A lot of questions come to mind while watching Madonna’s Sticky & Sweet Tour on video. One is how did she get those thighs? She was born with them. Better yet, considering that she is now over 50 years old, how does she keep those thighs? Well, not just the thighs, but the energy, the palpable excitement in her every number and that contagious sense of fun that does not spare anybody in the audience.
Now fun is not a word I would normally use to describe a Madonna concert. While always awesome spectacles, there seemed to be something dark and cynical and even tragic about her shows. It felt like watching a fallen angel who does not care about redemption anymore.
Not with this one though, Madonna does not only perform most of her hits from way back, like Like A Virgin and Borderline, as though these had just hit the charts, she also interacts warmly with the audience and all 250,000 of them show how much they love her back. Makes you wonder if Beyoncé will be as sexy and energetic 30 years from now.
Produced by Live Nation, the Sticky & Sweet Tour is said to be the most successful concert tour in the history of popular music. Reports have it that Madonna took the show to 36 countries. Can you just imagine how many people came to watch. Makes you wonder again. Do you think a Madonna concert will ever come to these shores?
Well, until that happens, you can do your dreaming with the Sticky & Sweet Tour album. There are two discs. One is the CD with 13 cuts including classics like Vogue and Like A Prayer. The other one is a DVD that has half an hour of behind-the-scenes footage the whole two-hour concert and it is truly Madonna’s best. Kanye West who has not been heard from lately, maybe because of his Taylor Swift incident, is a guest in The Beat Goes On Medley.
But don’t take that against Madonna who also has Justin Timberlake and Timbaland in 4 Minutes and she is superb in every cut. Among these are the Candy Shop Medley, Into The Groove, Heartbeat, Die Another Day, the La Isla Bonita medley, Ray of Light, Music 2008, a medley of Rain and Here Comes The Rain Again and the crowning moment, You Must Love Me and Don’t Cry For Me Argentina from Evita. This particular show was filmed in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the land of Eva Peron. The goose pimples stay for quite a while.
Meanwhile, why do you think the latest soundtrack CD from the hit TV series Glee is No. 1 in the US charts this week? The answer is it has music from Madonna. Titled Glee: The Music, The Power Of Madonna, the album is made up of Madonna songs as performed by the cast of Glee in its fantastic two-episode new season opener. I am sure a lot of you have seen those episodes and greatly enjoyed how the stars of Glee had a ball singing all those songs.
I must also add how clever it was of Madonna to give the show the recording rights to her entire catalogue. This means that an entire new generation of fans has now been exposed to the music of Madonna and they liked what they heard and will now want to hear the original recordings and of course, watch her concerts. This lady is not known as the Material Girl for nothing. Best of all, even non-fans will now have to admit that Madonna music has now proven itself not only enduring but is as fresh and timely as it was would you believe, 30 years ago. Another question, do you think Lady Gaga’s music will still be as current in 20 or 30 years?
The other top titles in the Top 20 of Billboard’s Top 200 albums chart this week are Need You Now by Lady Antebellum; My World 2.0 by Justin Bieber; Iron Man 2 the motion picture soundtrack featuring AC/DC; Raymond V Raymond by Usher; Now 23 by Various Artists; Encores by Jimmy Buffet; My World the first album by Bieber; The Foundation by the Zac Brown Band; The Fame by Lady Gaga; Blue Sky Noise by Circa Survive; Cold Day Memory by Sevendust; Revolution by Miranda Lambert; Animal by Ke$ha; Still Standing by Monica; The E.N.D. by the Black Eyed Peas; Battle Of The Sexes by Ludacris; Congratulations by MGMT; Rise Up by Cypress Hill; and Country Music by Willie Nelson.