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

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    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

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      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?

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      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

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      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

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      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

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      15 Great Songs From 1989 (the Year, Not the Album)

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      A playlist celebrating a staggeringly great year in music: Pixies, Janet Jackson, De La Soul, Madonna, Indigo Girls and more.Pixies want you to know that 1989 was really a stunning year in popular music. Gie Knaeps/Getty ImagesDear listeners,Today’s playlist is a homage to the music of 1989. Yes, the year. Why, you ask? Does it have anything to do with … you know … a certain musician rereleasing one of her most popular albums, with a title referencing the year she was born? I have no idea what you’re talking about. I simply wanted to celebrate a staggeringly great year in music.Consider just some of the albums released during this annus mirabilis: “Like a Prayer.” “3 Feet High and Rising.” “Paul’s Boutique.” “Doolittle.” “Rhythm Nation 1814.” “Pretty Hate Machine.” “Disintegration.” “Full Moon Fever.” “The Stone Roses.” “Bleach.” I could go on, but I have a playlist to get to.For brevity’s sake, I limited myself to 15 songs. I left off some artists who have made appearances on previous playlists; I adore “Disintegration,” for example, but I also did an entire Cure playlist a few months ago. Some 1989 hits, too, are so ubiquitous — “Love Shack,” “Free Fallin’,” “Like a Prayer” — that I don’t need to put them on the playlist: You will probably hear them in the next few days as a result of simply going about your life. And some omissions are just personal. As a small child, I was so terrified of Jack Nicholson’s “Joker” in the Tim Burton-directed “Batman” that Prince’s No. 1 hit “Batdance” still kind of creeps me out.That still left plenty of great songs to choose from, though. On this playlist, 1989 reveals itself to be a year when inventive, imaginative sampling had reached the mainstream in the music of Beastie Boys, De La Soul and Public Enemy; a generation of female pop stars like Madonna and Janet Jackson were coming into their power; and the alt-rock wave was beginning to form underground thanks to artists like Pixies and Nirvana.This one will leave you with a new appreciation for a year in which so many great songs were released. Reach out, touch faith, and enjoy the enduring bounty of music from 1989.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Janet Jackson: “Miss You Much”Let’s kick things off with the first single from Janet Jackson’s pop opus “Rhythm Nation 1814,” released in September 1989. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’s unparalleled production really makes this one sound gigantic. (Listen on YouTube)2. De La Soul: “Me Myself and I”Built around a sample of Funkadelic’s “(Not Just) Knee Deep” (among a few other songs), De La Soul’s crossover hit is a playful ode to self-acceptance. (As the group’s Posdnuos put it, “The press was referring to us as the hippies of hip-hop. This song became a way to express that this wasn’t a gimmick, and that we were being ourselves.”) “3 Feet High and Rising,” the debut album featuring this single, ranked No. 1 on the Pazz & Jop Poll, the Village Voice’s (former) annual barometer of critical consensus. (Listen on YouTube)3. The Stone Roses: “She Bangs the Drums”In May 1989, the Manchester pop-rockers the Stone Roses released their beloved, ambitious, and impossible-to-top self-titled debut album. Dreamy, singalong hooks abound, as on this exuberant single. (Listen on YouTube)4. R.E.M.: “Pop Song 89”Though R.E.M.’s sixth album, “Green,” came out in late 1988, I couldn’t resist including this cheekily titled leadoff track, which was — true to its prophecy — released as a single in 1989. (Listen on YouTube)5. Depeche Mode: “Personal Jesus”In a 1990 Spin interview, Martin Gore of Depeche Mode said that the band’s hit from the year before was inspired by Priscilla Presley’s memoir, “Elvis & Me”: “It’s about how Elvis was her man and her mentor and how often that happens in love relationships; how everybody’s heart is like a god in some way,” he said. “We play these godlike parts for people but no one is perfect, and that’s not a very balanced view of someone, is it?” Something tells me he’ll be interested in Sofia Coppola’s upcoming movie “Priscilla,” based on the same source material. (Listen on YouTube)6. Beastie Boys: “Egg Man”Many people still consider “Paul’s Boutique,” Beastie Boys’ ambitious 1989 celebration of the art of sampling, to be the group’s masterpiece. “Egg Man” may be one of the sillier songs on the album — it is, quite literally, about how the mischievous Boys liked to egg people — but the craft that went into its construction is still clear. (Listen on YouTube)7. Love and Rockets: “So Alive”Goth rock was steadily seeping into the mainstream by 1989, as evidenced by the success of the Cure’s ”Disintegration” and this darkly glittering surprise hit from the British alt-rockers Love and Rockets, which hit No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. (Listen on YouTube)8. Madonna: “Cherish”I do not need to remind you that “Like a Prayer” is a great song, so how about this slightly-less-overplayed hit from Madonna’s triumphant fourth album? If there were a Drug Store Music Hall of Fame (and there should be), I would nominate this song. (Listen on YouTube)9. Pixies: “Debaser”Not to get all “High Fidelity,” but “Debaser” — that ecstatically bizarre welcome into the wonderful world of “Doolittle” — has got to be one of the greatest Side 1, Track 1’s ever. (Listen on YouTube)10. Elvis Costello: “Veronica”“Is it all in that pretty little head of yours?” Elvis Costello sings on this bittersweet midcareer hit, inspired by his grandmother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s. “What goes on in that place in the dark?” Co-written with Paul McCartney (which makes sense, given the faint echoes of “Eleanor Rigby”), “Veronica,” which peaked at No. 19 on the Hot 100, became Costello’s highest-charting single in the States. (Listen on YouTube)11. Public Enemy: “Fight the Power”“1989, the number of another summer,” Chuck D begins on this incendiary call to consciousness, written for “Do the Right Thing,” Spike Lee’s film of the same year. “Fight the Power” was a lightning rod upon release, and 34 years later it remains a potent indictment of racism and a richly textured tribute to Black art. (Listen on YouTube)12. Nirvana: “About a Girl”In the summer of 1989, a little-known rock band from Seattle released its debut album, “Bleach,” on the indie label Sub Pop. It would have been hard to predict then that Nirvana’s next studio album would have a seismic effect on the music industry, but the craft of “Bleach” tracks like “About a Girl” certainly displays the nascent songwriting talent of the band’s leader, Kurt Cobain. (Listen on YouTube)13. Galaxie 500: “Strange”Elsewhere beneath the mainstream, the indie trio Galaxie 500 released its great second album, “On Fire,” in October 1989. Though sometimes associated with shoegaze and dream-pop, there’s a sky-scraping boldness and a stirring emotion animating the LP’s fourth track, “Strange.” (Listen on YouTube)14. Kate Bush: “This Woman’s Work”One of the more wrenching songs ever written about childbirth, Kate Bush initially composed “This Woman’s Work” for the 1988 John Hughes movie “She’s Having a Baby.” The following year, she released this slightly different version as the closing track on her album “The Sensual World.” (Don’t sleep on Maxwell’s cover, either.) (Listen on YouTube)15. Indigo Girls: “Closer to Fine”And finally, it’s Barbie’s favorite track on the Indigo Girls’ 1989 self-titled album. Thanks to its inclusion in this summer’s hot-pink blockbuster, “Closer to Fine” is experiencing a well-deserved resurgence, but plenty of soul-searchers have been belting along to it in their cars since ’89. (Listen on YouTube)Don’t know about you, but I am un chien Andalusia,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“15 Great Songs from 1989 (The Year, Not the Album)” track listTrack 1: Janet Jackson, “Miss You Much”Track 2: De La Soul, “Me Myself and I”Track 3: The Stone Roses, “She Bangs the Drums”Track 4: R.E.M., “Pop Song 89”Track 5: Depeche Mode, “Personal Jesus”Track 6: Beastie Boys, “Egg Man”Track 7: Love and Rockets, “So Alive”Track 8: Madonna, “Cherish”Track 9: Pixies, “Debaser”Track 10: Elvis Costello, “Veronica”Track 11: Public Enemy, “Fight the Power”Track 12: Nirvana, “About a Girl”Track 13: Galaxie 500, “Strange”Track 14: Kate Bush, “This Woman’s Work”Track 15: Indigo Girls, “Closer to Fine”Bonus TracksIf you’re looking to read something about that other 1989 thing, well … I wrote about its most provocatively titled “From the Vault” track.I also — busy week — published a profile of the independent-minded Gen Z pop star PinkPantheress, who graciously did not make fun of me for not going on as many roller coasters as she did while I was reporting this story. Bless her for that.Plus, if you’re looking for some new music as an alternative to that big release that shall not be named, let Jon Pareles and Giovanni Russonello provide you with some recommendations, from artists like Mr Eazi, Kevin Sun, Silvana Estrada and more. More

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      Madonna Kicks Off Celebration Tour in London

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      After a health-related delay, the pop superstar launched her Celebration Tour in London with a performance devoted to her full catalog of hits.They wore pearls with crucifixes, lace gloves, tulle skirts and body-sculpting corsets. Some even crimped their hair and drew on fake beauty moles, while others wore simple white T-shirts with only the letter M on the back. Spanning generations, the concertgoers arriving at the O2 Arena in London used Saturday night as an opportunity to dress in their favorite Madonna era, even if that was decades before they were born.Madonna, 65, is on the road for the first time since 2020 with her global Celebration Tour, a stage spectacle touching on more than 40 of her hits across four decades. The show opened at the O2, a 20,000-capacity arena, three months after its planned first date, following a health scare for the pop icon. In June, Madonna was hospitalized shortly before the tour’s scheduled debut in Canada. At the time, her manager said she had a “serious bacterial infection” that resulted in the singer staying in an intensive care unit for several days.Madonna swore that the tour — her first devoted to her full catalog of hits, rather than to a specific album release — would go on. In recent weeks, she has filled her Instagram account with tantalizing, and very on-brand, images from rehearsals, showing her dressed in a lacy black bustier, practicing onstage steps and resting her fishnet-clad knees.Fans waited out a 30-minute delay before Madonna arrived onstage in London, opening with a medley of hits before acknowledging the challenges that had led to the moment. “How did I make it this far? Because of you,” she said, adding, “But I will take a bit of credit, too.”Fans of the pop star Madonna taking pictures in front of her posters outside the O2 Arena in London.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesIt was clear from the beginning that this concert would be as much a journey through Madonna’s career as it would a bona fide dance party. Set on an elaborate stage that jutted out into the audience, several hanging retractable screens showed images of the singer. At other times, they displayed powerful portraits, as when she launched into “Live to Tell” and the screens displayed images of Freddie Mercury, Arthur Ashe and more people who died from AIDS.For more than two hours, with the help of her dancers and some of her six children, Madonna blazed through her catalog of songs, singing several hits like “Holiday,” “Like a Prayer,” “Hung Up,” “Ray of Light” and “Bad Girl.” Her costumes were sexy, religious and futuristic.Though the show had been in the works for months, it was not without technical difficulties. Early on, Madonna paused the show so the sound could be reset. She entertained the audience during the delay by speaking at length about her rise to stardom while technicians worked behind the scenes. Later in the show, between songs, Madonna expressed concern for those affected by violence in Israel and the Gaza Strip. “It breaks my heart to see children suffering, teenagers suffering, elderly people suffering, all of it is heartbreaking,” she said. “Even though our hearts are broken, our spirits cannot be broken.”When the tour was announced in January, it immediately became one of the year’s big-ticket events. But it appears to be far from sold out.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesMadonna also reflected on her health struggles this year. “I forgot five days of my life, or my death,” she said. “I don’t really know where I was, but the angels were protecting me.“If you want to know my secret, and you want to know how I pull through and how I survive, I thought, ‘I’ve got to be there for my children. I have to survive for them,’” she said. She then led the crowd in a singalong of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”The 24 performers onstage notably did not include a live band: Stuart Price, the tour’s musical director, told the BBC that “the original recordings are our stars.” The stage, which encompasses 4,400 square feet, was designed to echo Manhattan neighborhoods, as well as the wedding cake from Madonna’s 1984 MTV Video Music Awards performance of “Like a Virgin.” During the show, she is swept across the venue in a square-framed box 30 feet off the ground.Carla Nobre, 38, of Nottingham said that seeing Madonna in concert had been on her bucket list, but that she had been disappointed with the performance.“There was too much talking,” she said.Jenni Purple, 54, from the southern coast of England said the concert, which was her first time seeing Madonna live, had been “absolutely incredible.” “I loved all the medleys, I loved the costumes, I loved all the dances,” she said with a broad smile. “Everything was just mind-blowing.”In the past, Madonna’s tours have been news-making events tied as much to her latest music as to her cycle of stylistic reinventions. But Celebration is essentially the pop superstar’s Eras Tour, as Taylor Swift has styled her latest outing: a staged romp through decades of hit songs and signature looks, giving fans a chance to relive her career as a stages-of-life experience. (Seventeen of Madonna’s previous costumes were recreated for the tour, and some of the merchandise for sale includes replicas from past treks.)With her Virgin Tour in 1985, Madonna introduced herself as a punk-glam dance star whose every crucifix pendant or flap of denim was zealously adopted by fans. Who’s That Girl (1987) and Blond Ambition (1990) grew increasingly elaborate as Madonna pushed the fashion envelope with looks like Jean Paul Gaultier’s memorable cone bra and set the bar for bold, imaginative pop megatours. The Girlie Show (1993), in which Madonna appeared as a dominatrix, was the accompaniment to a period of daringly explicit material like her “Sex” book and “Justify My Love” video, which was banned from MTV.After an eight-year absence from the road, Drowned World (2001) reintroduced Madonna as a new mother, an electro-pop heroine and an acolyte of kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism. In more recent years, her Confessions Tour (2006) cast her in late-70s disco style, and Rebel Heart (2015-16) found her playing guitar, in addition to executing the complex choreography for which she is known. Her most recent tour, Madame X, which was cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic, saw Madonna looking to reinvent her stage performance once again in a more intimate, almost cabaret form, mostly eschewing arenas for spaces like the Brooklyn Academy of Music.For Madonna, the 78-date Celebration Tour is a chance to assert her star power in a year when live music has been dominated by Swift and Beyoncé — women who, like Madonna before them, have used talent and deep media savvy to remake pop stardom in their own image. In July, Beyoncé acknowledged the debt, when Madonna, making one of her first public appearances after her hospitalization, attended Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour in New Jersey. “Big shout-out to the queen,” Beyoncé called out during a performance of the “Queens Remix” of her song “Break My Soul,” which blends in Madonna’s 1990 smash “Vogue” — another hit that mined, and honored, gay dance culture of that period.Madonna returned the acknowledgment on Saturday, playing a bit of the same remix during an interstitial moment.(From left to right) Iien McNeil, Susie Petersen, Maria Belova and Suzy Burroughs posing in front of the venue before the show.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesWhen Madonna’s latest tour was announced in January, it immediately became one of the year’s big-ticket events — and yielded a micro-flood of hot takes about the singer’s age. But the tour appears to be far from sold out; Ticketmaster still shows many seats available at some major venues like Barclays Center in Brooklyn, where Madonna will start the North American leg of the tour with three shows in December.Back in 2009, Madonna’s Sticky & Sweet Tour set box-office records when it sold more than $400 million in tickets. Since then, the economics of live music have exploded; Beyoncé has already well exceeded that amount with her Renaissance shows, and Swift may well sell close to $2 billion in tickets by the time her Eras Tour is completed.Legacy has clearly been on Madonna’s mind lately. Last month, the 1989 Pepsi commercial that introduced her song “Like a Prayer” — before it was pulled amid outrage over its music video, which featured an interracial kiss and the singer dancing in front of burning crosses — was finally aired again during the MTV Video Music Awards.Maia and Aisha Letamendia Moore, 17-year-old twin sisters, wore looks that drew from the Like a Virgin and Vogue eras.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesMadonna, who had been paid $5 million for the promotion — and kept the money — said on social media: “So began my illustrious career as an artist refusing to compromise my artistic integrity.” She added, “Thank you @pepsi for finally realizing the genius of our collaboration. Artists are here to disturb the peace.”It was clearly on fans’ minds as well. Aisha and Maia Letamendia Moore, 17-year-old twins from southern England, near Brighton, wore looks that drew on the Vogue and Like a Virgin eras. “I think she’s such an influence,” Maia said. “She did so many things that were so controversial. She wasn’t scared to do it, she wasn’t scared what people would say.”Others mentioned rumors that Celebration could be Madonna’s last tour. Helen Dawson, 47, who said she first saw Madonna during the Who’s That Girl Tour in 1987, would abide no such thought. “Never, she won’t give up,” Ms. Dawson said. “This is just a new celebration, a new era.” More

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      ‘Holidays,’ a Madonna Musical, Pays Tribute to the Star

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      “Holidays,” the first musical to include the pop icon’s songs, arrives just days before her “Celebration” tour starts. But matching the star’s talents is a challenge.Two lovers belting “Open Your Heart.” A misunderstood woman exhorting a roaring audience to “Express Yourself.” A gay wedding extravaganza set to “Like A Prayer.”No, this isn’t a preview of the stage antics in Madonna’s highly anticipated “Celebration” tour, which starts Saturday in London, at the O2 Arena. In Paris, the French stage director Nathan Guichet has started the party early with “Holidays,” a plucky new musical inspired by the global pop icon.It’s a wonder no Madonna jukebox musical has made it to the stage until now. Her back catalog brims with highly theatrical songs, and if “Holidays” is any indication, it doesn’t take a big-budget, bells-and-whistles production to get admirers of the pop icon to buy tickets.This two-hour show, which is set to run at the Alhambra theater through Jan. 28, features just four performers and one (very pink) set.Guichet has woven 15 Madonna songs into a fictional script performed in French. It is centered on four childhood friends, with somewhat contrived results: A number of twists and turns clearly exist to shoehorn songs into the show. (A character somehow lands in San Pedro, the island mentioned in “La Isla Bonita,” solely to cue Madonna’s 1986 track.) Yet by the end of a recent performance, Parisians were on their feet, fully hung up on Madonna nostalgia.Madonna performing during her Blond Ambition tour, in Rotterdam in 1990. “Holidays” tries to capture the star’s many talents.Gie Knaeps/Getty ImagesThe French capital is an unlikely setting for the first Madonna musical. Still, the newfound popularity of American-style musicals in France means there is a hunger for new titles, while producing costs are lower than on Broadway. “Holidays” came together in a year or so with a budget hovering around $1 million, according to its lead producer, Stéphane Pontacq. (For comparison, Broadway’s “Jagged Little Pill,” a jukebox musical inspired by the music of Alanis Morissette, was capitalized for up to $14 million in 2019.)Guichet, who has directed and produced original productions including a ”reimagining of “The Snow Queen,” said in an email that he was inspired by an interview Madonna gave to The Daily Star newspaper in 2012. “I’d sanction my songs to be made into a musical,” she said at the time. “But I wouldn’t do it myself, I don’t think that would interest me.”“Holidays” premiered just as global curiosity surrounds Madonna, who turned 65 in August. In June, she postponed “Celebration,” her 12th world tour, because of what her manager called a “serious bacterial infection.” The U.S. leg of the tour has now been rescheduled to start in December, following a series of concerts in Europe.There is little doubt that “Celebration” will be a lavish affair: Delivering a show to remember is what Madonna does, and has been doing consistently for four decades. Part of the challenge, when staging a tribute like “Holidays,” is trying to match her many talents.It is clear from the singing numbers in “Holidays,” all set to recorded music, that Madonna’s history of gutsy performances has challenge the performers to go above and beyond. The four women who carry the show all have moments of brilliance, and work hard to make the often dubious script shine.In it, a young heiress who is about to get married, Louise, gathers three friends she hasn’t seen in well over a decade. Their passion for Madonna united the quartet as teenagers, and every year, on Aug. 16, Madonna’s birthday, they would come to mark that special “holiday.”They reconvene as adults in Louise’s childhood home in a French village, which features a full-on Madonna altar: an eccentric pink bedroom suite designed for the girls by Louise’s doting father, covered in portraits of their idol.It takes a while for the four characters to gel. Louise, played by Juliette Behar, starts off as a manic pixie blonde, a “Material Girl” proxy with an over-excited delivery. Of her three friends, one, Valentina (Fanny Delaigue), has become a mysterious, provocative star in the United States, not unlike Madonna herself; another, Nikki, is a travel blogger with a history of family abuse. The fourth, Suzanne, is the proverbial underdog, who stayed in their local town and is stuck in underpaid jobs.The production weaves together Madonna songs into a fictional story centered on four childhood friends.NeibaPhotoThroughout, the main thing the four women have in common is Madonna. What “Holidays” gets right is what the star represents for many women: A sense of freedom and empowerment, the belief that they could break free of existing norms. It quickly becomes clear that Louise and her future husband don’t see eye to eye, and her friends encourage her to think beyond what is expected of her. Similarly, in a nod to Madonna’s longstanding L.G.B.T.Q. activism, a gay romance links two of the four friends, and blossoms movingly with the song “Secret.”“Holidays” isn’t a Madonna-backed venture. Promotional material for the production names her as infrequently as possible and the playbill’s plot summary only refers to the “famous pop star” who inspired the main characters. Luckily for the producers, it doesn’t take much to telegraph the mystery star’s identity. The poster art for “Holidays” closely mirrors one of Madonna’s best-known portraits, with her head tilted back and eyes closed on the cover of her 1986 album “True Blue.”Still, as fan tributes go, “Holidays” is a welcome reminder that Madonna’s catalog has rare staying power — and offers space for others to make their mark onstage. As Suzanne, Ana Ka brings serious vocal chops to the table, and lends heart to a character that could easily feel miserabilist.And the charismatic Nevedya, a budding musical star in France who recently headlined a production inspired by Josephine Baker, takes the role of Nikki and runs with it. A consummate dancer and singer, she brought striking arm flourishes and even a death drop to a “Vogue” number that otherwise felt a little timid, and in her hands, “Papa Don’t Preach” became a powerful plea to a father attempting to clip her wings.Madonna herself will be in Paris with “Celebration” in November. Until then, “Holidays” is an entertainingly upbeat stand-in. More

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      Book Review: ‘Madonna: A Rebel Life,’ by Mary Gabriel

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      Mary Gabriel’s biography is as thorough as its subject is disciplined. But in relentlessly defending the superstar, where’s the party?MADONNA: A Rebel Life, by Mary Gabriel“I want to be alone,” Greta Garbo’s dancer character famously said in “Grand Hotel,” a quote permanently and only semi-accurately attached to the actress after she retreated from public life. Garbo was first on the list of Golden Agers in one of Madonna’s biggest hits, “Vogue,” but the pop star has long seemed to embody this maxim’s very opposite. She wants to be surrounded, as if with Dolby sound.“Before Madonna even had a manager, she had a court of valets and minstrels following her everywhere,” the record executive Seymour Stein observed.Though technically a solo vocalist, Madonna has been backed by dancers from the beginning of her career in the early 1980s. She has six children: two biological, four adopted from Malawi. Many more consider themselves her spiritual offspring: gay men to whom she’s been den mother; younger female performers she’s inspired.And she’s trooped around the world with an elastic entourage of friends, writers, producers, directors, handlers, photographers, publicists, reporters and fans, all of whom helpfully populate Mary Gabriel’s big, indignant new biography of her: a dogged, brick-by-brick bulwark against any detractors bobbing in the moat of her castle.“Madonna: A Rebel Life” is one of those books you measure in pounds, not pages: almost three, which would have been more if the publisher hadn’t decided to post the endnotes and bibliography online rather than printing them. It’s not going to fit on the little shelf of the StairMaster at the gym — a classically Madonna piece of exercise equipment — though you might hoist it afterward for wrist curls.If you wander into an aerobics class instead, not only are chances high that the instructor will play a song from Madonna’s catalog, but she’ll probably be wearing a hands-free headset microphone — and that is muy Madonna as well. As Gabriel notes, though the technology was used before by pilots and Kate Bush, it was her subject who popularized it on her 1989 “Blond Ambition” tour.For this book, though, the woman born Madonna Louise Ciccone in 1958, the same year as Prince and Michael Jackson, stayed quiet. Her voice is piped through from plentiful previous interviews, recorded performances and the occasional post on Instagram, where early in the pandemic she outcringed the Gal Gadot “Imagine” video with one of herself naked in a bath amid floating rose petals, declaring Covid-19 “the great equalizer.”The closest Gabriel gets to Madonna in the actual flesh is half a dozen conversations with her brother, Christopher Ciccone, whose best-selling 2008 memoir, “Life With My Sister Madonna,” caused at least temporary estrangement between the siblings, longtime professional collaborators. (Madonna’s sense of betrayal is hard to jibe with her ardent defense of free personal expression.)Gabriel also talks to 30-odd other sources, surprisingly few for the scope of the work, and turns up a few interesting archived nuggets, such as Norman Mailer, in an early draft of the more than 200 he wrote for a 1994 Esquire profile, describing Madonna as a “pint‐size” Italian American (he used an ethnic slur instead) “with a heart built out of the cast‐iron balls of a hundred peasant ancestors.”Previous Madonnagraphers have either been breathily unauthorized — Andrew Morton, J. Randy Taraborrelli — or taken a more “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” approach; universities have offered entire courses on her. Gabriel brings extra intellectual cred to the task. “Love and Capital,” her book about Karl Marx and his wife, Jenny, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award; her group portrait of five female painters, “Ninth Street Women,” was rhapsodically received. But she doesn’t describe her own connection to this project, as she did the others, and this reader was left wondering if it might be less love than capital.Not that Gabriel doesn’t make a diligent case for Madonna’s cultural importance: inviting us to consider, for example, her Mylar-encased coffee-table book “Sex,” pummeled with judgment when it was published in 1992, in the same light as James Baldwin’s novel “Giovanni’s Room.” She airs at length the praise of the curator Jeffrey Deitch, who worked with Madonna on a 2013 multimedia installation called “X‐STaTIC PRo=CeSS.”Maybe we’ve all miscast Madonna as the Queen of Pop — a dubious analogue to Aretha Franklin’s Queen of Soul — and she’s closer, on a mass scale, to Karen Finley, the performance artist who used to smear her nude body in chocolate or honey? Indeed, describing the period Madonna lived in Miami, Gabriel writes of her “daily ritual of covering herself in honey and jumping into Biscayne Bay, where she floated until the honey melted away,” with no apparent concern for sharks.“Madonna: A Rebel Life” is organized as a busy, seven-decade, mostly urban travel itinerary. Like Franklin, Madonna lost her mother early and was raised in Detroit, where her father, who also had half a dozen children, “thought we should always be productive,” she said. Her Barbie would tell Ken: “I’m not gonna stay home and do the dishes. You stay home! I’m going out tonight. I’m going bowling, OK, so forget it!” Among her formative influences were J.D. Salinger and Anne Sexton (literary); the Shangri-Las and David Bowie (musical); Martha Graham and Frida Kahlo (visual). “The sight of her mustache consoled me,” she said of the latter.I might be biased as a native who craved rubber bracelets and lace socks and waited to hear if FM radio played “Borderline” through the “la-la-la-la,” but the section when Madonna arrives in New York City, though well trafficked, is one of the most compelling in this book. She eats French fries out of garbage cans; learns guitar at an abandoned synagogue in Flushing Meadows nicknamed “the Gog”; brings a demo tape to the DJ booth at Danceteria; and, signed by Stein from his hospital bed, hangs with a “coterie” of artists that included Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. She was also raped at knife point on a rooftop, an ordeal not publicly aired until the punishing Abel Ferrara film “Dangerous Game” in 1993.Having segued to Hollywood (and later Broadway and the West End), she gave the middle finger to its male establishment: walking away from an early marriage to Sean Penn, cursing out David Letterman on the air and roundly shushing Harvey Weinstein when he offers feedback on “Truth or Dare,” her 1991 documentary. (“I don’t care what your point of view is,” she tells him. “I never want to hear it. Who the hell are you to tell me what kind of film I should be doing?”) Her onetime paramour Warren Beatty, who directed her in “Dick Tracy,” mocked how she wanted to live on-camera all the time; who with an iPhone now does otherwise?Madonna is rightly celebrated here as a pioneer of AIDS education — she lost countless friends to the disease — and a genuine philanthropist. But as she grows more practiced with the press and isolated by her fame, the book softens and suffers. The muchness of Madonna, her cross-disciplinarity — from MTV to “Evita” — seems impossible to corral.Madonna’s drug is work — she makes a discipline of even decadence — and “A Rebel Life” increasingly becomes a litany of remote description and tabulation: boundaries crossed, records broken, shows staged, money made, countries visited, foreign cultures sampled. “All artists appropriate,” is how Gabriel defends her against a frequent charge. “It is called inspiration.”Clichés sneak into her prose. Madonna is burning the candle at both ends, igniting a firestorm and is a lightning rod for controversy. She has never taken the road most traveled, but does take a long hard look in the mirror.Speaking of mirrors: Gabriel acknowledges Madonna’s talent for self-reinvention, but oddly ignores her transformation after cosmetic procedures and the resultant backlash — a sensitive matter to parse, but hardly irrelevant for someone whose oeuvre has been so entwined with image. “I’m going to make it easier for all those girls behind me when they turn 60,” the star said when promoting her 2019 album, “Madame X.” Well, some of those girls want to know why she can’t shake her skull-topped cane at the anti-aging industrial complex.“A Rebel Life” hits its marks but rarely soars, as Madonna did suspended by cables during her Drowned World tour. (Rather, the book is submerged in names, places and dates and historical exposition.) Then again, assessing Madonna’s legacy before she has a chance to recover from recent health setbacks may be an impossibly premature endeavor.“The verdict time and again would be that she had gone too far, that her career was over,” Gabriel writes. “Time and again, the jury was wrong.”MADONNA: A Rebel Life | By Mary Gabriel | Illustrated | 858 pp. | Little, Brown & Company | $38 More