Rolling Stone Review
Madonna’s Middle Age
Politics, yoga, kabbalah fuel her Re-Invention Tour
By Barry Walters
Few performers touring this summer have as much on the line as Madonna. The underwhelming sales of her last album, American Life, coupled with her increased focus on her family and spirituality seem like signs that the singer has lost her relevance.
But Madonna has never been one to shy away from a challenge, and she certainly gave it her best during the opening night of her Re-Invention Tour in Los Angeles on May 24th. At the very least, the show proved that the Material Girl still has an eye for smart extravaganza. Her setup included seven massive video screens, a stage that raised and lowered, moving walkways and a catwalk extending far and high above several rows of seats, allowing Madonna and her dancers to sweat right on top of her fans. An entire movie’s worth of projections, many of them explicitly anti-war and pro-spirituality, shone above her throughout the show.
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Opening with a flashback to her Victorian-style 1990 MTV Video Music Awards staging of Vogue, she commanded concertgoers to strike a pose as she literally bent over backward in an impossibly arched bridge yoga position. It was a gasp-inducing moment, one that proves her decades of rigorous physical training are still paying off: At forty-five, her body itself remains a special effect.
Her voice was even more impressive than her yoga poses. Like a Prayer was more of a knockout than ever, and her early club track Burning Up was transformed into a hard-rocking roof-raiser. When Madonna tried to mix politics and religion into her pop, however, things got a little more muddled. The original footage for her American Life video (including a closing shot of a Bush look-alike getting cozy with a Saddam clone) segued into Express Yourself. The implication seemed to be rhetorical: Is it possible to truly express oneself during wartime?
Madonna suggests the answer lies somewhere between mysticism and the innocence of children. It would take a kabbalah scholar to decode the revolving projected dials of scripture that illustrated the first half of Like a Prayer, but the intentions behind hr straightforward rendition of John Lennon‘s Imagine couldn’t be more obvious, particularly as the song ends with footage of an Arab boy and his Israeli counterpart walking with their arms around each other.
Madonna was more effective when she streamlined the spectacle. Her best moments came as she turned her long-forgotten ballad Crazy For You into a love song directed at her longtime, steadfast fans. For them, she doesn’t need to reinvent herself.
Special thanks to our friend Holidayguy at MadonnaNation