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    How Big Is Taylor Swift?

    You might have heard: Taylor Swift cannot be stopped. Her new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” sold 2.6 million copies in its opening week last month, earning Swift her eighth Billboard No. 1 album since 2020. At the Grammy Awards in February, she became the first artist to win album of the year for a […] More

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    Madonna’s Hits-Filled Celebration Tour, Dissected

    Hear five standouts from the set, and six we wish she’d played.Pablo Porciuncula/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDear listeners,Lindsay is desperately seeking some time off this week, so I am the first of your guest playlisters: Caryn, the pop music editor. I’m going to tell you a secret — you could consider it one of my confessions on a dance floor. I saw Madonna’s Celebration Tour seven times; eight if you include the livestream from Rio de Janeiro on Saturday night, where the Queen of Pop wrapped her first-ever retrospective with a free show before an estimated 1.6 million people on Copacabana Beach.Some have asked why, so a brief explanation: I believe Madonna is the most important and influential solo figure in pop history, and I don’t skip opportunities to see her onstage, where she has innovated and thrilled throughout her four-decade career. (If you’re wondering who was behind “60 Times Madonna Changed Our Culture,” wonder no more.) I was too young to catch the Virgin or Who’s That Girl tours — and nobody took me to Blond Ambition or the Girlie Show (ahem, parents) — so my live history begins with Drowned World in 2001 and I have done my best to catch up.The Confessions Tour from 2006 is the best I’ve seen in person, the Tears of a Clown revival at Art Basel in 2016 was the zaniest, and Celebration is the first one I’ve reviewed (on its U.S. leg’s opening night in October). Repeated viewings haven’t changed my initial critical overview, though some parts of the show grew on me, some vocal performances sharpened up, and some of the extemporaneous speeches Madonna gave during the two breaks each night designed for them were stunningly raw and moving. (See Bonus Tracks below for more on that.)But the point of today’s playlist is to take a deeper (and deeper) look at the songs Madonna did — and didn’t — select for the tour. The first five tracks are my favorites from the show, which has a lot to do with how she staged them. The second six are songs that were sorely missed, so should you ever do a Celebration 2, M, please consider them official requests.Crazy for you,CarynListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Madonna Performs Massive Free Concert in Rio

    The pop superstar performed a final date on her global trek marking four decades of hits: a set on Copacabana Beach before the largest live crowd of her career.When Madonna stepped out onto the mammoth stage constructed on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach on Saturday night in a gleaming halo headpiece and black kimono, she was greeted by the largest live crowd of her four-decade career.The free show, announced in late March, was a grand finale to the pop superstar’s latest world tour, which has delivered 80 performances since last October. Without ticket data, concert crowd sizes can be difficult to gauge; Riotur, the municipality’s tourism department, estimated that 1.6 million people flooded onto the 2.4-mile stretch of sand on Saturday that had been turned into a roughly $12 million playground surrounding the 8,700-square-foot stage.It was the culmination of days of Madonna-mania in the city, where talk of the singer, 65, was inescapable. Her songs spilled out of stores and car stereos. Fans assembled outside her hotel and shouted her name. Updates about the concert, which was broadcast on the network Globo TV, dominated local media reports.Fans traveled from across South America for Madonna’s Rio concert, her only Celebration Tour date on the continent. Maria Magdalena Arrellaga for The New York TimesFans packed the shores of Copacabana Beach to watch Madonna’s free concert on Saturday.Mauro Pimentel/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe spectacle in Rio was a milestone in Madonna’s career: the victory lap for her first stage retrospective, called the Celebration Tour, in which she chronicled her rise to stardom, performing hits like “Into the Groove,” “Like a Prayer” and “Ray of Light” with a cadre of dancers, four of her six children, and a wardrobe of elaborate costuming that recalled some of her most memorable looks.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How Ariana Grande’s ‘Yes, And?’ Relates to Madonna’s ‘Vogue’

    Madonna’s 1990 hit “Vogue” has enjoyed a recent renaissance. Ariana’s Grande’s first solo song in three years leans on its sound, but the similarities end there.There was never a question that Madonna’s 1990 pop-house classic “Vogue” was a tidal wave. But over the past year and a half, the song that helped bring the sounds of underground queer culture to the mainstream has continued to create powerful ripples.Since 2019 — when the track’s release was chronicled on the FX drama “Pose” alongside discussions about authorship and authenticity — the hit has been experiencing a slow, steady resurgence. In 2022, Beyoncé mashed it up with her ballroom-referencing “Break My Soul,” updating Madonna’s rap to pay tribute to Black pop icons, and starting last year, the remix was given prime placement on both Beyoncé’s and Madonna’s tours. Ariana DeBose performed a heavily memed adaptation of “Vogue” at the 2023 BAFTA Awards, and “Vogue” even garnered the ultimate symbol of 2020s relevance: It was sampled by the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny on his album “Nadia Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana.”Now “Vogue” is the animating reference on “Yes, And?,” the comeback single by Ariana Grande, who has spent three years out of the pop spotlight filming the movie version of “Wicked.” Like the original, written and produced by Madonna and Shep Pettibone, Grande’s song — credited to Grande, Max Martin and Ilya Salmanzadeh — features snappy synth drums; bright, syncopated stabs of piano; and a spoken-word bridge. But “Yes, And?” isn’t an invitation to the dance floor; it’s a rebuttal to Grande’s critics. So while it sounds superficially like “Vogue,” it doesn’t really feel like it.In the first part of her career, Grande was mainly a classicist with roots in hip-hop soul, ’90s R&B and brassy show tunes. Her fifth album, “Thank U, Next” from 2019, introduced a shift: Adopting the cadences and textures of contemporary rap, Grande provided raw, up-to-the-minute commentary on her personal life.“Yes, And?” attempts to marry the two sides of her music, providing a throwback musical canvas that she embellishes with her responses to those gossiping about her looks and her latest relationship, with her “Wicked” co-star Ethan Slater. While its bones are unmistakably rooted in “Vogue,” the song takes some turns: A pitched-up vocal sample makes the track feel busy, and Grande, a gifted singer, can’t resist the impulse to fill its empty spaces with high trills and flowery runs. When she approaches the final chorus, she belts the song’s title phrase as if she’s the world’s most effusive improv enthusiast.Paying tribute to an iconic song is risky business — just ask the many stars who have interpolated or sampled recent hits, only to come off like craven impersonators — and “Vogue,” in particular, is a masterpiece of elegance and restraint. Unlike many Madonna singles, “Vogue” is a remarkably selfless endeavor; it was inspired by the bold, creative queer pioneers of New York’s ballroom culture, and pays tribute to the scene without laying claim to it or assuming its struggles.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    7 Great Songs From Great 7th Albums

    Inspired by Ariana Grande’s return, hear tracks from U2, Sleater-Kinney, Guided by Voices and more.U2’s seventh album, “Achtung Baby,” was a triumph.Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,The music video for “Yes, And?,” Ariana Grande’s first new solo single in more than three years, opens with a tight shot of a ruby-red business card bearing the phrase “ag7.” In modern pop parlance, this is a way of hinting that her seventh album is coming soon.I’ve long felt that the seventh album — if an artist is lucky enough to get that far — is a pivotal moment. Sometimes it’s the perfect time for a sonic and aesthetic reinvention, à la U2’s glammy 1991 album (and my favorite in its discography) “Achtung Baby.” It can also be an opportunity for a pop star to show off newfound maturity, as Madonna did on her great seventh studio album, “Ray of Light.” The seventh album is often when the most brilliant artists shift gears into a level of mastery that seems newly effortless: Consider Bob Dylan’s seventh album, none other than “Blonde on Blonde.”Will Grande’s seventh LP deserve mention among those classics? Who can say? All I know for now is that the thought of one of our major pop stars preparing to join the Septet Club got me thinking about some of my all time favorite seventh albums. Naturally, this called for a seven-track playlist.The aforementioned legends each make an appearance, along with a few of my indie darlings, Guided by Voices and Sleater-Kinney. Plus, one of pop’s reigning superstars, who released a particularly imperial seventh album in 2022 — everybody’s on mute until you guess who.Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. U2: “Until the End of the World”After its polarizing sixth album, “Rattle & Hum,” U2 retreated from ’80s overexposure and re-emerged with a fresh ’90s rebrand on “Achtung Baby,” a Brian Eno-produced triumph that added some needed irony to the band’s outlook and made the Edge’s guitar glisten like a newly invented form of synthetic crystal. It is my professional opinion that this song rules. (Listen on YouTube)2. Madonna: “Nothing Really Matters”Madonna was a new mother about to turn 40 when she released “Ray of Light,” a midcareer commercial smash that got her back on the radio (alongside devotees half her age), and also netted her (somehow) her first Grammy in a music category. “Ray of Light” is a deeper, stranger album than its titular hit suggests; this underappreciated sixth single is more representative of its searching electro-pop sound. (Listen on YouTube)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    What Did We Learn From a Year in Live Shows?

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicNo one on the New York Times pop music staff attends more live shows than Caryn Ganz, the pop music editor. On this week’s Popcast, she reflects on the first full post-pandemic year of live performances, with stadium and arena tours finally back at full strength.That includes reflections on performances by Madonna, the Rolling Stones, 100 gecs, Depeche Mode, SZA, the Cure, Liz Phair and many more.Guest:Caryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    Madonna’s Celebration Tour, an Experiment in Looking Back

    Her Celebration Tour is the pop superstar’s first retrospective, one which thematically explores her past and perhaps offers a glimpse of how she will chart her future.For 40 years, evolution, rebellion and resilience have been Madonna’s hallmarks, but forward momentum is her life force. She’s been pop music’s premier shark, operating in near perpetual motion: Why would she pause to bask or look back, and risk losing oxygen?So there are understandable touches of both defiance and reluctance to the Celebration Tour, her first road show devoted to hits rather than a new album. The retrospective began its North American leg at Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Wednesday night with all the classic trappings of a Madonna spectacle. But unlike her 11 prior tours of this scale, this one was haunted by ghosts — some invited, and some who crashed the party.The set list began with a moment of birth — not the start of Madonna’s career, but the arrival of her first child — via “Nothing Really Matters,” a song from her 1998 album, “Ray of Light,” about how parenthood rearranges priorities. The anachronism was a table-setter: If Celebration recounts her life story, its arc was animated by her experiences of losing her mother and becoming one, herself. “Never forget where you came from,” she instructed a dancer who served as an avatar for her younger self, whom she then gave a maternal hug.Over two-plus hours, Madonna explored her career through themes which included her bold sexuality.The New York TimesThe first part of the concert, which was divided into seven chapters, was its most carefree (“Everybody,” “Holiday,” “Open Your Heart”). But the joy was built on struggle. Before Madonna took the stage, the night’s M.C., Bob the Drag Queen, reminded the crowd that the singer came to New York City from Detroit with $35 in her pocket and scattered faux bills.Decked out in a teal corset, a black miniskirt and a jacket adorned with chains, Madonna, 65, conjured some of the gritty energy of the late-1970s downtown scene where she first found like-minded creative spirits. It was a relief to be back, she said with a barrage of f-bombs, as she strapped on an electric guitar for a power-chord-heavy version of “I Love New York” blended with “Burning Up.” Vintage photos of CBGB, where she played one of her earliest gigs, lit up on the screen behind her.Glee was soon tempered by devastation: The community of artists who gave Madonna a home was decimated by AIDS, and she presented “Live to Tell” as a powerful tribute. Screens suspended around the stage, which stretched nearly the length of the floor on a series of runways, at first displayed single faces. The images then multiplied, demonstrating the scale of the epidemic. There were simply too many tales to tell.Over two-plus hours, Madonna resisted the simplest routes to depicting her own story. After the first section, the concert was only loosely chronological, leaning instead toward themes: her bold sexuality (“Erotica,” staged in a boxing ring, and “Justify My Love,” staged as a near orgy); her search for love (a salacious “Hung Up,” and the fan favorite “Bad Girl”); her rugged defiance (the perennial cowboy-themed standout “Don’t Tell Me”). She peppered the show with references to previous tours and videos, but skipped obvious choices (“Papa Don’t Preach,” “Express Yourself”) in favor of the glitchy 007 theme “Die Another Day” and a pointed acoustic cover of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”Madonna’s 11-year-old daughter Estere owning the catwalk during a section devoted to “Vogue.”The New York TimesThe show’s most spectacular number was “Like a Prayer,” which she sang on a dramatic spinning carousel that held shirtless dancers striking poses that mimicked Christ’s crucifixion. The remix’s propulsive bass provided tension, and a quick cut to Sam Smith and Kim Petras’s “Unholy” underscored the original track’s enduring influence.Madonna has always fixed her sights on what’s next, but the artists who have followed her have chosen different paths. This year alone, two women decades her junior turned yesteryear into big business: Taylor Swift has been delving into her prior album cycles onstage, and Beyoncé played stadium shows inspired by styles of dance music that date back before her birth.Madonna has never before indulged in nostalgia, and at this concert, it was clear why. In the ’80s she was rewiring expectations for what a pop career could accomplish. In the ’90s, she was testing how explicitly she could express her desires. In the 2000s, she was finding fresh freedom on the dance floor. In the 2010s, she was bringing new voices into her orbit. But on a tour celebrating the past, it’s impossible to ignore the passage of time. There is less future stretched out before Madonna now, and it’s unclear how she will reckon with it.Until recently, her groundbreaking career was a demonstration of seemingly impossible physical strength. But near the end of the 2020 theater shows supporting her last studio album, “Madame X,” serious injuries took a toll. Madonna’s once inexhaustible body failed her just days before the Celebration Tour was scheduled to start in July, and she was hospitalized with an infection.Over her career, Madonna’s performances have demonstrated seemingly impossible physical strength.The New York TimesAt Barclays, she let her dancers do much of the heavy lifting, though she still handled choreography — mostly in heels — for the majority of the show. At times, skipping down the runway with her blonde hair flying behind, she looked like the carefree upstart who flipped the pop world on its head. At others, a hair behind the beat, she looked like a stage veteran who has endured decades of punishing physical labor.“I didn’t think I was going to make it this summer, but here I am,” she told the crowd early on. She saved space in the show for those who didn’t: In a curious tribute to Michael Jackson, a silhouette of the two superstars dancing together was projected as a mix of “Billie Jean” and “Like a Virgin” played. Someone dressed like Prince mimed soloing on one of his signature guitars at the end of “Like a Prayer.” And, movingly, Madonna honored her son David’s birth mother alongside her own when he joined her for “Mother and Father.”David strummed a guitar to that melancholy song from “American Life” as well as to “La Isla Bonita”; her daughter Mercy accompanied her on a grand piano for “Bad Girl.” But otherwise, Madonna eschewed a band for this tour, instead using tracks edited by her longtime collaborator Stuart Price. The choice removed some of the theater of the show and put extra pressure on Madonna’s vocals, which started out raspy and occasionally strained. (For what it’s worth, the crowd didn’t hit the high notes of “Crazy for You,” either.)Madonna eschewed a band for this tour, a decision that emphasized her vocals.The New York TimesMadonna, long a noted perfectionist, seemed looser and chattier throughout the night. Several pauses to address the audience were dotted throughout the set, and she was elated during a playful tribute to the ballroom scene she spotlighted in “Vogue,” which featured her 11-year-old daughter Estere owning the catwalk. For “Ray of Light,” Madonna looked like she had a blast dancing in the confines of the rectangular lift that ferried her above the crowd.Madonna has long known the power of video, and the most effective encapsulation of her impact came in a montage before the show’s penultimate act that stitched together headlines and news reports about her unparalleled ability to shock the world. “The most controversial thing I have ever done is to stick around,” she said in a 2016 speech highlighting how she’s continually had to battle the twin scourges of sexism and ageism.New Yorkers, she noted onstage, don’t like to be told what to do. But perhaps finally pausing to look back has showed her another path forward: her well-earned legacy era. “Something is ending,” she sang in “Nothing Really Matters” as she swooped around the stage alone, “and something begins.” More

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    Madonna Lived to Tell

    Inspired by an Instagram account dedicated to AIDS, the singer mounts a moving and trenchant piece of political theater for her “Celebration” tour.Shining out from the Instagram slag heap, amid the endless A.I. selfies and reaction reels, is an account so quiet in presence and noble in intention that it is sometimes hard to believe it exists. The account, The AIDS Memorial, is an evolving testament, told in photographs, videos and user stories, to lives lost to a devastating and, it can occasionally seem, forgotten epidemic.The stories and photos are of lovers, parents, children, relatives, acquaintances and friends taken by the disease, and they are edited — and more generally guided into existence — by one man, Stuart Armstrong, from his home outside Edinburgh. To date, Mr. Armstrong has posted more than 11,000 of these tales, and if you are aware of them at all, that may owe to one woman: Madonna.The 65-year-old singer was early among the 269,000 followers of The AIDS Memorial. And, if it did not inspire her outright, the Instagram account served as the basis for a showstopping element of her current “Celebration” tour, which comes to Barclays Center in mid-December. That is, a photo montage depicting a fraction of the 40 million people who, according to World Health Organization statistics, have succumbed to the disease.“One of the most successful and important works of AIDS art in our time,” the writer Sarah Schulman — whose 2012 memoir, titled “The Gentrification of the Mind,” depicts 1980s New York in the grip of AIDS — said of The Aids Memorial. By extension, Madonna’s choice to deploy the montage early in each “Celebration” performance as a backdrop for a rendition of the 1986 song “Live to Tell” is as politically trenchant as it is deeply personal. The first image in what proliferates into a vast photo mosaic is of Madonna’s close friend Martin Burgoyne, the British-born artist who managed the singer’s first club tour and who died of AIDS-related complications in 1986 at 23.“One of the things she was saying was that she wanted to pay tribute not just to friends and famous people but to all the people who were lost to the disease,” said Sasha Kasiuha, 29, a Ukraine-born director commissioned by Madonna to orchestrate the video effects. What she also aimed for, Mr. Kasiuha said, was an evocation of the terrors that prevailed in New York and elsewhere during the period from the disease’s first mention in The New York Times in 1981 as an unnamed outbreak of “rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals” to the mid-2000s, when AIDS deaths peaked.Not only did major American metropolises become graveyards, as Madonna (who did not respond to requests to her representatives for comment) posted to her own Instagram account, a significant number of those affected by the disease in the days when a positive H.I.V. diagnosis equaled a death sentence, suffered dreadfully, becoming pariahs as they experienced what the singer characterized as destitution and abandonment by their families.“Two generations of incredible artists were decimated, along with the audiences that understood that art … all gone,” said the D.J. Honey Dijon, who has opened for Madonna on several “Celebration” tour dates. “I think of Madonna and what she lost and endured, and I think her perseverance is admirable.”“They just died and died and died,” Stuart Armstrong said in 2017.Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Live NationBut it was not only artists, as Ms. Schulman said, or people of note. It was ordinary folks from all walks of life and of every gender orientation, so many dead (more than 100,000 in New York City alone) that even memory of them has tended to be erased. “It’s up to the living to carry their name,” she said.Almost by default, the task of keeping those names and remembrances alive in a largely amnesiac culture fell to volunteers like Mr. Armstrong.“I had a personal affinity for the subject, but I kept trying to avoid it,” he said, declining to elucidate. “I thought, I’ll just post a few and see what happens, and then it went on and on and on.”The original 1,000 followers multiplied exponentially after the account was cited in i-D magazine in 2017, where Mr. Armstrong said of the disease’s casualties, “They just died and died and died.”As the numbers grew, so, too, did the stories of women, men and trans people, celebrated or anonymous, some as famous as Freddie Mercury, others as obscure as John Schultz, a writer and apparent hell-rake whose best friend, Katrina del Mar, vividly remembered being eighty-sixed with him at nightspots — like Boots & Saddle and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut — across the city.“Huge emotional moment during Madonna’s #LivetoTell, her moving tribute to all those lost to AIDS especially those that had touched her life,” wrote the Soft Cell singer Marc Almond on Instagram. “When Martin Burgoyne’s face appeared on a huge screen, I’m not ashamed to say that I had tears running down my face.”There are tales of men like Bill Powell of Knoxville, Tenn., “a savior of old buildings, stray dogs and lost souls”; of April Renee Dunaway, seen on Instagram and now in Madonna’s tour performances as a young mother, holding aloft her infant and posted to the account by her child, now the drag performer #trinitythetuck.It was back in April that Madonna’s team began working quietly with Mr. Armstrong to contact and obtain from the original contributors consent to include personal images of their loved ones in the “Celebration” tour. Among the goals, Mr. Kasiuha said, was saving a community marginalized in life from being banished altogether from cultural memory.“Younger audience born after the ’90s didn’t have to experience or know much about what was happening, that feeling of having friends, family all around them dying,” he said. “We wanted to go from the big, strong portraits to images that got smaller and smaller so you could begin to understand the scale.”In all, roughly 300 of these drawn from The AIDS Memorial. And at every performance, as a raft of YouTube videos attest, the emotional reaction has been similar. “People are overwhelmed,” Mr. Kasiuha said. “That was something Madonna emphasized. She wanted to remind people of how precious life is.” More