In Madonna’s “Celebration Tour,” A Pop Star Examines Her Past: Review
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The post In Madonna’s “Celebration Tour,” A Pop Star Examines Her Past: Review appeared first on Consequence.
“The most controversial thing I’ve ever done is stick around,” Madonna announced at the conclusion of a career retrospective montage during her “Celebration Tour.” It was certainly a “mic drop” by itself, but in the context of the show, it really set in — through every era, every romance, every success, and every pearl-clutching controversy, Madonna has risen from the ashes and reinvented herself.
That statement is relevant to her whole career, but it also takes on a bit of added weight given the tour’s narrative: After a nasty bacterial infection put Madonna in the ICU for several days, she had to reschedule the first North American leg of her “Celebration Tour.” So, for the opening date of the series at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center on December 13th, Madonna carried an air of overwhelming gratitude, sounding elated to even be alive.
As such, Madonna provided a thrilling, throughly engaging night of pop music. As she had during the tour’s European leg earlier this year, “The Celebration Tour” features a setlist that spans four decades, with songs from each and every major Madonna studio album (with the exception of 2019’s Madame X, which has been omitted from the show entirely). While the set is something of a “Greatest Hits” tour — an “Eras Tour,” if you will — that’s not the guiding factor. Madonna opted to keep several of her biggest hits out of the setlist (“Material Girl,” “Like a Virgin,” “Borderline,” “Frozen”) in favor of tracks that aren’t always given their flowers — particularly songs from 2003’s American Life, Erotica‘s title track, and “Bad Girl,” which she’s playing now for the first time since her 1993 Saturday Night Live performance.
Though the “Celebration” was already set to come before Madonna’s illness this year, the episode influenced the show’s sensitive, thankful aura. Even more emotional for Madonna was her homecoming — as Bob the Drag Queen playfully reminded us at the onset of the show, New York City is where it all began for Madonna, who arrived here in 1978 with only $35 in her pocket. Throughout the evening, Madonna acknowledged the role that New York played in both her career and her personality, frequently shouting out the unique “New Yorker” attitude that Madonna herself has cultivated and even busting out the Confessions on a Dance Floor cut “I Love New York” for the first time in 15 years.
Unlike the New York decree that “To be on time is to be five minutes early,” however, Madonna didn’t take the stage until 11:00pm and didn’t finish the set until around 1:15am — according to Madonna, this is because “New York is not for little pussies who sleep.” The show went so late that the pair of middle-aged women next to me left the show with an hour still remaining, especially upon realizing that Madonna wouldn’t be playing “Like a Virgin.”
Still, “The Celebration Tour” is mainly an opportunity for Madonna to have a dialogue with Madonna. At different points in the show, she stood face to face with a past version of herself. She drank and rambled alongside her “shy” 1983 persona, setting the stage for an examination of Madonna’s various reinventions throughout the last 40 years. She playfully danced with a performer wearing her iconic cone bra, and leaned harder into the provocative BDSM imagery of her Erotica era. She also invited her children to perform onstage with her, merging the past, present, and future of her family. With the show’s several screens positioned around the arena stage, Madonna confronted the images of those she’s lost: her mother immortalized on “Mother and Father,” and her touching rendition of “Live to Tell” featured images of significant gay and trans figures that died of AIDS.
While “The Celebration Tour” is partially a trip down memory lane, it is also a terrific sampler of the sounds and ideas that the pop star has been interested in for the last 40 years. The through line of it all is dance pop, in its most euphoric and crystalline form. With Confessions on a Dance Floor producer (and dance pop wizard) Stuart Price serving as the tour’s music director, several songs were presented as glitzy remixes (“Ray of Light,” “Into the Groove,” “Like a Prayer”) or DJ set mashups (“I Love New York” blended into “Burning Up,” “Erotica” interpolated “Papa Don’t Preach”).
The lack of a live band in favor of backing tracks didn’t rob the show of all charisma or explosiveness, but not all the EDM-arrangements pay off. Price had mentioned to the BBC that the tracks are meant to “let the original recordings shine,” and yet, the renditions of “Like a Prayer” and “Into the Groove” lose the majority of the funk-addled instrumentation that elevated those songs in the first place.
It’s on True Blue bangers “Open Your Heart” and “La Isla Bonita” that the real majesty of Madonna’s songwriting, arrangements, and production becomes illuminated — their chord structures are utterly satisfying, and hearing Madonna over a more analog presentation of dance pop is a reminder of her visionary spirit throughout the ’80s and beyond. If the show was meant to be an interrogation of Madonna’s career, it’s a missed opportunity to not celebrate her pre-Erotica predilection for a strong, versatile rhythm section.
Despite Madonna’s ’80s dominance, she gives her ’90s efforts a bigger spotlight than ever before. It’s fascinating to hear the evolution from Erotica to Ray of Light, and even more illuminating were the songs from 2003’s American Life, which can be baffling, to say the least. Madonna’s hyperpop-inflected rendition of “Die Another Day” is one thing, but the raw, earnest “Mother and Father” highlighted Madonna’s angsty early 2000s transition point, where the personal and political themes of her songs became mismatched by their presentation.
Despite all the bells and whistles, the looseness of the choreography and show overall made helped each song feel more like an ‘authentic’ presentation of Madonna. Her crowd banter felt both refreshing and slightly unpredictable, as shementioned that she was happy to be back in the US and New York, because they speak her language of “cunt”. This naturalistic presentation was exemplified by “Vogue,” which unfolded exactly as it should: with an overwhelmingly joyous, free-flowing ballroom sequence, led by Bob the Drag Queen, featuring more slaying, serving, and ecstatic queer expression than you could ever imagine.
Madonna’s legacy does not begin or end with one moment, but “Vogue” seemed to suggest otherwise. Sonically, it marked an insistence on the hypnotic ecstasy of house music, which would make its way into each ensuing Madonna record. But thematically, the song’s performance served as a passionate presentation of the kind of queer liberation that Madonna has championed from her early days, made all the more impactful by her reverence and willingness to let the performers shine. After all of these years, as she reminds us, she’s still reeling from having lost her closest friends to the AIDS crisis, still flummoxed that she made it out and others could not. Throughout the celebration, she acknowledged that there are so many others who were not afforded the same privileges as herself, whether that be on the basis of sexuality, gender, race, or religion.
This was Madonna’s uniting factor for “The Celebration Tour,” cemented by her earnest rendition of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” in the show’s second half. But the tour’s appeal extends further than a mere celebration of survival — it’s a chance for Madonna to reframe her career through her own eyes and interests, bringing us along for a journey into the center of the Madonna-verse. She maintains the iconography of her career well — the stage design nods to her 1984 MTV VMAs performance, she recreates dances from her most memorable music videos, and populates the arena with reminders of Madonna’s fashion-forward image throughout the last four decades.
But the music deserves some of the same treatment. Looking through the mirror, it is not the turbo EDM version of “Ray of Light” that stares back at her — it’s the soaring, bubbly original that left a profound impact on both dance and pop. “Like a Prayer” may have opened the door for successes from Sam Smith and Lady Gaga, but the fractured funk freakout at the end of the song is just as interesting as Madonna’s winking double entendres. That’s not to say that new arrangements of beloved tracks are a no-no, or that modern, club-forward dance production doesn’t have a place in a show like Madonna’s. It’s all dance pop at the end of the day — but as a true pioneer of the genre, Madonna’s “Celebration Tour” could have been that much sweeter.
Madonna Setlist
Nothing Really Matters
Everybody
Into the Groove
I Love New York / Burning Up
Open Your Heart
Holiday
Live to Tell
Like a Prayer
Erotica
Justify My Love
Hung Up
Bad Girl
Vogue
Human Nature
Crazy for You
Die Another Day
Don’t Tell Me
Mother and Father
I Will Survive (Gloria Gaynor cover)
La Isla Bonita
Don’t Cry for Me Argentina (Andrew Lloyd Webber cover)
Bedtime Story
Ray of Light
Rain
Encore:
Bitch I’m Madonna
Celebration
Photo Gallery: Madonna at Barclays Center (Click to Expand)
In Madonna’s “Celebration Tour,” A Pop Star Examines Her Past: Review
Paolo Ragusa
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