From the Kansas City Star:

The day Madonna turned 19 – Aug. 16, 1977 – was the day Elvis Presley died, and there’s a certain symmetry to the coincidence.

She was still several years away from barnstorming the music world with her gummy dance hits and inimitable fashion and, subsequently, becoming one of the most provocative and popular pop-culture figures in the world. Sex, religion, music, politics: Nothing was spared her brazen iconoclasm or sacrilege.

In its artist biography of Madonna, Rolling Stone says: “Until she toned down her press-baiting behavior in the ’90s, she was the most consistently controversial (pop star) since Elvis Presley.”

She turned 54 this year, but Madonna hasn’t lost much lust for generating attention, if not controversy. And she is going to great lengths to avoid Elvis’ fate: becoming a caricature as his career drifted into its gloaming.

Tuesday night, Madonna performs for the first time ever in Kansas City, where she is bringing her extravagant MDNA Tour, a two-hour blitzkrieg of music, theater, dance and acrobatics. The tour opened May 31 in Tel Aviv, and it has generated several “incidents.”

At a show in Istanbul, Turkey, she bared one of her breasts. She has been sued twice – once by a group in Russia for a pro-gay speech she delivered in St. Petersburg and once by the National Front Party in France for a video shown during the tour that associates the party’s leader with Hitler and the Nazis.

At a show in Washington, D.C., she referred to President Barack Obama as a black Muslim. She later told the Washington Post: “Yes, I know Obama is not a Muslim – though I know that plenty of people in this country think he is. And what if he were? The point I was making is that a good man is a good man, no matter who he prays to.”

And she chafed some raw wounds at her show in Denver on Oct. 18, three months after 12 people were killed in a mass shooting at a theater in nearby Aurora. As she does at every show on the tour, during the song “Gang Bang,” Madonna and her entourage pointed fake weapons at the crowd and then shot several assailants.

She later issued a statement saying, “It’s true there is a lot of violence in the beginning of the show and sometimes the use of fake guns – but they are used as metaphors. … they are symbols of wanting to appear strong and wanting to find a way to stop feelings that I find hurtful or damaging.”

It’s also worth noting that at nearly every stop on this tour, Madonna hasn’t taken the stage for her two-hour show until 10:30 p.m., long after the 8 p.m. starting time on the tickets, some of which cost more than $350. (If you’re hiring babysitters for this school-night show, take note.)

None of the above incidents seems anything worse than an act of insensitivity or poor taste. In fact, it seems that when it comes to true controversy or acts of deep offense or indelible sacrilege, the world has become desensitized since Madonna started baiting us with her music, videos and behavior. Others have since upped the ante in music (Marilyn Manson) and film (Quentin Tarantino), and there’s so much raw reality on the Internet.

Even exposure of a breast seems merely juvenile, a punch she was beaten to by Janet Jackson. Her performance during this year’s Super Bowl halftime was widely panned, notorious only because M.I.A flipped the bird.

The MDNA Tour is Madonna’s ninth; she has called it the “journey of a soul from darkness to light.” Reviews have been widely positive, mostly for the tour’s opulence and energy.

In the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot wrote: “(It) opened with an act of contrition and closed with a robed church choir paving the road to a celebration. In between there was fake blood, pretend guns, the return of the infamous conical bra, whiffs of sadomasochism and poison-tipped political commentary, as well as allusions to the pop art of Roy Lichtenstein, movies by Oliver Stone and Stanley Kubrick, Brecht-Weil cabaret, Asian mysticism, Cirque du Soleil-style tightrope acrobatics and Basque folk music.”

In his review of a show in Philadelphia, Jon Pareles of the New York Times wrote, “Madonna and her team do know how to dazzle. Her male dancers bounced on web tightropes in slack-lining routines, twisted themselves in scary contortions and even wore some high heels. Vogue’ placed Madonna at a decadent party with a chandelier overhead, surrounded by dancers in angular black-and-white costumes, while she struck her own poses in a latter-day remake of her old conical bra, now a black-ribbed exoskeleton.”

In 2012, rather than changing the game, Madonna is letting everyone know she’s still in it, out-ranking all the divas birthed in her wake, from Britney Spears and Beyonce to Katy Perry. She is overtly aware of the tide of popularity around Lady Gaga, who has become something of a rival. In several shows Madonna has made reference to Gaga, implying her imitation of the Queen of Pop borders on theft. She has been slipping the chorus of the Gaga hit “Born This Way” into “Express Yourself,” noting their similarities, then telling the crowd, “She’s not me.”

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