio star.
The setlist was limited to two albums’ worth of material
and yet still contained many popular songs – Material
Girl, Like a Virgin, Borderline,
Burning Up - that most musicians would
give their left arms to have recorded over an entire career,
much less a couple of records. Also featured were the current
soundtrack songs Gambler from Vision
Quest, delivered with an intense, sunglass-clad
furor, and Into the Groove from Desperately,
a tambourine stand at the microphone.
After the thunderous roar of the applause had faded in June,
Madonna surged back into the spotlight with a tour-capping
appearance at the original Live Aid just to remind everyone
that, yeah, she could do it.
And then she rested.
Not really. Two years later, she was back on the road with
the Who’s That Girl World Tour, timed
to plug the film of the same name. Guess which of the two
– film or tour - was considered more successful?
Thirty-nine dates, three continents, and at least five costume
changes later, Madonna showed she had become a worldwide
brand. With her short shock of platinum blonde hair and
more relaxed stage presence, Madonna captured the summer
of 1987 by focusing on the True Blue album,
home of new favorites like Papa Don’t Preach,
Live to Tell, and Open Your Heart.
She had become so prolific at even this early stage of her
career that three of her best known songs (Dress
You Up, Like a Virgin, and Material
Girl) were relegated to a medley. And by performing
Holiday at the end, she automatically forged
her signature hit-as-trademark.
More than ever, Madonna’s sense of humor shone through.
Her outlandish outfits – including a garish number
covered in junk and a red dress ripped from the La
Isla Bonita video - and play with multimedia reminded
that there was a real-life woman behind the tabloid nonsense.
With 1990’s Blond Ambition World Tour,
it was goodbye to “concerts” and hello to theater.
The legendary show, immortalized in the documentary Truth
or Dare, reflected Madonna’s ascendance to
pop royalty. The shriller voice of the two previous tours
gave way to a deeper, more technical sound. Compounded with
choreography that tested Madonna’s dance background
and demarcated themes that actually communicated something
beyond lyrics, the show transgressed into performance art.
Oh, and controversy. The Catholic Church hated the religious
references. The City of Toronto threatened to shut her down
because of the faux masturbation during Like a Virgin.
Mermaids opposed the Cherish video-derived
flipper-people segment. But when everyone got over themselves
and realized that Madonna was an artist making her own statements
about devotion, identity, and belief, critics went on with
their sad little lives and the Earth kept spinning on its
axis.
Four months and fifty-seven performances of Blond
Ambition catapulted it into the upper echelon of
rock’s greatest moments. Dick Tracy
songs aside, the show is timeless and near-epic in scope.
The new post-divorce, pre-Sex Madonna was
kicking ass and taking names.
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From the opening strains of Everybody
and the industrial Express Yourself to
the Keep It Together cabaret finale, Blond
Ambition was a rollercoaster of music and pomp
that only Madonna could deliver.
But her arguably most colorful and stylish tour came three
years later with The Girlie Show World Tour,
thirty-nine performances in eleven countries, including
Israel, Brazil, and over two weeks in Australia. Yet more
resilience from our girl: The Erotica album,
the source material for one-third of the show, was not a
smash by any means, and the tour soon followed and was perhaps
birthed by some very public tongue-lashings of the Material
Girl, bookending an era of take-it-or-leave-it
documentaries alluding to sex, photo books explicitly about
sex, and poorly received movies revolving around sex.
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Sure, the tour opened with a topless pole dance and dominatrix-attired
Madge smacking a bullwhip (Erotica), and
included a homoerotic The Beast Within
interlude and what some would deem an out-and-out orgy (Why
It’s So Hard), but this show wasn’t
just about sex.. Really.
The lavish tour celebrated the oeuvre of the icon –
Everybody, Holiday, La
Isla Bonita - and was more of a tribute to girl
power than anything.
Who can forget the gorgeous version of Rain
with Donna DeLory and Nikki Harris?
The creepy-sexy-cool, Breakfast at Tiffany’s Justify
My Love that degenerated into a hand jive contest?
The Like a Virgin by way of Marlene Dietrich
that was so dead-on that it erased the memory of bad acting
in all of Madonna’s previous films?
Madonna descending from the rafters on a (foreshadow alert!)
disco ball for Express Yourself?
The show was about fun, freedom of expression, and the occasional
sober reminder of In This Life.
And now Madonna rested. Sort of. She had kids,
got married, won lots of Grammys, won a Golden Globe, started
studying kabbalah and obsessing over yoga, and recorded
a ton of music.
Then, in 2001, came The Drowned World Tour.
The show, beginning in Europe and making its way west through
the United States, was a forty-seven night extravaganza
that eerily terminated right after 9/11 and quickly became
referred to as Madonna’s “dark” tour.
With varying degrees of slight aloofness, out-and-out hostility,
and limited interaction with the crowd, Madonna glided from
punk to geisha to cowgirl to Latina chanteuse to pimp, coasting
through most of the Ray of Light and Music
albums, famously (notoriously?) skipping all but a small
number of previous hits.
No longer a cherub-faced ingénue, Madge displayed
some impressive biceps as she strummed a guitar for the
first time, gracing a stage after eight years of tour hiatus.
The elaborate, futuristic sets, muted lighting, and curious
video displays, including an anime fever dream, were cleverly
designed to draw audience attention to a hermetically sealed
world – a drowned world, if you will - where Madonna
gave a lot but did not take much back in.
Cold or no, Madonna vamped it up for the fun Beautiful
Stranger, opened herself up with the acoustic I
Deserve It, and somehow turned the world’s
slowest-moving mechanical bull into a transfixing objet
d’arte (Human Nature). Plus, can
you go wrong with an ambisexual contortionist, pod people
with hollowed red lights in their mouths, and a mohawked
stud?
Reportedly inspired to tour after the critical and commercial
drubbing of the 2003 American Life album
– a new fan favorite – as proof that she had
not missed a step, Madonna embarked on an immensely popular
fifty-six night, seven-country odyssey in the summer of
2004 called the Re-Invention Tour.
The fans that wanted to hear most of the American
Life album? They got to see Madonna perform the
bulk of it, except, in keeping with Madonna’s fondness
for surprise, one of the more popular tunes, Hollywood,
which was just an interstitial background.
The fans that still wear rubber bracelets and stopped paying
attention after Blond Ambition?
Madonna supplied Crazy for You, Like
a Prayer, Into the Groove, Papa
Don’t Preach, Vogue, Burning
Up, Hanky Panky, and of course,
Holiday. Why, more than one jaw dropped
when Material Girl started.
Whether she sprinkled in lots of classics to appease audiences
of all stripes has not been officially determined, but no
one could leave with a complaint. Madonna addressed the
audience at several points, despite occasionally dipping
into her colder robo-Madge (Nobody Knows Me)
or pure performance mode (Nothing Fails).
Opening in period costumes and working through military
garb, showgirl glitz, a pinstriped pantsuit, and kilts and
wifebeaters (and a resurrection of the old “Italians
Do It Better” t-shirt from the Papa Don’t
Preach video, now updated to read “Kabbalists
Do It Better”), Re-Invention lived
up to its snarky name.
This, her sixth tour, which culminated in two stops in Portugal,
was rumored to be her last...
And yet, just two years and one hit album later, the Confessions
Tour is working its way across the globe this summer,
and it, too, will be added to this enviable string of phenomenal,
crowd-pleasing, and, yes, important tours.
History class adjourned.
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