2023-11-16 17:05:24
So she will do this a total of seventy-eight times: prance across the three-part stage to that dull pounding that was once “Get into the Groove”. Being lifted up to the sky in a glass elevator (to “Live to Tell”), covering “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor with an acoustic guitar, sitting with your legs apart on a lottery sofa (to “Erotic”). By the end of her “Celebration” tour, Madonna will remember her companions almost eighty times, appearing and disappearing as large black-and-white photos – lost to AIDS, to drugs, to the wild life that Madonna once lived and that she lives At 65 years of age, she doesn’t look at all.
“I like to keep my past close to me,” says Madonna on this Wednesday evening in Cologne. She likes to keep her past close, as well as her children, who now perform with her. In other words, Madonna is completely with herself here in the Lanxess Arena. The two shows here are the first stop on their tour in Germany before it on November 28th to Berlin continues. Everything about “Celebration” is self-quotation. The emcee and cheerleader Bob the Drag Queen begins wearing a Marie Antoinette outfit like Madonna wore at the 1990 MTV Awards. There is the wedding cake on stage like it was on her first MTV appearance in 1984, there is the famous Jean Paul Gaultier cone bra, also from 1990, but in a varied version.
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At the beginning of the concert, which begins an hour and a half late at ten o’clock in the evening (why does Madonna care about the train strike?), we see again the world in which Madonna Louise Ciccone became Madonna: the CBGB, the Lower East Side, the clubs from Manhattan. This earliest Madonna phase is very nice to look at, but that is also its problem: the new wave punk Madonna is difficult to reproduce forty years later in a multifunctional hall in front of 16,000 people. Her troupe’s costumes in the first act, with its seven early songs, are perhaps a little too meticulously crafted – what you’re seeing here is essentially a new wave musical with “Burning Up,” “Open Your Heart” and “Holiday.”
A new face, but still hers
But that’s just how it is with looking back. While other legends get hired in Las Vegas towards the end of their careers and put on the same show night after night, Madonna makes the world her Las Vegas. Until now she had refused to tour extensively without presenting a new album at the same time. This is different now. Finally there are all the super hits in one evening. And Madonna, who gave her face a new, V-shaped, freaky Look from the cabinet of curiosities of plastic surgery that I had missed actually looks really good today. It’s a new face she wears, but still hers.
A star body like that doesn’t always go along with everything. At the end of June, in the middle of preparations for the tour, the artist fell ill with a bacterial infection that sent her to the intensive care unit for several days. But Madonna recovered. Six weeks of intensive rehearsals followed, and you have to say: you can see that. Every minute of the show is choreographed, but it doesn’t seem rigid at all. There is no live band, a total of 24 performers are on stage with her. This stage is big.
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The Queen of Pop herself doesn’t exactly jump around, but why would a queen jump? She strides while her dancers are significantly faster, similar to the motorcycle squadrons that move back and forth between columns of VIP vehicles and the intersections that need to be secured, while the swarm remains intact overall. It’s a cocoon of toned bodies in club kid outfits, like from the great series “Pose”, or in black SM masks like in “Like a Prayer”, which with its erotic ritual Catholicism shows once again how brilliant Madonna (pop )cultural tropes can be short-circuited with each other – and you can still always hum along to this complex intellectual achievement.
The fact that women now appear topless is new, but only logical – Madonna’s kiss with Britney Spears from 2003 is repeated with a Britney double. A person in the know points out that there is a lot of diversity in the stage team on this tour, but there is one thing you would never see on her: a background dancer who is also blonde. The Marilyn Monroe tone, which became a trademark early on, is reserved solely for the star. “Blond Ambition”, as their legendary tour from 1990 was called.
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But Madonna’s “Celebration” show is at its best when it gets dark, when there is nothing left to celebrate. To the 1986 ballad “Live to Tell,” she floats above the crowd in a glass box. In huge photos you can see companions who died far too early, like Martin Burgoyne, who was only 23 years old, designed the artwork for “Burning Up” and lived with the singer before he died of AIDS in 1986. Also the performance of „Don’t Tell Me“ with her cowboy outfit from the 2000 “Music” album is strong. Here, Madonna is vocally closer to her 2023 self.
In the not-so-great moments, “Celebration” gives you a cruise show feeling. It’s rumbling and flashing and glittering, you’re sitting there, it’s all part of the package, you can’t leave that quickly anyway, it’s okay overall, but also a little embarrassing that everyone is so old and is spending the wild years together again look at. “Four Decades” is the subtitle of this world tour – forty years of public service to pop.
Madonna on her “Celebration” tour
Quelle: WireImage for Live Nation
Madonna is now part of the empire, as the writer Bret Easton Ellis would call it. You can still play her music everywhere, but she is an artist of the boomer generation, which is evident, for example, in the fact that, despite her decades of LGBTIQ advocacy and lifelong proximity to gay icons, practically no younger queers find their way into Lanxess -Arena – that’s significantly different with Lady Gaga or Beyoncé.
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The Madonna audience is fairly normal, has gray hair and will soon be paying off the house – maybe you should if you have to invest several hundred euros for a good seat. We are in the mainstream, but the intelligent mainstream. Madonna has always reflected in her music where she is at the moment and how the world has moved relative to her.
“I am just as surprised that I am here,” she says at the very beginning to the audience in “Cologne, Germany”. It remains unclear whether she means her surprise at being here as a whole – from a young, ambitious woman from a suburb of Michigan to the culture war zone of the Lower East Side in New York in the late 1970s, then to worldwide fame in the superstar decade of the 1970s 1980s, in which she – always among other things – starred in major films, founded a successful record label and, as early as 1992, liberated contemporary sexuality in her illustrated book “SEX”.
Or does she mean her illness this summer? Probably both. Madonna is indomitable because she is not afraid. Not even before getting older.
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