Guy Oseary on Madonna – Ariel Pink collaboration

"Madonna and I have never heard of Ariel Pink. The label may have reached out but M has no interest in working with mermaids.”

AMEN!

“DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN” BLU-RAY IS OUT!

Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

Bored New Jersey housewife Roberta fills her days by reading the personals ads and following an ongoing romance between “Jim” and “Susan”, a mysterious drifter who appears to lead the kind of free-spirited life about which Roberta can only dream. And dream she does, until the day she actually shows up at the couple’s pre-arranged rendezvous in New York City … and after a bump on the head, a bout of amnesia turns Roberta into Susan and opens the door to intrigue, laughter and love.

Starring: Rosanna Arquette, Madonna, Aidan Quinn, Laurie Metcalf, John Turturro, Giancarlo Esposito
Director: Susan Seidelman

Special Features:
• Audio Commentary by the Producers
• Original and Alternate Endings
• Original Theatrical Trailer
• Optional English Subtitles

Madonna: The World's Biggest Star Is Just Hitting Her Stride

After more than three decades on top, Madonna has never been more relevant, more powerful or more interesting than she is at this very moment. How in the world does she do it? I'm writing about Madonna. Again.

In one of those full circle moments Oprah tends to get very excited about, my first professional journalism assignment came in the form of writing a review of True Blue, the Detroit native's album released in 1986. As an ambitious writer/editor of 21, I took the job very seriously. Just a day after turning in my earnest critique (a rave), I arrived in Manhattan to start my dream job at Esquire, magazine home to some of my writing heroes Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and John Gregory Dunne. It had been a very good week.

The first time I heard Madonna was back in 1982 during my first semester at Tulane University. As I hurried to get dressed to meet friends for a long night of New Orleans' particular brand of debauchery (how I do miss those days), I heard a voice I couldn't place coming from my roommate's radio -- female, African-American, sounding a bit like a grittier Jody Watley. The song was "Everybody," Madonna's first released track, and something about the song, her voice and her one-word moniker struck a winning chord with me. Her second hit, "Holiday," an irresistible happy dance confection, solidified that this Madonna was the next hot R&B female vocalist and I wanted to hear more. You can imagine my shock when I first laid eyes on Madonna on MTV burning up my screen in her video for "Borderline"--her first Billboard Top 10 smash --and discovered that Madonna was, in fact, white and blonde! Who was this Madonna? I was hooked.

It's surreal recounting the early days we were first introduced to the ambitious life force tornado bursting with in-your-face bravura that became the all-encompassing, omnipresent, intergalactic superstar with a Biblical name.

From the moment we laid eyes on Madonna--with crazy fishnet stockings, dirty jeans and fingerless lace gloves--she had us under her spell. As the singer once famously said to a reporter, "Love me or hate me, but you have to deal with me." And dealing with her is something the world has been doing with wide-eyed fascination for more than three decades. There's no stopping this woman.

Madonna's tireless, unapologetic, get-out-of-my-way armor she wears heavily reminds me -- oddly -- of the late great Joan Rivers. Think about it: Both women, against impossible odds, not only survived to reach their respective fields' mountaintop, but remained relevant competing against upstarts decades their junior. I'm not sure if anyone had connected Madonna with Rivers before, but their shared take-no-prisoners, relentless modus operandi is undeniable and quite admirable.

At the height of Madonna's white-hot fame, there wasn't a more recognizable woman on the planet, save Princess Diana. I took personal pride as year in, year out Madonna accumulated more ammunition--fame, money, power--and her numerous critics of all stripes sharpened their knives claiming that the public's interest in Madonna had run its course. With the release of every album, every film, every failed romance, every trumped-up moral controversy, the cry was the same: How could a marginally talented singer hold the world in the palm of her hand for this long? How indeed?

Over the course of her remarkable career, Madonna has been called many things--Material Girl, Queen of Reinvention, Madge, diva, maverick, whore--which, for vastly different reasons, all are partly right, but mostly wrong. What Madonna ultimately achieved is nothing less than reigning as the universe's Queen of Pop, as in music, culture, life. Madonna has impacted the planet's pop cultural zeitgeist more significantly than anyone in my lifetime. By a mile. Her detractors be damned: The world we inhabit is a better, less predictable place with Madonna in it -- it's also more colorful, more artistic, more tolerant, more exciting. It's just more, a hell of a lot more.

And then there's her music and those songs happily stuck in our heads forever: "Like A Prayer," "Papa Don't Preach," "Into The Groove," "Like A Virgin," "Take A Bow," "Material Girl," "Ray Of Light," "Cherish," "Open Your Heart," "Vogue," "Music," "Deeper And Deeper," "Don't Tell Me," "Frozen," "Hung Up," "Rain," "Erotica," "Lucky Star," "Secret," "La Isla Bonita" and on and on and on--a head-boppin' jukebox for the ages.

Here's what those songs have done for Madonna. Bluntly -- and indisputably -- Madonna is the best-selling female recording artist of all time and is certified as such by Guinness World Records. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Madonna is also the best-selling female artist of the 20th century with an astonishing 64 million albums. Only The Beatles rank ahead of Madonna on Billboard's 100 All-Time Top Artists, making her the most successful solo artist in the history of the American singles chart. Billboard also anointed Madonna the top-touring female artist ever. Ever -- as in all of recorded history. To top things off, Madonna -- that "moderately talented singer" who most critics agreed had vastly outstayed her welcome -- was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in her very first year of eligibility. Nobody's bigger, folks. And nobody's done more with less than Madonna. Nobody. Ever.

Of course, it's not like Madonna came out of nowhere without any influences to guide her. In her earliest incarnations, you can see a bit of Cher in her shtick, a touch of Bette Midler's sass, a dose of Marilyn Monroe's ingénue mystique, but, incredibly, Madonna never came off as derivative. She borrowed, sure, but she always Madonnaized it. When she appropriated dance moves from the club underground, she made it palatable and relatable to the general public by demystifying its very subversiveness. Call it merely her mastery of reinvention if you want, but what Madonna's thousands of rapid-fire changing looks, clothes, hairstyles and passions have resulted in is an intoxicatingly graphic, multi-dimensional scrapbook for contemporary sociologists to marvel. Is it any wonder why several universities offer advanced courses analyzing the many facets of Madonna's amazing career?

But while Madonna was inspired by Cher, Bette and Marilyn, it's eye opening (to say the least) how, um, directly, Madonna's younger musical contemporaries have liberally taken from her. Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Kylie Minogue and Miley Cyrus all owe Madonna a huge debt of creative gratitude for sure, but most audaciously, gifted vocalist and provocateur, Lady Gaga, seems to have dissected Madonna in an unsubtle Single White Female copycat-stalker manner. I mean, c'mon. But no problem, I'm from the school that believes imitation is the highest form of flattery and the more talented women the merrier. If anyone can pivot away from the current crop of pop stars and go in a new, unexpected direction is Madonna. Trust me, people.

With the buzz for Madonna's new album--coming later this year--generating a deafening "this is the best in her career" frenzy, the 56-year-old gorgeous single mother is exactly where she wants to be. But old attitudes are hard to shake. After telling a close (though pretentious) friend that I was planning to write a big Madonna story about her unprecedented perseverance at the top of the music world competing with the likes of Beyoncé and Pink, great singers decades her junior, my friend's reaction was immediate: "Madonna? Really?" He punctuated his sarcastic query with an epic eye roll to leave no room for misinterpretation. I asked him where his eye roll was for Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney, both of whom are still touring nonstop well into their great-grandfatherly years. His silence was both deafening and telling. It's a friggin' woman thing. Again.

That's the thing about powerful, no B.S. women like Madonna, like Joan Rivers, like Barbra Streisand--they get labeled as "difficult" or "aggressive" or "whore"--anything to knock them off their perch a bit for upsetting the natural (male) order of things. Well, Madonna's having none of it. When she was photographed by Steven Meisel completely naked hitchhiking in broad daylight on a busy public street in Miami Beach (looking gorgeous, incidentally) in her wildly controversial book, Sex, a reporter asked her if she was "sorry" for causing such a fuss. Madonna burst out laughing and on her next album, released a single called "I'm Not Sorry." Perfect.

Is there any wonder why Madonna has always had a lock on the gay community's heart? From her true friendships with artist Keith Haring and photographer Herb Ritts--both of whom died of AIDS--to her current ferocious defense of rock band Pussy Riot's right to perform freely and for gays to exist without fear in Vladimir Putin's increasingly draconian Russia, Madonna isn't only fighting for what's fair and just in her own life, but in yours.

One of the first times Madonna ever appeared on TV was her debut on Dick Clark's iconic American Bandstand. After performing, Clark asked the young singer a prescient question: "What are your dreams?" Madonna, with the chutzpah of a cat who ate the canary, looked at the television legend, smiled and said sweetly, "To rule the world." Against all the odds, she's done it.

Madonna is the reigning Queen of Pop. And, yes, of course, her haters will continue to hate, but she's already won the game. Boy, did she ever.

Madonna In NYC This Week October 2014 Pics.

ALICIA KEYS ON WORKING WITH MADONNA

What was it like working with Madonna on her new album?

It was good. I was in here doing a meeting or something and she was working with Diplo. They were like, “Oh, maybe you can play some piano on this thing.” And I was like, “Alright. I’ll try. If you hate it you can take it off.” It was just like that, casual and cool.

vibe.com

BuzzFeed: Madonna is the definitive #1 Pop Diva!

What else is new? Nothing! According to the popular BuzzFeed.com Madonna tops the definitive ranking of pop divas!




We all agree, of course, about the obvious #1, but what about the other positions?
Tell us your opinion.

Here’s the complete list:

1. Madonna
2. Beyoncé
3. Mariah Carey
4. Whitney Houston
5. Janet Jackson
6. Diana Ross
7. Dolly Parton
8. Aretha Franklin
9. Mary J. Blige
10. Adele
11. Cher
12. Rihanna
13. Tina Turner
14. Barbra Streisand
15. Kylie Minogue
16. Amy Winehouse
17. Erykah Badu
18. Shakira
19. Lady Gaga
20. Britney Spears
21. Donna Summer
22. Taylor Swift
23. Celine Dion
24. Lauryn Hill
25. Jennifer Lopez
26. Miley Cyrus
27. P!nk
28. Kelly Clarkson
29. Christina Aguiler
30. Lana Del Rey
31. Katy Perry

Madonna's Bedtime Story Turns 20 This Month!

Twenty years ago this month, Madonna released her sixth studio album, Bedtime Stories, a classic that came out at a strange crossroads in her career.
While Madonna certainly didn’t lack for fame in 1994, the button-pushing Erotica album had soured many critics and fans. For the first time in a decade of superstardom, people weren’t shocked by her antics anymore — even worse, they often seemed exhausted by her.

Artistically speaking, she’d spent the last four years challenging and subverting America’s sexual puritanism. But after releasing an entire book called Sex featuring nude pictures of herself and other celebrities, there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to go in that realm.

It didn’t help that she’d detonated 14 F-bombs on a March 1994 episode of The Late Show With David Letterman, an infamous appearance that racked up FCC complaints and distanced her from Middle America. Evita was two years away and the overt sexuality of Erotica was growing stale — so when Bedtime Stories hit, Madonna’s career was at a strange point.

To that end, Bedtime Stories is lyrically and musically a much warmer album. She sacrifices some bawdy entendres (compare Erotica’s “Where Life Begins” to Bedtime’s “Inside of Me”) and focuses on autobiographical matter.

Instead of Erotica’s chilly, pounding dance pop, Bedtime puts Madonna in softer sonic territory. There’s the singer-songwriter-y “Secret,” the avant pop of “Bedtime Story” (co-written by Bjork), the new jack swing jam “I’d Rather Be Your Lover” (featuring Meshell Ndegeocello rapping), the Herbie Hancock-sampling ballad “Sanctuary” and the lush, orchestral R&B of “Take a Bow.”

But softer sounds didn’t necessarily mean muted lyrics. “Human Nature” finds Madonna taking on her critics more directly than ever with a logical, defiant attack on slut-shaming. And while album opener “Survival” is a cozy R&B-pop song, it was similarly unrepentant in attitude.

The inviting R&B sound of Bedtime Stories is due in part to co-producer Dallas Austin, who longtime Madonna backup singer Donna de Lory describes as “part of her tribe at that time.” Also on board were co-producers Nellee Hooper, Dave “Jam” Hall (hot off Mary J. Blige’s debut, What’s the 411?) and, of course, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds.
While Edmonds had recently worked with TLC and Toni Braxton, he tells Billboard it was one of his own hits that brought him to Madonna’s attention.

“Madonna was a fan of a song I did, ‘When Can I See You.’ Because of that, she was interested in working with me,” Edmonds recalls. “She came to me for lush ballads, so that’s where we went.”

Babyface would collaborate with Madonna on three songs — two of which, “Forbidden Love” and “Take a Bow,” ended up on the album. Although the latter became Madonna’s long-running No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, Edmonds says he wasn’t gunning for chart-toppers when they met.

“I wasn’t so much thinking about the charts,” Edmonds recalls. “I think I was more in awe of the fact that I was working with Madonna. It was initially surreal, but then you get to know the person a little bit, and you calm down and then it’s just work. And work is fun.”

When Edmonds played Madonna the bare bones of a song that would become “Take a Bow,” she immediately took to it. “It was just a beat and the chords. From there we collaborated and built it up,” he says. “I was living in Beverly Hills and I created a little studio in my house, so she came over there to write.”

As for “Forbidden Love,” Edmonds recalls that track came together with similar speed. “She heard the basic track and it all started coming out, melodies and everything… It was a much easier process than I thought it would be.”

Donna De Lory, however, wasn’t surprised at how easily Bedtime Stories came together when she and fellow backup vocalist Niki Haris were called in to provide harmonies on “Survival,” co-written by Austin. At that point, she’d been performing with Madonna for seven years.

“The minute you walked in [the studio], she was giving you the lyric sheet,” De Lory tells Billboard. “That was the atmosphere — we’re not here to just hang out. It’s fun, but we’re here to work and get this done.”

And what Madonna sets out to do, Madonna invariably succeeds at. De Lory recalls the sessions for “Survival” took just a “couple of hours” and there were no retakes.
Similar to Babyface, De Lory describes working with Madonna as a creative partnership, even if she was the one setting the tone. “Once she got her ideas out, she was open to your ideas. You didn’t want to go in with her and right off the bat say, ‘Well, I hear this,’ because she was so specific and articulate. She already had the sound in her head. But after she’d spoken, we’d put our two cents in. We always had ideas, like, ‘Can we answer this line with an extra “survival” [in the background]?'”

The result of that session is the perfect opener to the album — a lush, beguiling anthem to resilience and statement of purpose. “I’ll never be an angel, I’ll never be a saint it’s true/ I’m too busy surviving, whether it’s heaven or hell/ I’m gonna be living to tell,” Madonna sings, nodding to her critics while simultaneously brushing them off.
Speaking of critics, Bedtime Stories received very positive reviews, especially compared to her two previous albums, the divisive Erotica and her Dick Tracy companion I’m Breathless.

It was similarly successful on the charts, debuting at a respectable No. 3 slot on the Billboard 200. The first single, “Secret,” also peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. (FYI, Madonna teased “Secret” in an audio message available exclusively online prior to its release — a prescient publicity move for an era where less than 15 percent of adults had Internet access.)

But it was the second single from Bedtime, the Babyface-produced “Take a Bow,” that became its biggest hit. Topping the Hot 100 for seven weeks, it became Madonna’s 11th No. 1 hit and is still her longest-running No. 1 on the Hot 100.
Despite the unqualified success of “Take a Bow,” Bedtime’s next two singles — the Bjork-penned “Bedtime Story” and “Human Nature” — stalled, becoming her first singles in a decade to not crack the Hot 100’s top 40. While De Lory recalls that Madonna was directing her energy back toward acting at that point anyway, the tepid performance of those singles could partly explain why Madonna didn’t tour behind the album.

She did, however, perform “Take a Bow” with Babyface at the American Music Awards in 1995, an experience he recalls as terrifying. “I was nervous as hell. But you couldn’t actually see my legs shaking under the suit,” Edmonds says. “When we finished, she told me she had never been that nervous before. That was crazy to me — I was thinking, ‘You’re Madonna, you’re on stage all the time!'”

These days, Madonna is readying a new album for a presumed 2015 release and Edmonds is hot off producing an album for another unstoppable icon: Barbra Streisand. Looking back on Bedtime Stories 20 years later, he says the whole experience seems surreal. “Today when I think about it, it’s hard to believe I even did that with Madonna,” Edmonds says. “It’s always nice to be part of an album that’s a classic — but you never know when you’re a part of it at the time. Only time can tell.”

As for De Lory, she stopped performing with Madonna in 2007. Today, she’s following her own muse, performing and crafting world-music-influenced electronic pop on albums like her most recent, The Unchanging.

Recalling her time with Madonna, she’s still in awe of the pop icon’s total immersion in the recording process. “I was constantly amazed at her ability to focus in on the intonation and rhythm of our vocal parts,” De Lory says. “When you worked with her, you had to be so on. She was very present in the moment — she knew what she wanted, she got what she wanted, and then she was moving on.”

Source: Billboard

MADONNA OPENS SCHOOL IN KARACHI

KARACHI: Queen of Pop Madonna’s school in Karachi has opened its gates to students.

The 56-year-old “Material Girl” singer took to Twitter to announce that the Dream Model Street School has so far admitted 1,200 kids.



Madonna tweeted: “The revolution of love continues in Pakistan! The Dream School is finally finished. 1200 kids attending. Knowledge…”
The Revolution of Love continues in Pakistan! The Dream School is finally finished. 1200 kids attending?? knowledge… http://t.co/c5GezOMdgP

Madonna announced last year that she was raising money to expand a school located in the outskirts of Karachi.

The pop star also shared a photograph of girls studying in the classroom equipped with laptops.

“Girls learning at the Dream School,” she captioned the picture.

Source : TimesOfIndia

Paloma Faith on Madonna and ageism

…and don’t get her started about Madonna and age.
She adds: “People talk about Madonna, saying she should stop wearing all that stuff, she’s too old for that kind of thing now.
“But why? She’s been doing it all along. She’s entitled to wear that but at the same time, it was important for her to do that, back in the day.”

Amen!

“MADONNA TRACK SOUNDS WICKED” SAYS MNEK

MNEK has described Madonna’s new material as “wicked”.

The British singer-songwriter has been in the studio with the US icon to work on a track for her forthcoming new album, which is due out in 2015.

“I almost get quite scared talking about it,” MNEK told Digital Spy at the MOBO Awards launch.

“It’s happened, obviously.I did meet Madonna and I did work with her.It was great and amazing.The song sounds wicked – I’m really proud of it. Diplo’s dope, Madonna’s dope, her people are great and that side of things is working out great.”

MNEK is nominated for Best Newcomer at the MOBO Awards 2014.

digitalspy.co.uk

Madonna On Instagram September 23/14

MADONNA:

“2 sides 2 every story! #tsorrynotsorry #imdone #iconic”



MADONNA:

“Just sayin……………..#bitchimmadonna ❤️”

Madonna On Instagram September 22/14

“NICKI MINAJ : My trip to New York isn’t the same unless I bump into the Queen. #BitchItsMadonna 😜” MADONNA : We go Hard or we go Home we Gon Do this all night long! #werk



Goin to werk #bitchimmadonna