Madonna's Report Card From The 70's...

M was a great dance student!

Happy Madonna Holidays!

Wishing everyone the very best and may you all be blessed!

BEYONCE : I WANTED TO FOLLOW IN MADONNA’S FOOTSTEPS

Beyonce Knowles just pulled off one of the most spectacular surprise album drops of all time with the Dec. 13 release of her self-titled visual album, setting both iTunes and Billboard chart records in the process. What facilitated the successful campaign? The singer made it clear on Saturday night that it came to one major business decision.



“I started my own company,” Beyonce said referring to Parkwood Entertainment, the entertainment and management company she founded in 2008. “When I decided to manage myself, it was important that I didn’t go to some big management company. I felt like I wanted to follow the footsteps of Madonna and be a powerhouse and have my own empire and show other women when you get to this point in your career, you don’t have to go sign with someone else and share your money and your success — you do it yourself.”

Beyonce’s comments came during a private screening for fans and the press of the 17 videos accompanying the album at New York’s School of Visual Arts Theatre.

Source : HollywoodReporter

Madonna Headed To Malawi Pics...

REVIEW : MADONNA AT “SNL”

She made a name for herself as the Material Girl, oozing sex appeal and an almost other worldly glamour.
But Madonna donned an unlikely persona to talk politics for a cameo appearance on Saturday Night Live.
The 55-year-old slipped into a pinstripe suit as she fixed a pair of intense spectacles onto her visage to chat with Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon on the late night sketch comedy show.

Wearing her blonde locks pinned into a new wave pompadour, the transformed star looked every bit the part of a seasoned intellectual.
Sitting for a roundtable discussion for the The Barry Gibb Talk show segment, the star assumed a confident and earnest demeanour.
It started cordially when Bee Gees legend Barry, played by Fallon, asked her: ‘You’ve travelled all over the world, you’re an observer of human nature – Republican or Democrat – why can’t people get along?’
She replied: ‘In my experience politicians… it doesn’t matter which country you come from, as long as they don’t put their personal ideology above doing the right thing, there will be unity. It’s simple.’
But after impressing him she infuriated him by interrupting him moments later.
The angry host said: ‘You already answered the question woman. You think you can come on my show and say anything you want to me?’

And after a bit of verbal tennis he ultimately conceded: ‘She’s tamed me like a wild horse.’
The show then closed with a singsong featuring the real Barry, who showed the pair how it should be done with his trademark falsetto.
But there was still time for Justin to entertain the crowd with a couple of tunes of his own.

Meanwhile, Madonna is said to study regularly with her own personal Kabbalah Centre rabbi.
And in keeping with her studies, the star no longer gives concerts on Friday night as it is the onset of Shabbat, and wears the red string around her left wrist for protection and to ward off the ‘Evil Eye’.
She became attracted to mystical offshoot of Judaism in the 1990s, and it has been claimed it was a way for her to deal with her worldwide fame.

Source : DailyMail

NO FADE AWAY 1989 : LIKE A PRAYER by MADONNA

“I’m sort of naturally a pain in the ass. I naturally like to do things that rub people the wrong way. No, that’s wrong. Let me rephrase that. I just like being controversial, I guess. Even that doesn’t sound right. But somehow it happens that way. It’s more like “Hey, well, you know how they always say things are this way? Well, they’re not! Or they don’t have to be.”Madonna talking to Glenn O’Brien, Interview, 1990

“It’s hard to know what was more awe-inspiring about the conceit of this song and its accompanying video – the sheer ego needed to go there, or the fact that she now had the talent and soul and imagination to pull it off so magnificently.”Garry Mulholland, This Is Uncool: The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk and Disco (Cassell, 2002)

And so we leave the eighties in much the same way as we started them. In a dazzle of glory. Now, almost 25 years later, it seems to me (feel free to scoff) that 1989 seems as charged and potent a year for pop as, say, 1965, 66, 79 or 81. A year saturated in sound.

Everyone and everything is playing their part in 1989. Italo House, Balearic beats, old-school indie, new school indie, London sound systems, Scottish widescreen miserabilists and the odd tune from proper pop goddesses.

Hip hop would not reach its commercial peak for a few years yet, but in Fight the Power it found its anthem, a charged, potent, sonically dense, angry record from a band who were both infuriating – in some of their politics- and thrilling – ditto – by turn.

Set against that you had De La Soul’s sunny “Afrocentric optimism”, while across the Atlantic Soul II Soul offered a soaring black British take on R&B (“a song and performance and production so perfect in every way,” Garry Mulholland said of Keep On Movin’, “that the Sun seemed to come out every time it played”; personally I prefer Back to Life – though both are great).

The Beloved offered blissed-out (possibly, oh let’s be honest, probably, drug-induced) dreamy electropop, and in Manchester guitar bands were shrugging off the spell of the Smiths (though Morrissey’s shy, sensitive bookishness was still offering a useful model for The Sundays) and finding that they could dance after all.

The Stone Roses – as this year’s comeback proved – still get all the kudos, although they never seemed that much more than an attitude and a decent guitarist to me. By contrast the Mondays offered hooligan flair and prole-art energy in their swampy funk (though, arguably, it’s 808 State’s Pacific State that was the city’s best gift to the world that year).

In America rock was finding fresh fuel in Black Francis’s scream and the bass-playing of Kim Deal. The Pixies initiated the loud-quiet-loud pattern that would infuse every half decent rock band for at least the next decade (and all too many that weren’t even a quarter decent).

But 1989, I’ve decided, belongs to the women. Dusty – the first great British pop vocalist – bows out with an undervalued Pet Shop Boys ballad. Kate Bush put James Joyce’s erotic vision to music. But in the end they are both in the shadow of the material girl.

In a way it’s almost too easy to choose Like a Prayer as the Madonna track. Written with Patrick Leonard, it is her most nakedly obvious attempt at pop classicism (gospel choirs and all). I’d be happy to argue that Papa Don’t Preach was the most successful – and moving – lyric she ever wrote, and some of her most interesting music would emerge in the nineties after she’d stopped selling 20 million albums every go (not that 2 million copies is to be sniffed at either).

But then pop’s pleasures often work best when they’re obvious, when they’re immediate, when they’re in your face. And Like a Prayer is in your face.

Part of that is down to the tune itself, but you could also point to Mary Lambert’s thrillingly offensive video. Against a backdrop of burning crosses, it not only argues that Jesus was black but that Madonna might be having sex with him. Always running in parallel, Madonna’s fervent attraction to and feminist rejection of the orthodoxies of the Catholic Church was one of her most significant creative accelerants. Plus she enjoyed noising people up. And, ever the smart businesswoman, she knew there was money in it.

The sex button was an easy one to push in a country that was both politically and culturally conservative in that decade. It was to Madonna’s credit that her sexuality never felt – to me at any rate – like something she was commodifying. Some of her critics felt that was exactly what she was doing, but as she sang on Human Nature “Express yourself, don’t repress yourself”. We can argue about whether that is the sensible, grown-up response.

Camille Paglia once argued that Madonna was the future of feminism for that very reason: “Madonna has a far profounder vision of sex than do the feminists. She sees both the animality and the artifice. Changing her costume style and hair colour virtually every month, Madonna embodies the eternal values of beauty and pleasure. Feminism says, ‘No more masks.’ Madonna says we are nothing but masks”.

That might be honest but it also opened the way for the music business to objectify almost every woman in the industry over the years that followed. For that reason Madonna’s image-making is not unproblematic.

But she also is a woman in charge of her life, of her career, of her image. She has never been a victim. That’s why her example matters.

That and the fact that Like A Prayer shows just what is possible in a simple pop song. Sex, religion, controversy. And a choir. I love that choir.

Source : HeraldTribune

MADONNA ANNOUNCES DAVID BLAINE AS DECEMBER GUEST CURATOR FOR #ARTFORFREEDOM

Madonna has confirmed David Blaine as the December guest curator for Art for Freedom. Guest curators collaborate with Madonna to select daily submissions to be showcased on artforfreedom.com.

“Madonna, who has always been an incredible inspiration, invited me to be a part of Art for Freedom. It’s an amazing platform to bring artists together and I look forward to seeing the brilliance this generates.”

“I am excited David is signing on as guest curator. This is only the beginning of Art for Freedom bringing artists together to change the world.” commented Madonna.

As part of the Art For Freedom initiative, David Blaine will work with Madonna to select one artist from their respective month whose creative expression demonstrates a unique view of the fight for human rights. Madonna will then award a $10,000 grant to a nonprofit organization of the winning artist’s choice. All projects must be focused on the values of Art For Freedom.

The latest freedom fighters chosen to receive an Art for Freedom grant are Amber Fares and the Speed Sisters – a documentary about the Middle East’s first all women motor racing team. Against a backdrop of social and political upheaval, Speed Sisters presents an inspiring look into the drive to be true to oneself. The grant will go towards finishing the film. You can see more on the project below.

Launched in September 2013, Art For Freedom is a global digital initiative, led by Madonna in partnership with VICE Media, designed to fuel free speech – to respond, address and protest persecution and discrimination around the world. It is an online public art project encouraging people to express their personal meaning of freedom and revolution, in the form of video, music, poetry, and photography. Public submissions become part of the Art For Freedom website: contributors can join the project by uploading original artwork or tagging original posts #artforfreedom. The project was launched with the film secretprojectrevolution, co-directed by Madonna and Steven Klein.

VICE Media continues to serve as co-curator of Art for Freedom, leveraging VICE’s extensive global network of filmmakers, artists, writers, musicians, museums, and more, to contribute works to the project.

Cool New Madonna Sticky/Hard Candy Outtakes!

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A Message From Madonna...

MADONNA’S SONG INSPIRES HARSH GUPTA’S COLLECTION

Designer Harsh Gupta has come up with Christmas collection and says he has taken inspiration from pop star Madonna’s popular song – “Secret” – for the designs.

“For my autumn-winter 2014 collection, I took inspiration from the song ‘Secret’ by Madonna,” Gupta told IANS, and added that an inspiration is everything for an artist or a designer.

“It gives you required direction, be it mood, style, silhouette or interpretation. Inspiration is the guiding force behind every artist or designer`s work,” he said.

The collection offers glamorous, high-end, cocktail evening dresses for modern confident women.

“I love the song and found it very captivating to portray the woman I wanted to show through the collection. I kept visualising a modern, feminine, confident, sultry and very attractive woman while conceptualising the styles for my 2014 couture collection,” said Gupta.

For the apparels, Gupta indulged in fine fabrics like gazar silk, satin silk, silk-taffeta, single jersey lycra, silk-chiffon, georgette and brocade in range of colours such as mid-night blue, burgundy, bone-gray, brass-green, emily pink, daffodil yellow, black, copper and cadmium red.

The entire collection was put together in three months and Gupta says working on the collection was a memorable experience.

“We actually researched on some very innovative couture making techniques from Paris and followed some strict methods of couture cutting and sewing techniques while crafting the whole collection. It was truly a very memorable experience for me and my team,” he said.

Source: NewIndianExpress