TheOriginalPYT
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^^ Well they are WRONG. I may have voted for Madonna because I believe she is The Queen of Pop... but Janet Jackson is DEFINITELY a true star in her very own right.
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(BILLBOARD)’CELEBRATION’: MADONNA’S 40 MOST IMPRESSIVE INSTANTS
By Gary Trust
September 15, 2009
Today’s Chart Beat entry focuses solely on Madonna, who reaches a milestone in her legendary Billboard chart career. Spotlighting another artist in light of Madonna’s latest feat would be, simply, immaterial.
TAKE A BOW: 26 years to the chart week after notching her first No. 1 on Dance/Club Play Songs, Madonna rules for a 40th time, rising 2-1 with “Celebration.” She easily extends her lead for most No. 1s in the chart’s history, pulling further ahead of runner-up Janet Jackson, who has 18.
Madonna first appeared on the tally with “Everybody” on the chart dated Nov. 6, 1982, eventually taking the cut to No. 3. Her follow-up, “Burning Up/Physical Attraction” (counted as one title in Billboard’s archives), also reached No. 3.
The third time was the charm for Madonna, as the double-sided “Holiday/Lucky Star” marked her first No. 1 stay beginning Sept. 24, 1983.
Here, in chronological order, are Madonna’s 40 No. 1s on Dance/Club Play Songs. For titles that spent multiple weeks at No. 1, total frames in the lead are noted in parentheses.
1983, “Holiday/Lucky Star” (five weeks)
1984, “Like a Virgin” (three weeks)
1985, “Material Girl”
1985, “Angel/Into the Groove”
1987, “Open Your Heart”
1987, “Causing a Commotion (Remix)”
1988, “You Can Dance (LP Cuts)”
1989, “Like a Prayer” (two weeks)
1989, “Express Yourself” (three weeks)
1990, “Keep It Together”
1990, “Vogue” (two weeks)
1991, “Justify My Love” (two weeks)
1992, “Erotica”
1993, “Deeper and Deeper”
1993, “Fever”
1994, “Secret” (two weeks)
1995, “Bedtime Story”
1997, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”
1998, “Frozen” (two weeks)
1998, “Ray of Light” (four weeks)
1999, “Nothing Really Matters” (two weeks)
1999, “Beautiful Stranger” (two weeks)
2000, “American Pie”
2000, “Music” (five weeks)
2001, “Don’t Tell Me”
2001, “What It Feels Like for a Girl”
2001, “Impressive Instant” (two weeks)
2002, “Die Another Day” (two weeks)
2003, “American Life”
2003, “Hollywood”
2003, “Me Against the Music,” Britney Spears featuring Madonna (two weeks)
2004, “Nothing Fails”
2004, “Love Profusion”
2005, “Hung Up” (four weeks)
2006, “Sorry” (two weeks)
2006, “Get Together”
2006, “Jump” (two weeks)
2008, “4 Minutes,” Madonna featuring Justin Timberlake (two weeks)
2008, “Give It 2 Me”
2009, “Celebration”
Comparing her chart champs by decade, Madonna scored nine Dance/Club Songs No. 1s in the ’80s and 13 in the ’90s. Since 2000, she has almost doubled her total, adding 18 No. 1s in that span.
At five weeks each, “Holiday/Lucky Star” and “Music” represent Madonna’s longest reigns. “Ray of Light” and “Hung Up” are next with four weeks each in charge.
GET TOGETHER: Perhaps the cowboy hat Madonna wore on the cover of her 2000 album “Music” was a foreshadowing of this week’s accomplishment. Madonna joins only two other artists in the history of Billboard charts to collect 40 No. 1s on a survey. The prior two each managed the feat on Country Songs.
Between 1968 and 1986, Conway Twitty sent 40 songs to the top of Country Songs. He first led with “Next in Line” and last reigned with “Desperado Love.”
George Strait joined the exclusive 40-No. 1s club when “She Let Herself Go” reached the top of Country Songs in January 2006. He had first held sway with “Fool Hearted Memory” in 1982. He passed Twitty with “Give It Away,” his 41st No. 1, in September 2006.
Strait holds the mark for most No. 1s on a Billboard chart. His sum stands at 44, with “River of Love” having become his latest leader in April. He could add a 45th topper as soon as next week: “Living for the Night” holds at No. 2 with a bullet this week.
(While Madonna Louise Ciccone has never appeared on Country Songs, another Madonna has. Madonna Dolan rose to No. 82 with “The Home Team” in 1988).
DEEPER AND DEEPER: If we include Madonna’s No. 1s on other current-based, domestic Billboard charts, her chart-topping total swells to a colossal 146 leading entries.
By format, here are Madonna’s No. 1 sums on the following lists:
Dance/Club Play Songs: 40
Hot Dance Singles Sales: 33 (Last week, “Celebration” crowned the list, becoming her perfect 17th No. 1 of 17 entries this decade).
Hot Singles Sales: 15
Billboard Hot 100: 12
Radio Songs/Hot 100 Airplay: 9
Billboard 200: 7
Hot Dance Airplay: 7
Top Music Video Sales: 7
Adult Contemporary: 5
Internet Albums: 3
Digital Albums: 2
Digital Songs: 2
Hot Video clips: 2
Pop Songs/Mainstream Top 40: 1
Dance/Electronic Albums: 1
WHO’S THAT GIRL: Madonna has made two other notable appearances on Dance/Club Play Songs, although she did not receive artist credit on either top five track.
She wrote and contributed background vocals to Jellybean’s 1984 No. 1 “Sidewalk Talk.”
In 1996, she took part in Junior Vasquez’s No. 2 “If Madonna Calls.” The song features telephone answering messages from Madonna to Vasquez.
In a career as luminous as Madonna’s, that last effort might just be the only case where Madonna could be accused of phoning it in.
Source: http://www.billboard.com/column/cha...madonna-s-40-most-impressive-1004012156.story
By Gary Trust
September 15, 2009
Today’s Chart Beat entry focuses solely on Madonna, who reaches a milestone in her legendary Billboard chart career. Spotlighting another artist in light of Madonna’s latest feat would be, simply, immaterial.
TAKE A BOW: 26 years to the chart week after notching her first No. 1 on Dance/Club Play Songs, Madonna rules for a 40th time, rising 2-1 with “Celebration.” She easily extends her lead for most No. 1s in the chart’s history, pulling further ahead of runner-up Janet Jackson, who has 18.
Madonna first appeared on the tally with “Everybody” on the chart dated Nov. 6, 1982, eventually taking the cut to No. 3. Her follow-up, “Burning Up/Physical Attraction” (counted as one title in Billboard’s archives), also reached No. 3.
The third time was the charm for Madonna, as the double-sided “Holiday/Lucky Star” marked her first No. 1 stay beginning Sept. 24, 1983.
Here, in chronological order, are Madonna’s 40 No. 1s on Dance/Club Play Songs. For titles that spent multiple weeks at No. 1, total frames in the lead are noted in parentheses.
1983, “Holiday/Lucky Star” (five weeks)
1984, “Like a Virgin” (three weeks)
1985, “Material Girl”
1985, “Angel/Into the Groove”
1987, “Open Your Heart”
1987, “Causing a Commotion (Remix)”
1988, “You Can Dance (LP Cuts)”
1989, “Like a Prayer” (two weeks)
1989, “Express Yourself” (three weeks)
1990, “Keep It Together”
1990, “Vogue” (two weeks)
1991, “Justify My Love” (two weeks)
1992, “Erotica”
1993, “Deeper and Deeper”
1993, “Fever”
1994, “Secret” (two weeks)
1995, “Bedtime Story”
1997, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”
1998, “Frozen” (two weeks)
1998, “Ray of Light” (four weeks)
1999, “Nothing Really Matters” (two weeks)
1999, “Beautiful Stranger” (two weeks)
2000, “American Pie”
2000, “Music” (five weeks)
2001, “Don’t Tell Me”
2001, “What It Feels Like for a Girl”
2001, “Impressive Instant” (two weeks)
2002, “Die Another Day” (two weeks)
2003, “American Life”
2003, “Hollywood”
2003, “Me Against the Music,” Britney Spears featuring Madonna (two weeks)
2004, “Nothing Fails”
2004, “Love Profusion”
2005, “Hung Up” (four weeks)
2006, “Sorry” (two weeks)
2006, “Get Together”
2006, “Jump” (two weeks)
2008, “4 Minutes,” Madonna featuring Justin Timberlake (two weeks)
2008, “Give It 2 Me”
2009, “Celebration”
Comparing her chart champs by decade, Madonna scored nine Dance/Club Songs No. 1s in the ’80s and 13 in the ’90s. Since 2000, she has almost doubled her total, adding 18 No. 1s in that span.
At five weeks each, “Holiday/Lucky Star” and “Music” represent Madonna’s longest reigns. “Ray of Light” and “Hung Up” are next with four weeks each in charge.
GET TOGETHER: Perhaps the cowboy hat Madonna wore on the cover of her 2000 album “Music” was a foreshadowing of this week’s accomplishment. Madonna joins only two other artists in the history of Billboard charts to collect 40 No. 1s on a survey. The prior two each managed the feat on Country Songs.
Between 1968 and 1986, Conway Twitty sent 40 songs to the top of Country Songs. He first led with “Next in Line” and last reigned with “Desperado Love.”
George Strait joined the exclusive 40-No. 1s club when “She Let Herself Go” reached the top of Country Songs in January 2006. He had first held sway with “Fool Hearted Memory” in 1982. He passed Twitty with “Give It Away,” his 41st No. 1, in September 2006.
Strait holds the mark for most No. 1s on a Billboard chart. His sum stands at 44, with “River of Love” having become his latest leader in April. He could add a 45th topper as soon as next week: “Living for the Night” holds at No. 2 with a bullet this week.
(While Madonna Louise Ciccone has never appeared on Country Songs, another Madonna has. Madonna Dolan rose to No. 82 with “The Home Team” in 1988).
DEEPER AND DEEPER: If we include Madonna’s No. 1s on other current-based, domestic Billboard charts, her chart-topping total swells to a colossal 146 leading entries.
By format, here are Madonna’s No. 1 sums on the following lists:
Dance/Club Play Songs: 40
Hot Dance Singles Sales: 33 (Last week, “Celebration” crowned the list, becoming her perfect 17th No. 1 of 17 entries this decade).
Hot Singles Sales: 15
Billboard Hot 100: 12
Radio Songs/Hot 100 Airplay: 9
Billboard 200: 7
Hot Dance Airplay: 7
Top Music Video Sales: 7
Adult Contemporary: 5
Internet Albums: 3
Digital Albums: 2
Digital Songs: 2
Hot Video clips: 2
Pop Songs/Mainstream Top 40: 1
Dance/Electronic Albums: 1
WHO’S THAT GIRL: Madonna has made two other notable appearances on Dance/Club Play Songs, although she did not receive artist credit on either top five track.
She wrote and contributed background vocals to Jellybean’s 1984 No. 1 “Sidewalk Talk.”
In 1996, she took part in Junior Vasquez’s No. 2 “If Madonna Calls.” The song features telephone answering messages from Madonna to Vasquez.
In a career as luminous as Madonna’s, that last effort might just be the only case where Madonna could be accused of phoning it in.
Source: http://www.billboard.com/column/cha...madonna-s-40-most-impressive-1004012156.story
trueiopian
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Do they live under a rock? :lol:
With all due respect, but if those people don't even know that Janet Jackson has been a highly successful artist in her own right they can't be very interested in music. And if they aren't interested in music their opinion doesn't really matter.
Maybe they are just pretty young, It's been 8 years since Janet had a top 10 hit in the UK, lots of young people will not remember her at all...
trueiopian
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Her last hit in the UK was last year! Rock with U hit #4 on the UK R&B charts and #9 on the UK Dance chart.
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^^ Rock With U was not a hit in the UK, yes it may have charted on the R&B and Dance charts but a lot of new releases do chart on there including dance remixes of songs etc but that doesn't mean it did well or was a hit. On the the proper top 100 singles chart, Rock With U did not chart at all. The fact is no one really knew about it nor did they know about her album Discipline.
I do like a lot of Janet's stuff and I do think she is a fantastic performer and I wish her all the best. I have to say I really like her new song Make Me.
I do like a lot of Janet's stuff and I do think she is a fantastic performer and I wish her all the best. I have to say I really like her new song Make Me.
trueiopian
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AGB
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I don't think you can really blame it all on LA Reid because both Damita Jo and 20.Y.O. didn't do well and those albums had nothing to do with Def Jam. Do I think Discipline could have been promoted better outside of the US? The answer is yes but the music itself wasn't really appealing to people either just like it wasn't appealing to people on the previous two albums. I do sincerely wish Janet all the best for her new album because she is very talented and a great performer but the success is largely going to be dependent on the quality of the material and Make Me seems like a move in the right direction because its one of the best songs she has done for a long time.
trueiopian
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Yes, you're right! But the record label has to play their part too! Record labels have been half-assing Janet ever since All for You LP came out! Damita Jo is a wonderful album that was overshadowed by the SB. It's just that D-Jays wouldn't pick up a Janet record during that time (even now) because she was being blacklisted.
AGB
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You can say that for the US that she was being blacklisted for the Superbowl thing but that's not the case for outside of the US because most people in Europe really didn't care about that. People just haven't been into Janet's music since All For You outside of the US because they just weren't into the music she was making and felt it wasn't good enough or that she has been singing predominantly about a particularly subject in great detail over the last few years which people just got tired of, it didn't have anything to do with Superbowl since it didn't provoke anywhere near the same reaction or outroar. It hasn't helped that the record labels she has been on as well as Janet herself hasn't really been doing much promotion outside of the US which has affected sales plus Janet has never really had a strong fanbase outside of the US.
trueiopian
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Actually she was quite popular in Europe through out the 90's and her fanbase in Japan is HUGE! But I never understood why she focused so much on the states rather than the non-US markets either. Also Hard Candy was no different from Discipline as far as music goes. And it hit #1 throughout Europe so maybe image plays a factor as well.
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I know she was popular in Europe in the 90's with the Janet and Velvet Rope albums because that's when she had fully developed her own style and had become more distinct musically, she started being seen as an artist in her own right. What I meant is that her fanbase has never been as big over here in Europe as she has been in the States but she was definitely garnered success and popularity during the Janet and Velvet Rope eras. Again I do think if she concentrated doing promotion outisde of the US for her new album when its released next year and did some concerts over here then that would help her regain some of the ground she's lost over the past decade.
The reason why Madonna's continued to do well is because she is really good at promotion and focuses on pretty much every market and she's consistently done that throughout the majority of her career. Plus she's done some huge tours over the past few years which has helped retain interest. I agree Hard Candy imo wasn't much to talk about in terms of music and it wasn't as successful as Confessions but the reason it was still performed well was that a) the lead single with Justin Timberlake got people talking, collaborations always gain interest especially if they work well and b) because she had a really big tour that attracted a large audience and c) she has quite a large fanbase. Madonna's sales do get affected if people think the music isn't so good as it was evident with American Life but she's always had the tours to support her which has cushioned the blow and then has followed albums with not so good material with something better or at least one big single next time round. Janet has had 4 average to sub-par albums in a row which has caused a lot of the damage and hasn't done any world tours or major performances for a long time.
I really do want Janet's next album to be a big hit, I really do. She has some brilliant material and has done some excellent videos and is a great performer. It's just she needs to switch up the material because the stuff she has been doing hasn't been working and needs to reconnect with audiences in other markets.
The reason why Madonna's continued to do well is because she is really good at promotion and focuses on pretty much every market and she's consistently done that throughout the majority of her career. Plus she's done some huge tours over the past few years which has helped retain interest. I agree Hard Candy imo wasn't much to talk about in terms of music and it wasn't as successful as Confessions but the reason it was still performed well was that a) the lead single with Justin Timberlake got people talking, collaborations always gain interest especially if they work well and b) because she had a really big tour that attracted a large audience and c) she has quite a large fanbase. Madonna's sales do get affected if people think the music isn't so good as it was evident with American Life but she's always had the tours to support her which has cushioned the blow and then has followed albums with not so good material with something better or at least one big single next time round. Janet has had 4 average to sub-par albums in a row which has caused a lot of the damage and hasn't done any world tours or major performances for a long time.
I really do want Janet's next album to be a big hit, I really do. She has some brilliant material and has done some excellent videos and is a great performer. It's just she needs to switch up the material because the stuff she has been doing hasn't been working and needs to reconnect with audiences in other markets.
The problem with Janet is clearly the music. I love her and consider myself a big fan but I am not too blind to see that she needs to become inspired again and make an album on par with Velvet Rope. I don't think her last few albums have been pure crap but they really weren't that great. Not Janet wise. Anyone could have made those albums and that's been the problem. She's repeatedly used the same formula almost to the T and it's killed nearly all interest. I really hope Janet's next album is good and gets the attention it will hopefully deserve. I do think Discipline was a step in the right direction.
As I said before, no Hard Candy did not perform as well as her previous albums BUT it was certainly not a flop and is a best seller worldwide (top 10) since it's release having sold over 3 million copies which sounds low but that speaks more on the state of the music industry (pirating, etc) than it does on Madonna herself.
As I said before, no Hard Candy did not perform as well as her previous albums BUT it was certainly not a flop and is a best seller worldwide (top 10) since it's release having sold over 3 million copies which sounds low but that speaks more on the state of the music industry (pirating, etc) than it does on Madonna herself.
I thought this was pretty cool to read...
MADONNA WILL MATCH ALL CONTRIBUTIONS MADE TO RAISING MALAWI
Madonna wants you to support the children of Malawi. To encourage your donation, she has pledged $100,000 to match every contribution here, dollar for dollar. If we take advantage of this opportunity, then together we can raise $200,000 to ensure Malawians have opportunities to improve their lives.
With your help, Raising Malawi can continue to provide:
Remember: we are all inextricably connected, and this is why we strive to raise Malawi.
Click here to make your donation today!
MADONNA WILL MATCH ALL CONTRIBUTIONS MADE TO RAISING MALAWI
Madonna wants you to support the children of Malawi. To encourage your donation, she has pledged $100,000 to match every contribution here, dollar for dollar. If we take advantage of this opportunity, then together we can raise $200,000 to ensure Malawians have opportunities to improve their lives.
With your help, Raising Malawi can continue to provide:
- Nutritious food
- Proper clothing
- Secure shelter
- Formal education
- Targeted medical care
- Emotional care and psychosocial support
Remember: we are all inextricably connected, and this is why we strive to raise Malawi.
Click here to make your donation today!
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THE SUNDAY TIMES’ INTERVIEW W/ MADONNA
September 20th, 2009
The British nerve centre for Madonna Inc is to be found in two adjoining townhouses in central London. The buildings are a home for the singer and her four children when they are in this country, plus offices and a personal gym. From the outside, the six-storey edifices are standard-issue London mansions — that is, way beyond the standards most of us are accustomed to. There is something impregnable about such streets: an air of discreet luxury pervades them. Litter seems not to blow or rattle down their immaculate expanses; no chewing gum or urgently expelled kebab encrusts their gleaming paving stones. You might glance up at Madonna’s perfect residential pair and admire their symmetry, the cleanness of their architectural lines. But you would be more likely, unless you were a lurking paparazzo, not even to notice them; they are merely two houses in a long, wide street of the things. Anonymous, ordered, well maintained and with a touch of class. Madonna wouldn’t have it any other way. “Where do you live?” she asks when we meet later. Dalston, I say. The name doesn’t register. Stoke Newington, I add as a pointer. “That’s not even in London,” she scoffs. And it isn’t, to be fair. Or not in this London, at any rate.
The evening before I walk down her street and ring the doorbell, I visit another imposing building near the singer’s home. A few days earlier, a leaflet had been thrust into my hand. “It’s a Sign,” it read, and considering that it went on to invite the bearer to an introductory talk on kabbalah at the centre Madonna bought for the organisation six years ago, it seemed just that. The lecture offered an hour-long precis of what cynics would dismiss as woolly mumbo jumbo. One per cent of each of us is concerned with our corporal beings; concentrate on the remaining 99%, the speaker suggests, and we locate the key to a spiritually nourishing life. There is, however, an impression of calm, wellbeing, even complacency. And Madonna, as even a cursory knowledge of her questing, controversy-courting 27-year career will attest, needs calm. Because the opposite of calm, of control, is? “Chaos,” she says later. “Pain, suffering.”
We are meeting to discuss Celebration, the two-disc, 36-track greatest-hits collection that marks Madonna’s final contractual obligation to her record label before she skips off into the $120m embrace of Live Nation, the American concert promoters. Conditions have been imposed: no questions about adoption, about her divorce, about her love life, her faith; discussion is to be confined to her music. Refereeing the joust is the singer’s longtime American publicist, a formidable, don’t-mess-with-me powerhouse named Liz Rosenberg, whose manner, if not appearance, puts one instantly and inescapably in mind of the character of Roz, the giant snail in the film Monsters Inc, with her catch phrase: “I’m watching you, Wazowski. Always watching.” She has worked for the singer pretty much from the moment, in 1982, when Madonna was first handed the keys to the candy store of stardom. “By the way,” Madonna says at one point, “my dream was always to work in a candy store. It was because of my obsession with candy; I don’t have it any more, now that my teeth are all rotten. I did go to a university for a year, as shocking as that might sound to people, and there was a candy shop that I used to go to all the time, an old-fashioned one where all the candy was in these big glass jars. I used to go in there and look at all the candy and think, ‘God, it would be really cool to work in here; I could have candy whenever I wanted.’ So I did want the keys to the candy store, but I had different keys.” Confectionery’s loss, pop’s gain.
In Life with My Sister Madonna, Christopher Ciccone’s bitchy and embittered memoir, the singer’s brother recounts how every single minute of his sister’s day is planned and accounted for. Today, however, that schedule has gone awry. Seconds before I am due at her front door, a call comes through advising me to delay by 15 minutes. Which I duly do, only to be parked in the reception hall for a further quarter of an hour. It gives me a chance to take a look around. As I wait, Madonna appears briefly before descending to the basement, from which various sounds drift up: a peal of throaty laughter; a burst of her new single; and the noise of a vacuum cleaner. Is she catching up on housework, geed up by one of her own songs on the stereo and skipping round, Dyson in hand? Unlikely, but it’s an appealing image.
In the hall where I wait, a painting by the 17th-century Dutch baroque artist Gerrit Dou hangs on one of the walls, which are covered with blue brushed velvet. On another wall, a pair of circular canvases show a troupe of pierrots, rope-dancing. Scented Christian Dior candles fill the air in a space so dimly lit, it seems both slightly theatrical and quasi-religious. A huge telephone with multiple extensions bears labels such as M study, M dressing room, M bathroom, Laundry, Music Room, Kitchen, Mews. The picture is one of great wealth combined with logistical and organisational rigour. Discipline, control, precision. “And that’s the definition of me?” Madonna says later, finishing my out-loud train of thought. “Yeah, but I don’t even think, when people write that, that they really believe it. I just think people are tapping into a zeitgeist and repeating things they’ve heard other people say; and it makes good copy.”
Our encounter finally gets under way in Madonna’s study, an all-grey room with a Frida Kahlo painting above the huge art-deco desk, glass shelves bearing art books and family photographs, and two semi-facing armchairs, on which we sit. In the flesh, in black trousers and a sleeveless shirt, the 51-year-old is tiny, even in heels, and pretty, her face somehow more animated and readable than you expect, her features forming into butter-wouldn’t-melt or knowingly ironic expressions as she talks. Her accent is noticeably clipped, with a Queen’s English clarity, a result of the amount of time she began to spend in this country following her marriage to Guy Ritchie. For a good 10 minutes, her discomfort is visible, a hand covering her face as she answers. And when, during this initial awkwardness, I lean into the space between us to emphasise a point, I sense without any room for doubt that I have crossed an invisible line.
You begin to understand why people are so in awe of her: you wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of her frosty glares. Does that mean, I ask at one point, that we have stopped treating her as a mere mortal? “A lot of people are just really confused by me,” she says. “They don’t know what to think of me, so they try to compartmentalise me or diminish me. Maybe they just feel unsafe. But any time you have an overtly emotional or irrational, negative reaction to something, you’re fearing something that it’s bringing up in you.” She pauses and looks over at Rosenberg. “Let’s all call our shrinks right now and have that discussion. Liz?”
When, last year, an American magazine writer profiled Madonna and wrote “Think back on her career. It’s not songs you remember, or not primarily”, you knew what he meant. Videos, film roles, marriages, haircuts, children, charity work: all carry visual freight that has often seemed to overshadow Madonna’s original claim to fame. But doesn’t Celebration, I suggest, indicate that the songs figured in there somewhere, too? That writer, Rosenberg barks suddenly from behind the desk, “is an arsehole”. “Those are harsh words,” Madonna chides, unable to suppress a laugh. “I don’t know, I guess it depends on what side of the fence you’re on. Some people don’t appreciate my music, so they’re not going to think of me as a musician or songwriter. They like to think of me as a sort of cultural phenomenon.” So people listen to her songs and react visually, more than emotionally or musically? “Right — ‘That’s when she had the cone bra on’, ‘That’s the burning-crosses song’. That kind of stuff. I suppose that’s partly my fault.” And when we sift through the milestones of her career, we look for, what? Motivation, irony? “Manipulation, provocation,” she says.
Another commentator wrote that Madonna’s “ability to absorb and incorporate knowledge keeps her one step ahead”. Certainly, her instincts about music, fashion and future cultural trends have proved uncanny. But doesn’t this concentration on her skill for assimilation overlook what she herself does with that knowledge? “Well, yeah,” she replies. “We can all take in information. It’s how we regurgitate it that makes us different. Right?” And might concentrating on the absorption remove her own subsequent input from the equation? “Well, it’s an undermining thing to do, isn’t it?” She laughs. “Isn’t that the point of the exercise?”
I ask her about her early days in New York in the late 1970s, where she arrived, penniless and a university dropout, to pursue a career as a dancer. And where she earned a reputation as a stop-at-nothing, man*ipulative, sexually promiscuous wannabe, discarding managers, bandmates and boyfriends on a whim.
Five years of hard graft, thrift, ruthlessness and opportunism paid off when she signed a record contract in 1982. But they also marked her, indelibly, as an artist; indeed, from the way she talks about the period, you get the sense that, no matter the rumoured £300m fortune, the art collection, the toy boy, the record-breaking tours (her most recent, Sticky & Sweet, grossed a staggering $408m), there is a part of Madonna that is still motivated by the cross-fertilisation and experimentalism of early-1980s New York.
Physically, she left it long ago. Artistically, she’s still there, in her own imagination at least: zooming around taking on influences and collaborators, draining them dry, moving on, a cultural magpie. The budgets, and the headlines, have got bigger; the spirit, she argues, remains. “The city will never be the same,” she says. “It was an amazing time, an amazing convergence of pop culture and art. To think I used to have dinner on a regular basis with Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. That was like an everyday thing. It was a much more informative part of my life than most of the parts people choose to focus on. I got to do gigs at places like CBGB before I got put underneath the microscope, and that was helpful to me, as an artist, and also to give me a sense of confidence about myself — regardless of the subsequent beatings I would take.”
Madonna contra mundum? It’s a condition you find in many artists, a willed psychological state that pumps them up before they rescale the heights with each successive album or tour. The affirmation of album sales — Madonna is the most successful female recording artist of all time — cannot shake such people from a sense of victimhood, of being misunderstood or under*appreciated. Possibly, this is rooted in the belief that what they create is ineffably trivial. That might explain why some, especially the intellectually curious (or insecure), dabble in a multitude of other arts disciplines or gather around them the appurtenances of cultural refinement and significance. (How revealing, after all, is that “I did go to a university for a year, as shocking as that might sound to people”?)
Madonna is surely better placed than most to resist such doubts. Her recent releases may have been patchy — you’d need to go back to 1998, and Ray of Light, to find her last bona-fide classic — but Celebration offers indisputable affirmation of her pop genius. Vogue, Cherish, Into the Groove, Borderline, Like a Prayer, Material Girl, Frozen: the hits rattle by, potent reminders of what we — and Madonna, too — have lost by drowning in the froth of celebrity, rather than being swept along by the music. “The song comes first,” Madonna agrees. “And all of those other things that people remember, the imagistic things, are secondary, or certainly not as important.” She wants us, she implies, to get back to the music. But surely she doesn’t care, by now, what people think? “I do too,” she zaps back. “But I think I’ve become pretty good at sussing out when people’s opinions of my work are coming from what they think of me personally. You just have to do your thing and then let it go out into the world. The rest, you’re not in control. So there goes that theory that I’m a control freak. I can make all the music, do all the shows that I want, make all the films I want, but I can’t control people’s reactions — at all. They’re going to think what they want to think, and feel what they want to feel. I can only control myself — and sometimes I can’t do that very well.” Her reputation for ruthlessness is, she argues, confused with simple self-discipline, although she concedes: “Sometimes I will stop at nothing.”
Again, it was New York that finetooled that drive into the unstoppable force it still is today. “That was when I knew,” she says, “that that’s what I was going to do — be a singer and a songwriter and an entertainer, and I don’t care if I have to starve, and live in a room with five guys, and wash in a sink; this is what I’m going to do. And because I lived a pretty dismal life and I didn’t care, well, if you’re living a dismal life and you don’t care and you’re enjoying it, then that must be proof that you’ve committed to something.”
The 36 songs on Celebration document the succession of skilfully selected producers and writers — John “Jellybean” Benitez, Steve Bray, Pat Leonard, William Orbit, Mirwais, Stuart Price — Madonna has worked with during her career. Other collaborations — with Prince, with Michael Jackson — either went off like a damp squib or failed entirely. Of the Jackson collaboration, she says: “We spent a chunk of time together, and became friends, but it never happened. I wrote a bunch of words and presented them to him, and he didn’t want to go there. He didn’t want to be provocative. And I said, ‘Well, why come to me?’ I mean, that’s like asking Quentin Tarantino to not put any violence in his films. I felt like he was too inhibited, too shy. Well, I’m shy too. When you’re writing with somebody, you immediately become shy, because, unless you’re already good friends, you can’t be honest and say, ‘That’s the shittest thing I’ve ever heard.’ You’re afraid to say that you don’t like something because you don’t want to hurt their feelings, or you’re afraid your ideas are shit; and if you reveal those cards, they’re not going to want to work with you.” Surely any musician in the world, I think, would kill to work with her. But of course that’s not the point. Madonna needs to want to work with them. It’s never the other way around.
“The first thing that came into my head,” she continues, referring now to Jackson’s death, “was the word ‘abandoned’. I feel like we all abandoned him and put him in a box and labelled him as a strange person. And it used to pain me to see people go write such horrible things about him, accuse him of being a child molester, and all these things that nobody had any proof of — because, you know, I’ve had plenty of things I’ve been accused of. When I adopted David, I was accused of kidnapping him, for God’s sakes; and it’s very hurtful, and people love to jump on bandwagons. The lynch-mob mentality is pretty scary.”
As Madonna said in her tribute to Jackson at last week’s MTV awards, she lost her mother at six, and he lost his childhood. Both engaged in a long search for something to fill those gaps. Madonna is still looking, but alive. Something armoured her on that journey that was missing in Jackson. What advice would she give to her 24-year-old self, about to release her first single and blast into the limelight? “Don’t take it personally,” she answers without a pause.
Listening back to the tape later, I’m struck by how un-uptight she sounds, but also how tired. Perhaps that’s because she still had a few shows left before her world tour finally wound up. But there is, in her voice, the beginning of a sense of weariness, even as she recites self-motivating mantras such as: “I’m still curious and still hungry. I want more knowledge, I want more information, I want more experience.” Her enthusiasm for London, for music, for success, is both audible and visible, especially when she laughs, which she does often. But there are moments when you can’t help but wonder if she doesn’t dream of jumping off the carousel. And, however circumscribed the line of questioning, it is nothing like as controlled as Madonna’s candour, which seems nonetheless designed to brook neither argument nor deeper inquiry. She is open to an extent, but determinedly crease-free.
A growl from Rosenberg indicates that my time is up. And with that, Madonna looks at the watch hanging from a chain around her neck, rises from her chair and says, “Ooh, bathtime.” And is gone. Off to a room that doubtless has its own telephone extension. In a pristine household where everything runs (almost) like clockwork. You look back at the career Celebration marks, at how much could have gone so horribly wrong, and suddenly that craving for order, for security, for predictability, begins to make a lot of sense. Perhaps that’s what it’s all been about, at heart. “Pain, suffering,” she called it. At a young age, Madonna resolved not to experience that again. How much of her has succeeded in that avoidance strategy, only she can know. But that’s probably the only percentage that counts.
Celebration is released tomorrow on Warners.
September 20th, 2009
The British nerve centre for Madonna Inc is to be found in two adjoining townhouses in central London. The buildings are a home for the singer and her four children when they are in this country, plus offices and a personal gym. From the outside, the six-storey edifices are standard-issue London mansions — that is, way beyond the standards most of us are accustomed to. There is something impregnable about such streets: an air of discreet luxury pervades them. Litter seems not to blow or rattle down their immaculate expanses; no chewing gum or urgently expelled kebab encrusts their gleaming paving stones. You might glance up at Madonna’s perfect residential pair and admire their symmetry, the cleanness of their architectural lines. But you would be more likely, unless you were a lurking paparazzo, not even to notice them; they are merely two houses in a long, wide street of the things. Anonymous, ordered, well maintained and with a touch of class. Madonna wouldn’t have it any other way. “Where do you live?” she asks when we meet later. Dalston, I say. The name doesn’t register. Stoke Newington, I add as a pointer. “That’s not even in London,” she scoffs. And it isn’t, to be fair. Or not in this London, at any rate.
The evening before I walk down her street and ring the doorbell, I visit another imposing building near the singer’s home. A few days earlier, a leaflet had been thrust into my hand. “It’s a Sign,” it read, and considering that it went on to invite the bearer to an introductory talk on kabbalah at the centre Madonna bought for the organisation six years ago, it seemed just that. The lecture offered an hour-long precis of what cynics would dismiss as woolly mumbo jumbo. One per cent of each of us is concerned with our corporal beings; concentrate on the remaining 99%, the speaker suggests, and we locate the key to a spiritually nourishing life. There is, however, an impression of calm, wellbeing, even complacency. And Madonna, as even a cursory knowledge of her questing, controversy-courting 27-year career will attest, needs calm. Because the opposite of calm, of control, is? “Chaos,” she says later. “Pain, suffering.”
We are meeting to discuss Celebration, the two-disc, 36-track greatest-hits collection that marks Madonna’s final contractual obligation to her record label before she skips off into the $120m embrace of Live Nation, the American concert promoters. Conditions have been imposed: no questions about adoption, about her divorce, about her love life, her faith; discussion is to be confined to her music. Refereeing the joust is the singer’s longtime American publicist, a formidable, don’t-mess-with-me powerhouse named Liz Rosenberg, whose manner, if not appearance, puts one instantly and inescapably in mind of the character of Roz, the giant snail in the film Monsters Inc, with her catch phrase: “I’m watching you, Wazowski. Always watching.” She has worked for the singer pretty much from the moment, in 1982, when Madonna was first handed the keys to the candy store of stardom. “By the way,” Madonna says at one point, “my dream was always to work in a candy store. It was because of my obsession with candy; I don’t have it any more, now that my teeth are all rotten. I did go to a university for a year, as shocking as that might sound to people, and there was a candy shop that I used to go to all the time, an old-fashioned one where all the candy was in these big glass jars. I used to go in there and look at all the candy and think, ‘God, it would be really cool to work in here; I could have candy whenever I wanted.’ So I did want the keys to the candy store, but I had different keys.” Confectionery’s loss, pop’s gain.
In Life with My Sister Madonna, Christopher Ciccone’s bitchy and embittered memoir, the singer’s brother recounts how every single minute of his sister’s day is planned and accounted for. Today, however, that schedule has gone awry. Seconds before I am due at her front door, a call comes through advising me to delay by 15 minutes. Which I duly do, only to be parked in the reception hall for a further quarter of an hour. It gives me a chance to take a look around. As I wait, Madonna appears briefly before descending to the basement, from which various sounds drift up: a peal of throaty laughter; a burst of her new single; and the noise of a vacuum cleaner. Is she catching up on housework, geed up by one of her own songs on the stereo and skipping round, Dyson in hand? Unlikely, but it’s an appealing image.
In the hall where I wait, a painting by the 17th-century Dutch baroque artist Gerrit Dou hangs on one of the walls, which are covered with blue brushed velvet. On another wall, a pair of circular canvases show a troupe of pierrots, rope-dancing. Scented Christian Dior candles fill the air in a space so dimly lit, it seems both slightly theatrical and quasi-religious. A huge telephone with multiple extensions bears labels such as M study, M dressing room, M bathroom, Laundry, Music Room, Kitchen, Mews. The picture is one of great wealth combined with logistical and organisational rigour. Discipline, control, precision. “And that’s the definition of me?” Madonna says later, finishing my out-loud train of thought. “Yeah, but I don’t even think, when people write that, that they really believe it. I just think people are tapping into a zeitgeist and repeating things they’ve heard other people say; and it makes good copy.”
Our encounter finally gets under way in Madonna’s study, an all-grey room with a Frida Kahlo painting above the huge art-deco desk, glass shelves bearing art books and family photographs, and two semi-facing armchairs, on which we sit. In the flesh, in black trousers and a sleeveless shirt, the 51-year-old is tiny, even in heels, and pretty, her face somehow more animated and readable than you expect, her features forming into butter-wouldn’t-melt or knowingly ironic expressions as she talks. Her accent is noticeably clipped, with a Queen’s English clarity, a result of the amount of time she began to spend in this country following her marriage to Guy Ritchie. For a good 10 minutes, her discomfort is visible, a hand covering her face as she answers. And when, during this initial awkwardness, I lean into the space between us to emphasise a point, I sense without any room for doubt that I have crossed an invisible line.
You begin to understand why people are so in awe of her: you wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of her frosty glares. Does that mean, I ask at one point, that we have stopped treating her as a mere mortal? “A lot of people are just really confused by me,” she says. “They don’t know what to think of me, so they try to compartmentalise me or diminish me. Maybe they just feel unsafe. But any time you have an overtly emotional or irrational, negative reaction to something, you’re fearing something that it’s bringing up in you.” She pauses and looks over at Rosenberg. “Let’s all call our shrinks right now and have that discussion. Liz?”
When, last year, an American magazine writer profiled Madonna and wrote “Think back on her career. It’s not songs you remember, or not primarily”, you knew what he meant. Videos, film roles, marriages, haircuts, children, charity work: all carry visual freight that has often seemed to overshadow Madonna’s original claim to fame. But doesn’t Celebration, I suggest, indicate that the songs figured in there somewhere, too? That writer, Rosenberg barks suddenly from behind the desk, “is an arsehole”. “Those are harsh words,” Madonna chides, unable to suppress a laugh. “I don’t know, I guess it depends on what side of the fence you’re on. Some people don’t appreciate my music, so they’re not going to think of me as a musician or songwriter. They like to think of me as a sort of cultural phenomenon.” So people listen to her songs and react visually, more than emotionally or musically? “Right — ‘That’s when she had the cone bra on’, ‘That’s the burning-crosses song’. That kind of stuff. I suppose that’s partly my fault.” And when we sift through the milestones of her career, we look for, what? Motivation, irony? “Manipulation, provocation,” she says.
Another commentator wrote that Madonna’s “ability to absorb and incorporate knowledge keeps her one step ahead”. Certainly, her instincts about music, fashion and future cultural trends have proved uncanny. But doesn’t this concentration on her skill for assimilation overlook what she herself does with that knowledge? “Well, yeah,” she replies. “We can all take in information. It’s how we regurgitate it that makes us different. Right?” And might concentrating on the absorption remove her own subsequent input from the equation? “Well, it’s an undermining thing to do, isn’t it?” She laughs. “Isn’t that the point of the exercise?”
I ask her about her early days in New York in the late 1970s, where she arrived, penniless and a university dropout, to pursue a career as a dancer. And where she earned a reputation as a stop-at-nothing, man*ipulative, sexually promiscuous wannabe, discarding managers, bandmates and boyfriends on a whim.
Five years of hard graft, thrift, ruthlessness and opportunism paid off when she signed a record contract in 1982. But they also marked her, indelibly, as an artist; indeed, from the way she talks about the period, you get the sense that, no matter the rumoured £300m fortune, the art collection, the toy boy, the record-breaking tours (her most recent, Sticky & Sweet, grossed a staggering $408m), there is a part of Madonna that is still motivated by the cross-fertilisation and experimentalism of early-1980s New York.
Physically, she left it long ago. Artistically, she’s still there, in her own imagination at least: zooming around taking on influences and collaborators, draining them dry, moving on, a cultural magpie. The budgets, and the headlines, have got bigger; the spirit, she argues, remains. “The city will never be the same,” she says. “It was an amazing time, an amazing convergence of pop culture and art. To think I used to have dinner on a regular basis with Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. That was like an everyday thing. It was a much more informative part of my life than most of the parts people choose to focus on. I got to do gigs at places like CBGB before I got put underneath the microscope, and that was helpful to me, as an artist, and also to give me a sense of confidence about myself — regardless of the subsequent beatings I would take.”
Madonna contra mundum? It’s a condition you find in many artists, a willed psychological state that pumps them up before they rescale the heights with each successive album or tour. The affirmation of album sales — Madonna is the most successful female recording artist of all time — cannot shake such people from a sense of victimhood, of being misunderstood or under*appreciated. Possibly, this is rooted in the belief that what they create is ineffably trivial. That might explain why some, especially the intellectually curious (or insecure), dabble in a multitude of other arts disciplines or gather around them the appurtenances of cultural refinement and significance. (How revealing, after all, is that “I did go to a university for a year, as shocking as that might sound to people”?)
Madonna is surely better placed than most to resist such doubts. Her recent releases may have been patchy — you’d need to go back to 1998, and Ray of Light, to find her last bona-fide classic — but Celebration offers indisputable affirmation of her pop genius. Vogue, Cherish, Into the Groove, Borderline, Like a Prayer, Material Girl, Frozen: the hits rattle by, potent reminders of what we — and Madonna, too — have lost by drowning in the froth of celebrity, rather than being swept along by the music. “The song comes first,” Madonna agrees. “And all of those other things that people remember, the imagistic things, are secondary, or certainly not as important.” She wants us, she implies, to get back to the music. But surely she doesn’t care, by now, what people think? “I do too,” she zaps back. “But I think I’ve become pretty good at sussing out when people’s opinions of my work are coming from what they think of me personally. You just have to do your thing and then let it go out into the world. The rest, you’re not in control. So there goes that theory that I’m a control freak. I can make all the music, do all the shows that I want, make all the films I want, but I can’t control people’s reactions — at all. They’re going to think what they want to think, and feel what they want to feel. I can only control myself — and sometimes I can’t do that very well.” Her reputation for ruthlessness is, she argues, confused with simple self-discipline, although she concedes: “Sometimes I will stop at nothing.”
Again, it was New York that finetooled that drive into the unstoppable force it still is today. “That was when I knew,” she says, “that that’s what I was going to do — be a singer and a songwriter and an entertainer, and I don’t care if I have to starve, and live in a room with five guys, and wash in a sink; this is what I’m going to do. And because I lived a pretty dismal life and I didn’t care, well, if you’re living a dismal life and you don’t care and you’re enjoying it, then that must be proof that you’ve committed to something.”
The 36 songs on Celebration document the succession of skilfully selected producers and writers — John “Jellybean” Benitez, Steve Bray, Pat Leonard, William Orbit, Mirwais, Stuart Price — Madonna has worked with during her career. Other collaborations — with Prince, with Michael Jackson — either went off like a damp squib or failed entirely. Of the Jackson collaboration, she says: “We spent a chunk of time together, and became friends, but it never happened. I wrote a bunch of words and presented them to him, and he didn’t want to go there. He didn’t want to be provocative. And I said, ‘Well, why come to me?’ I mean, that’s like asking Quentin Tarantino to not put any violence in his films. I felt like he was too inhibited, too shy. Well, I’m shy too. When you’re writing with somebody, you immediately become shy, because, unless you’re already good friends, you can’t be honest and say, ‘That’s the shittest thing I’ve ever heard.’ You’re afraid to say that you don’t like something because you don’t want to hurt their feelings, or you’re afraid your ideas are shit; and if you reveal those cards, they’re not going to want to work with you.” Surely any musician in the world, I think, would kill to work with her. But of course that’s not the point. Madonna needs to want to work with them. It’s never the other way around.
“The first thing that came into my head,” she continues, referring now to Jackson’s death, “was the word ‘abandoned’. I feel like we all abandoned him and put him in a box and labelled him as a strange person. And it used to pain me to see people go write such horrible things about him, accuse him of being a child molester, and all these things that nobody had any proof of — because, you know, I’ve had plenty of things I’ve been accused of. When I adopted David, I was accused of kidnapping him, for God’s sakes; and it’s very hurtful, and people love to jump on bandwagons. The lynch-mob mentality is pretty scary.”
As Madonna said in her tribute to Jackson at last week’s MTV awards, she lost her mother at six, and he lost his childhood. Both engaged in a long search for something to fill those gaps. Madonna is still looking, but alive. Something armoured her on that journey that was missing in Jackson. What advice would she give to her 24-year-old self, about to release her first single and blast into the limelight? “Don’t take it personally,” she answers without a pause.
Listening back to the tape later, I’m struck by how un-uptight she sounds, but also how tired. Perhaps that’s because she still had a few shows left before her world tour finally wound up. But there is, in her voice, the beginning of a sense of weariness, even as she recites self-motivating mantras such as: “I’m still curious and still hungry. I want more knowledge, I want more information, I want more experience.” Her enthusiasm for London, for music, for success, is both audible and visible, especially when she laughs, which she does often. But there are moments when you can’t help but wonder if she doesn’t dream of jumping off the carousel. And, however circumscribed the line of questioning, it is nothing like as controlled as Madonna’s candour, which seems nonetheless designed to brook neither argument nor deeper inquiry. She is open to an extent, but determinedly crease-free.
A growl from Rosenberg indicates that my time is up. And with that, Madonna looks at the watch hanging from a chain around her neck, rises from her chair and says, “Ooh, bathtime.” And is gone. Off to a room that doubtless has its own telephone extension. In a pristine household where everything runs (almost) like clockwork. You look back at the career Celebration marks, at how much could have gone so horribly wrong, and suddenly that craving for order, for security, for predictability, begins to make a lot of sense. Perhaps that’s what it’s all been about, at heart. “Pain, suffering,” she called it. At a young age, Madonna resolved not to experience that again. How much of her has succeeded in that avoidance strategy, only she can know. But that’s probably the only percentage that counts.
Celebration is released tomorrow on Warners.
FedoraHatGirl2058
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madonna, even though i prefer others, but she is the queen, isnt she?
Got.to.be.there
Proud Member
Well in the girls world of pop, there's madonna, and then theres everybody else...and I don't like madonna that much, she annoys the crap out of me, but she is the one.
.Butterflies.
Proud Member
I'm surprised Kylie was even mentioned or that anyone in the U.S knows who she is even though I grew up on Kylie and Michael records
azza
Proud Member
Thats easy.Madonna.
Great list although I'm not sure what Pink is doing on there.She considers herself a rockstar even though she makes pop songs lol.
Great list although I'm not sure what Pink is doing on there.She considers herself a rockstar even though she makes pop songs lol.
Really? Honestly, I never heard her referred to that title until the last few years of her career. I think many always thought of her as such, but it wasn't vocalized by the media until more recently. I think since Michael's passing it has been sort of unceremoniously solidified by the media to refer to her as the Queen of Pop and for good reason. I think MJ's passing has made people realize just how big, important, and iconic her songs and image are. I think that's why she was chosen to honor him at the VMAS. Who else could have? No one else has come close to the heights of MJ's success. There really isn't any other pop act out there who has influenced pop culture the way Madonna has (I'm not trying to make this a compare and contrast between M and MJ so let's not make it). Madonna has been with us for nearly 30 years now and is still on top of the pop world. No, her sales aren't what they used to be but that applies to EVERYONE including the teeny boppers. The music industry and economy are in ruins but even so she is still selling out stadiums, breaking records, and is still a best selling artist globally.
There really isn't anyone else out there who has been as consistent as Madonna.
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MJJ Lover xOX
Proud Member
Janet :wub:
azza
Proud Member
Great post & I totaly agree.Madonna has also been the most consistent female entertainer with regards to albums,tours,dvd's,movies,books etc.
She's very driven & works extremely hard.She sings live & for every tour she re-works songs with a new style & new choreography to keep things fresh aswell as adding new traks from the album she's touring.
On top of all that she influenced fashion in the 80's much the same as Michael Jackson & that (like MJ) makes her a symbol of pop-culture.
I would call her a genius of some sort.Whether it be for her bussiness sense,work ethic or foresight to reinvent herself time & time again.Or perhaps she's a genius for all those aspects combined.But she did it on her own as a teen living in New York living on less than a dollar a day.Kudos to her.She worked for every single inch of what she's achived.
GameGirlAdvance
Proud Member
Gonna have to say Madonna. She'a already been labeled the queen of pop.
Nar
Proud Member
I'd have to say Madonna, without even thinking about it.
reggty
Proud Member
Madonna. she is the only!