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20-09-2009, 05:36 PM
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#1 | |||
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Frozen
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The poll to vote for your fave Madonna song here
http://www.thisisbigbrother.com/foru...php?tid=147882 |
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20-09-2009, 05:41 PM
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#2 | |||
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Frozen
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Madonna: a rare and candid interview with the Queen of Pop
Madonna shows Dan Cairns all too clearly who is in control - of her life, her astonishing 27-year career, and their meeting. The British nerve centre for Madonna Inc is to be found in two adjoining townhouses in central London. The buildings are a home for the singer and her four children when they are in this country, plus offices and a personal gym. From the outside, the six-storey edifices are standard-issue London mansions — that is, way beyond the standards most of us are accustomed to. There is something impregnable about such streets: an air of discreet luxury pervades them. Litter seems not to blow or rattle down their immaculate expanses; no chewing gum or urgently expelled kebab encrusts their gleaming paving stones. You might glance up at Madonna’s perfect residential pair and admire their symmetry, the cleanness of their architectural lines. But you would be more likely, unless you were a lurking paparazzo, not even to notice them; they are merely two houses in a long, wide street of the things. Anonymous, ordered, well maintained and with a touch of class. Madonna wouldn’t have it any other way. “Where do you live?” she asks when we meet later. Dalston, I say. The name doesn’t register. Stoke Newington, I add as a pointer. “That’s not even in London,” she scoffs. And it isn’t, to be fair. Or not in this London, at any rate. The evening before I walk down her street and ring the doorbell, I visit another imposing building near the singer’s home. A few days earlier, a leaflet had been thrust into my hand. “It’s a Sign,” it read, and considering that it went on to invite the bearer to an introductory talk on kabbalah at the centre Madonna bought for the organisation six years ago, it seemed just that. The lecture offered an hour-long precis of what cynics would dismiss as woolly mumbo jumbo. One per cent of each of us is concerned with our corporal beings; concentrate on the remaining 99%, the speaker suggests, and we locate the key to a spiritually nourishing life. There is, however, an impression of calm, wellbeing, even complacency. And Madonna, as even a cursory knowledge of her questing, controversy-courting 27-year career will attest, needs calm. Because the opposite of calm, of control, is? “Chaos,” she says later. “Pain, suffering.” We are meeting to discuss Celebration, the two-disc, 36-track greatest-hits collection that marks Madonna’s final contractual obligation to her record label before she skips off into the $120m embrace of Live Nation, the American concert promoters. Conditions have been imposed: no questions about adoption, about her divorce, about her love life, her faith; discussion is to be confined to her music. Refereeing the joust is the singer’s longtime American publicist, a formidable, don’t-mess-with-me powerhouse named Liz Rosenberg, whose manner, if not appearance, puts one instantly and inescapably in mind of the character of Roz, the giant snail in the film Monsters Inc, with her catch phrase: “I’m watching you, Wazowski. Always watching.” She has worked for the singer pretty much from the moment, in 1982, when Madonna was first handed the keys to the candy store of stardom. “By the way,” Madonna says at one point, “my dream was always to work in a candy store. It was because of my obsession with candy; I don’t have it any more, now that my teeth are all rotten. I did go to a university for a year, as shocking as that might sound to people, and there was a candy shop that I used to go to all the time, an old-fashioned one where all the candy was in these big glass jars. I used to go in there and look at all the candy and think, ‘God, it would be really cool to work in here; I could have candy whenever I wanted.’ So I did want the keys to the candy store, but I had different keys.” Confectionery’s loss, pop’s gain. In Life with My Sister Madonna, Christopher Ciccone’s bitchy and embittered memoir, the singer’s brother recounts how every single minute of his sister’s day is planned and accounted for. Today, however, that schedule has gone awry. Seconds before I am due at her front door, a call comes through advising me to delay by 15 minutes. Which I duly do, only to be parked in the reception hall for a further quarter of an hour. It gives me a chance to take a look around. As I wait, Madonna appears briefly before descending to the basement, from which various sounds drift up: a peal of throaty laughter; a burst of her new single; and the noise of a vacuum cleaner. Is she catching up on housework, geed up by one of her own songs on the stereo and skipping round, Dyson in hand? Unlikely, but it’s an appealing image. In the hall where I wait, a painting by the 17th-century Dutch baroque artist Gerrit Dou hangs on one of the walls, which are covered with blue brushed velvet. On another wall, a pair of circular canvases show a troupe of pierrots, rope-dancing. Scented Christian Dior candles fill the air in a space so dimly lit, it seems both slightly theatrical and quasi-religious. A huge telephone with multiple extensions bears labels such as M study, M dressing room, M bathroom, Laundry, Music Room, Kitchen, Mews. The picture is one of great wealth combined with logistical and organisational rigour. Discipline, control, precision. “And that’s the definition of me?” Madonna says later, finishing my out-loud train of thought. “Yeah, but I don’t even think, when people write that, that they really believe it. I just think people are tapping into a zeitgeist and repeating things they’ve heard other people say; and it makes good copy.” Our encounter finally gets under way in Madonna’s study, an all-grey room with a Frida Kahlo painting above the huge art-deco desk, glass shelves bearing art books and family photographs, and two semi-facing armchairs, on which we sit. In the flesh, in black trousers and a sleeveless shirt, the 51-year-old is tiny, even in heels, and pretty, her face somehow more animated and readable than you expect, her features forming into butter-wouldn’t-melt or knowingly ironic expressions as she talks. Her accent is noticeably clipped, with a Queen’s English clarity, a result of the amount of time she began to spend in this country following her marriage to Guy Ritchie. For a good 10 minutes, her discomfort is visible, a hand covering her face as she answers. And when, during this initial awkwardness, I lean into the space between us to emphasise a point, I sense without any room for doubt that I have crossed an invisible line. You begin to understand why people are so in awe of her: you wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of her frosty glares. Does that mean, I ask at one point, that we have stopped treating her as a mere mortal? “A lot of people are just really confused by me,” she says. “They don’t know what to think of me, so they try to compartmentalise me or diminish me. Maybe they just feel unsafe. But any time you have an overtly emotional or irrational, negative reaction to something, you’re fearing something that it’s bringing up in you.” She pauses and looks over at Rosenberg. “Let’s all call our shrinks right now and have that discussion. Liz?” When, last year, an American magazine writer profiled Madonna and wrote “Think back on her career. It’s not songs you remember, or not primarily”, you knew what he meant. Videos, film roles, marriages, haircuts, children, charity work: all carry visual freight that has often seemed to overshadow Madonna’s original claim to fame. But doesn’t Celebration, I suggest, indicate that the songs figured in there somewhere, too? That writer, Rosenberg barks suddenly from behind the desk, “is an arsehole”. “Those are harsh words,” Madonna chides, unable to suppress a laugh. “I don’t know, I guess it depends on what side of the fence you’re on. Some people don’t appreciate my music, so they’re not going to think of me as a musician or songwriter. They like to think of me as a sort of cultural phenomenon.” So people listen to her songs and react visually, more than emotionally or musically? “Right — ‘That’s when she had the cone bra on’, ‘That’s the burning-crosses song’. That kind of stuff. I suppose that’s partly my fault.” And when we sift through the milestones of her career, we look for, what? Motivation, irony? “Manipulation, provocation,” she says. Another commentator wrote that Madonna’s “ability to absorb and incorporate knowledge keeps her one step ahead”. Certainly, her instincts about music, fashion and future cultural trends have proved uncanny. But doesn’t this concentration on her skill for assimilation overlook what she herself does with that knowledge? “Well, yeah,” she replies. “We can all take in information. It’s how we regurgitate it that makes us different. Right?” And might concentrating on the absorption remove her own subsequent input from the equation? “Well, it’s an undermining thing to do, isn’t it?” She laughs. “Isn’t that the point of the exercise?” I ask her about her early days in New York in the late 1970s, where she arrived, penniless and a university dropout, to pursue a career as a dancer. And where she earned a reputation as a stop-at-nothing, man*ipulative, sexually promiscuous wannabe, discarding managers, bandmates and boyfriends on a whim. Five years of hard graft, thrift, ruthlessness and opportunism paid off when she signed a record contract in 1982. But they also marked her, indelibly, as an artist; indeed, from the way she talks about the period, you get the sense that, no matter the rumoured Ł300m fortune, the art collection, the toy boy, the record-breaking tours (her most recent, Sticky & Sweet, grossed a staggering $408m), there is a part of Madonna that is still motivated by the cross-fertilisation and experimentalism of early-1980s New York. Physically, she left it long ago. Artistically, she’s still there, in her own imagination at least: zooming around taking on influences and collaborators, draining them dry, moving on, a cultural magpie. The budgets, and the headlines, have got bigger; the spirit, she argues, remains. “The city will never be the same,” she says. “It was an amazing time, an amazing convergence of pop culture and art. To think I used to have dinner on a regular basis with Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. That was like an everyday thing. It was a much more informative part of my life than most of the parts people choose to focus on. I got to do gigs at places like CBGB before I got put underneath the microscope, and that was helpful to me, as an artist, and also to give me a sense of confidence about myself — regardless of the subsequent beatings I would take.” Madonna contra mundum? It’s a condition you find in many artists, a willed psychological state that pumps them up before they rescale the heights with each successive album or tour. The affirmation of album sales — Madonna is the most successful female recording artist of all time — cannot shake such people from a sense of victimhood, of being misunderstood or under*appreciated. Possibly, this is rooted in the belief that what they create is ineffably trivial. That might explain why some, especially the intellectually curious (or insecure), dabble in a multitude of other arts disciplines or gather around them the appurtenances of cultural refinement and significance. (How revealing, after all, is that “I did go to a university for a year, as shocking as that might sound to people”?) http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle6836901.ece |
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20-09-2009, 06:49 PM
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#4 | |||
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****
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Cool interview
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20-09-2009, 06:53 PM
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#5 | |||
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Senior Member
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Not a fan of Madonna at all, though I like some of her old songs. But I just heared Revolver on my friends' phone and I love... reminds me of Britney's 'Radar' :P
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21-09-2009, 04:10 PM
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#9 | |||
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Frozen
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Me with Celebration
http://i36.tinypic.com/112bf2t.jpg We with single and album http://i38.tinypic.com/35k67vl.jpg Photography isnt my strong point shown with my sad face. |
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21-09-2009, 04:12 PM
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#10 | |||
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Senior Member
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[rquote=2596114&tid=109695&author=Harry.]Me with Celebration
http://i36.tinypic.com/112bf2t.jpg We with single and album http://i38.tinypic.com/35k67vl.jpg Photography isnt my strong point shown with my sad face.[/rquote] Yay, wel all love Madge 
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21-09-2009, 04:17 PM
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#11 | |||
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Frozen
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Celebration on iTunes Albums charts – Today
Australia – #4 Austria – #5 Belgium – #3 Denmark – #3 Finland – #4 France – #4 Germany – #4 Greece – #1 Ireland – #5 Italy – #1 Luxembourg – #5 Netherlands – #4 New Zealand – #4 Norway – #3 Portugal – #1 Sweden – #2 Switzerland – #8 UK – #3 |
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21-09-2009, 05:58 PM
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#12 | |||
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Frozen
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Madonna launches four-week MSN campaign
Warner Brothers Music has launched a four-week campaign for Madonna’s greatest hits album with the first takeover of the MSN Artist of the Month slot. The campaign for the Celebration album and DVD will feature up to 45 video clips hosted across the portal, as Madonna takes over the prime editorial slot on MSN Music. The release also features across MSN Messenger and Video. Surrounding activity, planned by media agency ZenithOptimedia, includes display activity across sites such as Heat, MySpace and Popjustice. The campaign will also be tied into existing Facebook and Twitter profiles. Katherine Parrott, marketing manager at Warner Brothers Music, said new video was being distributed throughout the campaign to maintain high levels of interest from fans. 'By taking over the Artist of the Month slot it acts as a long-term offering to remind people it’s out,' she said. 'We wanted to try something a bit different and used the success we had online in the past with Lily Allen campaigns.' To view the Artist of the Month page visit events.uk.msn.com/music/madonna-celebration 
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21-09-2009, 08:06 PM
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#13 | |||
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Frozen
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Put your face on the "Celebration" album cover in just a few clicks of your mouse at celebrate.madonna.com, the new webpage at Madonna's official website that is ready to spread the Celebration mania around the net.
Click http://celebrate.madonna.com/ to visit the site!  Here is one I made eailer...  |
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21-09-2009, 08:28 PM
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#14 | |||
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Jaydaughter
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21-09-2009, 08:33 PM
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#16 | |||
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Frozen
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[rquote=2596950&tid=109695&author=MiuMiu]I'm officially jelous Harry.
I'll be waiting for my copy of the album for a few weeks thanks to those lazy peeps at the radio station lol!   [/rquote]Time goes by so slowly.... Hope you get it soon xxx |
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21-09-2009, 08:39 PM
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#17 | ||
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Senior Member
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[rquote=2596954&tid=109695&author=Harry.][rquote=2596950&tid=109695&author=MiuMiu]I'm officially jelous Harry.
I'll be waiting for my copy of the album for a few weeks thanks to those lazy peeps at the radio station lol! [/rquote]Time goes by so slowly.... Hope you get it soon xxx[/rquote] So slowly....  Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock Break down now! (As in, I'll have a breakdown if I don't get it soon!)  Aw thanx!  
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21-09-2009, 10:53 PM
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#20 | ||
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Senior Member
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[rquote=2597259&tid=109695&author=001steven]Brought celebration today, it's no.1 asda, I'm addicted to Revolver and Strangly Hollywood[/rquote]
Hollywood is a great song!!!! One of my Fav's  The "Push the button. Don't push the button. Trip the station. Change the channel." where he voice gets deeper and deeper is my favourite bit from any Madonna song. |
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22-09-2009, 04:16 PM
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#22 | |||
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Frozen
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Chart Celebration ahead for Madonna
Madonna is looking to equal Elvis Presley’s total of 11 UK album number ones this weekend with her new retrospective Celebration opening up a narrow lead at retail. The double set is presently a few thousand sales ahead of its nearest rival, fellow Warner Bros release The Resistance by Muse, which debuted at one last Sunday. If Celebration remains in front it will place Madonna in joint second place with Presley behind The Beatles with the most UK chart-topping albums. Her tally of 10 album number ones dates back to 1984’s Like A Virgin and also takes in the Evita soundtrack, which features both her and other artists. Madonna’s album leads another bumper week of new releases with four other newly-issued albums among the 10 biggest sellers of the week so far. These include Dizzee Rascal’s new Dirtee Skank-issued album Tongue N’ Cheek, which features his three number one singles, Casablanca/Island act Mika’s second album The Boy Who Knew Too Much and Pearl Jam’s Island debut Backspacer. source: musicweek |
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22-09-2009, 04:30 PM
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#23 | ||
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Senior Member
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Oh dear!
Looks like Madge has some stiff competition. It could be Muse. They're music is savage. It could be Dizzie, backed by his 3 number 1 tracks "Dance wiv me", "Bonkers" and "Holiday" Or it could be Mika. His last album sold millions which was quite a shock. I hope Madonna gets it! But it's not going to be easy.
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22-09-2009, 04:31 PM
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#24 | |||
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Frozen
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[rquote=2598447&tid=109695&author=MiuMiu]Oh dear!
Looks like Madge has some stiff competition. It could be Muse. They're music is savage. It could be Dizzie, backed by his 3 number 1 tracks "Dance wiv me", "Bonkers" and "Holiday" Or it could be Mika. His last album sold millions which was quite a shock. I hope Madonna gets it! But it's not going to be easy. [/rquote]Currently the chart stands like this. 1. Madonna 21.9k 2. Muse 17.7k 3. Dizzee Rascal 16.8k 4. Mika 14.8k 5. Pearl Jam 13.3k Big gap |
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