The directions were clear: \u201cGo through the legs and up the stairs.\u201d The limbs in question were vast, inflatable, and splayed, maybe fifteen feet high, and bent at the knee, as if a giant were lying on its back. Each leg was shod in a high-heeled silver boot. In between the legs was\u2014no getting around it\u2014a slit, through which all visitors were invited to pass. It was like being born in reverse.<\/p>\n
Such was the reception accorded to anyone lucky enough, and unblushing enough, to attend the launch of Madonna\u2019s latest album, \u201cConfessions II.\u201d The venue was a blockish and forbidding space called Magazine, which squats in a loop of the Thames, in southeast London. The interior was a restful combination of black walls and patinated steel, with polished concrete underfoot. The motto for the occasion was printed on T-shirts available for purchase in a foyer beyond the slit: \u201cDon\u2019t Be a Vibe Kill.\u201d Evidently, Madonna was going industrial\u2014the furthest possible cry from her lady-of-the-manor period in the early years of this century, when she was seen fetchingly clad in rustic tweeds. That vibe is so dead.<\/p>\n
The evening\u2019s co-hosts were Madonna and Grindr. The resulting throng was described in Rolling Stone, the following day, as \u201cjuicily maximalist,\u201d filled with \u201csome of the country\u2019s best dressed people.\u201d These, alas, were hard to spot, the exception being a gentleman whose torso, richly tattooed, was encased in a transparent cuirass. Some guests were granted access to an exclusive balcony on one side of the room, where they were offered a selection of themed cocktails. One drink was named for \u201cDanceteria\u201d\u2014a track from the new album, celebrating the former Manhattan night club\u2014and daringly rimmed in chili powder. Any suggestion that the hot hit of spice barely disguising a watery want of flavor was all too fitting a symbol for this phase in Madonna\u2019s career would have been met with indignation. \u201cConfessions II\u201d has been greeted in some quarters as a late-flowering masterpiece, and, for one night, Magazine was the rightful home of the true believer, not the skeptic.<\/p>\n
The church of Madonna has many denominations, and, as a blunt rule, the stuff you like depends on the age you are\u2014or, at any rate, the age that your clubbing self would like to be. On the Tube to North Greenwich, the stop nearest the venue, Louis Byrne, a hair stylist and the founder of a company called I Can I Am and I Will, said, \u201cMy mum was very envious that I was coming tonight\u201d\u2014his mother being three years older than Madonna and, in Byrne\u2019s words, \u201cdefinitely a \u2018Blond Ambition\u2019 girl.\u201d He himself cherishes \u201cmy first memory of \u2018Vogue\u2019 on the caravan-park-disco dance floor as a young boy.\u201d On Magazine\u2019s balcony, Timothy Phillips, a historian of the Cold War, admitted to a preference for \u201cConfessions on a Dance Floor,\u201d from 2005, and for its opening number, \u201cHung Up,\u201d which chugged its way to the summit of the charts in more than forty countries. Would Madonna be scaling that peak at the party?<\/p>\n
Yes, but it was a hell of a wait. Having been urged to arrive between nine-thirty and ten, guests were placed in the care of d.j.s until midnight, at which point Stuart Price, the producer of both \u201cConfessions\u201d albums, took to the decks. The mob, hitherto restless, surged to life, roaring the chorus of Madonna\u2019s 2000 song \u201cMusic.\u201d (The literary equivalent would be a publisher reading out bits of old novels at an author\u2019s book launch.) At last, Madonna materialized. She wore shades and a loosely tied pink coat, which, when removed, revealed a shiny pink top and long pink gloves; it was as if the former queen of bubblegum pop were made of actual gum. Standing next to Price, she sang along to herself, a little, and issued moral commands. \u201cBe whoever you want to be!\u201d she cried, pointing a finger at the mob, like a much loved teacher advising her third-grade pupils on Halloween costumes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The directions were clear: \u201cGo through the legs and up the stairs.\u201d The limbs in question were vast,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":931758,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[9],"tags":[341358,171,375743,4180,129708,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-931757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-_talk-of-the-town","tag-entertainment","tag-london-postcard","tag-magazine","tag-splitscreenimageleftinset","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116912208793556202","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=931757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931757\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/931758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=931757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=931757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=931757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}