rating: * * * *

By Sarah Crompton

Madonna: no nostalgia, just the latest trends
As Madonna delivered her tribute speech about Michael Jackson at the MTV Video Music Awards this week, she assumed the role of ambassador for her generation, reminding us that she was born in the same year as Jackson, 1958. Yet she is still here, still touring, still making music, keeping up with the latest trends rather than trading on nostalgia.
As her extensive new greatest hits collection reminds us, there is talent there, too. There are 36 tracks on this double CD, only a couple of which feel dispensable. Both are among the newest – the current single Celebration is infinitely forgettable and Revolver, featuring New Orleans rapper Lil Wayne, shows off his skills better than hers. On the other hand, 4 Minutes, a duet with Justin Timberlake from last year’s album Hard Candy, stands up surprisingly well. It may be lyrically silly, but it’s eminently catchy and that has always been Madonna’s strength. I could live without Take A Bow, but since it was her longest-running US number one, I suppose it deserves inclusion.
This compilation is heavily weighted to her glory days – everything on The Immaculate Collection of 1990 is also here except, weirdly, Rescue Me. But the selection from the rest of her career reveals just how consistently she has delivered the goods, with tracks such as Music, Ray of Light, Frozen and Don’t Tell me.
The CD sleeve shows Madonna as a latter-day Marilyn Monroe. She hasn’t yet attained such legendary status, but as the collection’s title suggests, she deserves her moment of celebration.

rating: * * * *

By Rob Sheffield

“What? No ‘Hanky Panky’? Is this some kind of joke? Given how obsessive her fans are, it’s a thankless task for Madonna to assemble a two-CD hit collection. But from the opening one-two of ‘Hung Up’ and ‘Music,’ two of her best ever, Celebration kicks off with pure bliss and never lets up. It’s a dizzying, nonchronological spin through the Madonna years, years it makes you feel lucky to be living through. Her hitmaking genius is unmatched and—with the new Eurocheese blast ‘Celebration’ and the Lil Wayne duet ‘Revolver’—undiminished. It’s almost enough to make you forget that they left off ‘Angel,’ which is just plain crazypants.”

rating: B

Madonna, of course, is less about the Voice than the zeitgeist. At 51, she remains
as strenuously au courant as ever; on the glitched-out dance-floor stomper ”Revolver,” one of two new tracks from her mammoth greatest-hits collection Celebration, she enlists raspy-voiced hip-hop scamp Lil Wayne, and delivers lyrical come-ons like ”My love’s a revolver/My sex is a killer/Do you wanna die happy?” Superfans may well die happy with this much concentrated Madge-estry: 36 tracks covering nearly every phase of her
25-year career. It all holds up surprisingly well.

rating: * * */5

This 36-track, double disc, definitive career- encompassing compilation conveniently follows Madge’s recent expensive divorce. The stark reality though is that, as a cultural force, she peaked in 1989 with the superb Like A Prayer. Thereafter it’s her image manipulation and media savvy that impress – far more than retro confections such as Hung Up.

rating: * * * */5

By Eric Henderson

Confession from my own private dance floor: I’ve never been a fan of The Immaculate Collection, despite the canonization accorded it in the absence of any competing career compilation up until its companion volume GHV2 in 2001. In almost every case, I found Immaculate’s QSound makeovers by Shep Pettibone (at the time, Madonna’s go-to guy thanks to his revelatory work on “Express Yourself” and “Vogue”) to be earsores, if not total desecrations, of the original works. The winningly tremulous qualities of her earliest hits were all but obliterated by Pettibone’s glossy remixes, and don’t even get me started on the deadening house beats he used to kamikaze “Like a Prayer,” a song which, like no other song from her first decade, did not exactly want for urgency. The upside of the album was and remains this unique feat: how its obligatory new tracks, the simmering “Rescue Me” and the aromatic “Justify My Love,” are considered by most fans to be among the singer’s best work.

Unfortunately, only one of those two songs survived the transition to Celebration, the “best of” reboot I’ve been wanting, needing, waiting for since 1990. Representing Madonna’s first post-iPod compilation, the full two-disc version of Celebration promises more bang for your buck than her previous hits collections and, in the bargain, reverts many (but not all) tracks previously assembled on Immaculate to their original mixes, essentially making Celebration her most retro retrospective to date. The backward compatibility is born out in the album’s cover art by Mr. Brainwash, which features a True Blue/”Vogue”-eras composite shot tarted up a la Andy Warhol. As she herself sang on the soundtrack to A League of Their Own, “Don’t hold on to the past/Well, that’s too much to ask.” (Unless the past in question is “This Used to Be My Playground,” which is the sole #1 not included here.)

Speaking of things that are too hard to hold on to, Celebration’s other major deviation from the Immaculate template is primarily structural. Maybe the compilation represents Madonna acquiescing to the death of the album and the rise of the mp3, but the overall effect of the song sequence is that of a frenzied shopping spree, not a careful retrospective. I’m not necessarily in the camp that insists compilations follow chronological order, but segues should at least make some sense of a career path. Celebration isn’t totally random—the first disc seems to focus more often than not on the dance-floor burners while the second spreads its attention across a broader definition of pop—but it seems tailor-made to purchase song-by-song to fill the gaps in your collection. Maybe Madonna is, 40 #1 dance hits into her career, making the sloppiness the point itself. Maybe she’s trying to suggest that her career can no longer be summarized. But if that’s the case, why bother collecting representative tracks in the first place?

I’m aware that every Madonna fan has his or her own favorite moments, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who will find the placement of “Vogue” sandwiched between “Music” and her Justin Timberlake duet “4 Minutes” obfuscatory to the point of offensiveness. “Vogue” is the lynchpin of her greatest, gayest period, and as such has a rightful place in Madonna’s narrative, one that does not nestle comfortably aside the hijinks of a toy boy. “Vogue” falls in line with a startling arc of growth and self-consciousness of which “Express Yourself” was the warning shot, an unmistakably feminist missive that explicitly excluded straight males from its directive and then commanded they respond to its demands. From telling straight women and gay men their love has every potential to be real, Madonna then submitted her persona within the gay identity with “Vogue.” If some found her cultural appropriation presumptuous, the reward was in the music you could let your body move to, hey, hey, hey. At least so far as pop music is concerned, “Vogue” was instrumental in allowing disco revivalism to emerge, allowing the denigrated gay genre to soar once again within the context of house music, the genre disco became in its second life. The queer-celebratory “Vogue” became, with a dash of ACT UP rage, Erotica, her darkest and most politically rewarding album and one that revealed a full understanding of the bipolarity of the gay experience circa AIDS, the self-actualizing highs and the then-tragically pervasive lows. If Silence = Death, Erotica’s aggressively gay house beats intended to make a whole goddamned lot of noise.

I use “Vogue” as merely one example of the benefit of chronological representation. On a song-to-song basis, the inclusion of recent misfires such as “Miles Away” and “Hollywood” (the latter marking an embarrassing moment in Madonna’s career no matter how you slice it, being her first single in two decades to completely miss Billboard’s Hot 100) would read as forgivable tokenism if the album were merely presented in chronological order. But to have them pop up unannounced among some of the unassailable classics of pop is flatly disruptive. The arrival of the commercially successful but creatively stagnant “Die Another Day,” for instance, in such close proximity to her Austin Powers ditty “Beautiful Stranger” (stupid, cute) only calls to attention Celebration’s most glaring soundtrack omission: the long-legged 1994 hit “I’ll Remember,” which, much like “Vogue,” represents one of the most important gear-changes in Madonna’s entire career. An underwater indigo dirge featuring a remarkable below-the-root bassline and supple, husky vocals, “I’ll Remember” settles up the score following the widely (and wrongly) derided Sex era and finds Madonna switching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf roles mid-performance from “hump the hostess” Martha to “I wanna have a baaay-bee” Honey. It’s the key to understanding how both Lourdes and Ray of Light came into being. And it gets the shaft in favor of “Sigmund Freud, analyze this!”

Okay, so the legitimacy of the song selection can, in this Cuisinart iteration, only be appraised on a case-by-case basis. How do the songs sound? And are the mixes definitive? Great and mostly, respectively. The oldest and newest tracks have been given the most attention. Almost everything from her first two albums shimmer with virginal moisture (especially “Dress You Up” and “Holiday”), and all of her tracks from the neo-aughts boast robust EQ credentials (though the claustrophobia of the production on “Music” almost seems overripe compared to the open warmth of the comp’s kickoff, “Hung Up”). Between “Like a Prayer” (thankfully, the album version) and “Sorry,” “Ray of Light” sounds strangely weak and muffled. I was hoping for a deeper bass sound on “Everybody,” but “Lucky Star” (which, best I can tell, seems to be a smartly remastered hybrid of the original track and the Pettibone remix) emerges as an absolute monster, a Larry Levan-worthy concoction of clanging rhythm guitars, synth atmospherics, and chugging bass.

The album is missing songs, doesn’t always include the right ones, seems to have been sequenced by a not particularly intuitive Genius playlist, and the two new tracks aren’t fit to kiss the feet of “Justify My Love”: The title track is a zero-traction dance track that’s as shallow lyrically (”If it makes you feel good then I say do it, I don’t know what you’re waiting for”) as it is musically, and the less said about her clumsy collaboration with Lil Wayne, “Revolver,” the better. But functionally, what Madonna and fans are really celebrating with the release of Celebration is the hard proof that Madonna’s back catalogue is now so immense and so varied that she can release a behemoth, two-disc greatest hits package that shoehorns in 36 songs and still manages to significantly short-change the singer’s legacy.

rating: * * * *

By Scott Kara

The way Madonna still gets around in public wearing next to nothing and dating lads more than half her age, it’s sometimes easy to forget she’s been around since 1982 when her debut single, Everybody, was released. That song - which to be honest, sounds like the theme to an 80s soft drink ad - is included on Celebration, the Material Girl’s latest 36-track greatest hits collection.
Since Everybody, Madonna has had 12 No.1 singles and seven No.1 albums in New Zealand; clocked up more than 200 million album sales worldwide; and churned through many boyfriends, and two husbands. Oh, and it goes without saying, she’s the biggest female music star ever - even if she has let her game slip through the 2000s.
Celebration has nothing on her first greatest hits, 1990’s The Immaculate Collection, which was a classic document of her heyday, but this new two-disc set is an excellent document of her vast catalogue of hits and a few misses.
Though compiling the album by mixing old classics with newer songs may have been seen as a masterstroke, it only serves to highlight how dreadful some of Madonna’s music from the 2000s has been.
For example, the Justin Timberlake and Timbaland collaboration 4 Minutes, sounds forgettable sandwiched between Vogue and the tin-pot P-funk pop of Holiday; and the cheesy throb of Sorry, from 2006’s Confessions On A Dancefloor, pales between the stunning Ray Of Light and 1989’s Express Yourself.
And beware of the awful Eurodance oonst of latest single Celebration.
Special mention has to be made of her best song, the ridiculously saucy, Justify My Love, which sounds just as naughty and wicked nearly 20 years on.
So the album’s not quite immaculate, but a celebration nonetheless.

Madonna’s new compilation Celebration leaps straight to number one in the Official Album Chart and brings her level with Elvis Presley’s record of eleven UK number one albums, the Official Charts Company reveals today.
She also did it with a Virgin (1984), True Blue (1986), Like a Prayer (1989), The Immaculate Collection (1990), Evita (1996), Ray of Light (1998), Music (2000), American Life (2003), Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005), Hard Candy (2008) and now Celebration!

No other solo artist can match this achievement. Only The Beatles, with a total of fifteen, have had more number one albums in chart history.

This feat marks yet another record for Madonna, the most successful female solo artist of all time. She has also:

● Spent more weeks (29) at number one of the Official UK Album Chart than any other female solo artist.
● Had more UK number one singles (13) than any other female solo artist.
● Achieved the chart double (simultaneous number one album and single) more times (4) than any other female solo artist.

She also did it with Like a Virgin (1984), True Blue (1986), Who’s that Girl (1987), Like a Prayer (1989), I’m Breathless (1990), Something to Remember (1995), Ray of Light (1998), Music (2000), American Life (2003), Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005), Hard Candy (2008) and now Celebration!

A special dance mob video (Thailand version) has been shot at Park Paragon in Bangkok and will be broadcast on local TV. It includes thousands of fans and 200 dancers performing on Madonna’s music.

To have a look at the full official video and plenty of pictures, just click…

There is a picture of her music collection and part of the interview she says…

“I have all of Madonna’s albums, she is a fantastic entertainer, I first saw her live in 1993 and I have been to her concerts ever since then!”

The single is at #8 (+1) in the World Charts and #5 in the Euro-Charts…
It didn’t make it to #1 in the UK with a #3 position, but radios aren’t all very supportive of the track. BBC Radio 1 have removed “Celebration” from their playlist.

The track is also…
#2 in France (new) and Italy (+2)
#4 in Denmark (+2)
#5 Belgium (Wallonia) and #8 in Flanders
#6 in Switzerland (-1)
#9 in The Netherlands (+8)
#10 in Ireland (+16)
#11 in Sweden (-5)
#12 in Brazil (-1)
#24 in Canada (-15)

Also the album is about to make an entry at #1 in the UK Charts…

Finally some news about the US CD Maxi… It will be released on October 13th, and will have the same cover as the 12’’ Vinyl single.
Have an HQ logo-less look!

Madonna is all lined up to appear on Saturday Night Live for the first time in 16 years—in fact, they’re desperately seeking to have her host and perform. She might wind up doing one or the other, but if she does the double, it would be her first time since 1985.

Source: Boyculture

The surprise event was organised by Madonna dancer Takahiro Ueno, one of the lead performers on the Queen of Pop’s recent Sticky and Sweet tour.Takahiro revealed he had been preparing the event to mark the launch of Celebration for months.
Takahiro said: “For practice we had just one day because we used more than 150 dancers, but I have been preparing it for two months.”

The party got started in the streets of Shinjuku, Tokyo shortly after 2pm when large speakers began blaring a medley of Madonna hits. A crowd gathered to see what the commotion was before five breakdancers appeared on the high street showing off their moves. They were followed by a group of five girls in red ballet tutus and leotards. More than 100 other dancers then appeared out of the crowds and joined in with the tightly choreographed routine. They cleared as Takahiro took centre stage dressed in a black hat, shades and a waistcoat. The snake-hipped performer moonwalked around the street and performed several summersaults for the crowd. A group of  transvestites joined in the rave in the last moments before the entire group left the scene and scattered – leaving bystanders wondering what had just happened.

Asked after the show what it had been like to perform with Madonna, Takahiro said: “It was just amazing, she is very beautiful, kind and very powerful.”

Ambition, whenever I hear the word, in my head, all I can think of is Madonna, for some reason. Madonna in the 80’s. Very ambitious person and a great artist, certainly explores many avenues to get her name out there. I think she’s a very special lady.
I think artists like Madonna and Michael Jackson are both amazing live performers. I remember seeing the footage of their concerts and really thinking, well that’s something really extraordinary. Rock bands don’t really do that…

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 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.

“Taking over the Artist of the Month slot acts as a long-term offering to remind people the album is 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.”

Lola?
She hangs out with the dancers a lot. She’s a dancer herself. I don’t think she wants to be a singer. I think she wants to be an actress.
I’m fine with it, as long as she finishes school, and takes it seriously.
She’s been protected, but she’s been chased by the paparazzi since she was a tiny baby. She’s super-sister. She’s amazing with the little ones. Very protective.

What song are you feeling really good about right now?
I like Beautiful Stranger. That’s a good one.
They are all a part of me, and an aspect of me, or a pivotal moment for me.
I certainly have songs that I feel resonate more and speak truthfully more about me than others. Like Don’t Tell Me, Like It Or Not and Live To Tell.

Celebration, clubbing…
Paul Oakenfold has done so many remixes for me. We’ve collaborated on a lot of music. Plus, he’s been opening for me on most of this tour, and we’ve hung out together a lot.
I certainly don’t go clubbing when I’m on tour, because it’s not really good for me. You can’t talk loud after shows and stuff in smokey nightclubs.

New projects? Next album?
I love electronic music, so I’m sure that I’ll keep doing something in that area. But I don’t know who I’m going to work with yet.
I have several projects going. I have another script that I’ve written, and I want to direct another film. Hopefully, I’ll be doing that next year.
I also have many, many projects going on in Africa right now that I want to bring to fruition, like building a girls school and working on two new documentaries that I want to make. So, I’ve got lots of projects going.

I didn’t see it that way at all… not at all. I thought Madonna did a fabulous job, it was absolutely magnificent. I felt that she was trying to show the world the parallels between the two of them and I understood it. I have to be quite honest with you. That speech to me was so touching. I truly enjoyed every single word she said.
As a matter of fact, I didn’t want it to end. It was so heartfelt. I loved it, to be honest. I stood up and I applauded at the end and I rushed and I called my mother, when it was over. I said mother, and my mother said “Oh Latoya, wasn’t that incredible.”
I thought it was absolutely wonderful, what she has done.

She looked like Rachel Zoe gone horribly wrong.
About dating Jesus Luz, it proves the point that you can judge a person by the company they keep— or don’t keep. It’s painfully apparent that Jesus may be able to turn water into wine, but your basic blow dryer eludes him.

To be continued…

TVGuide: Will Madonna ever drop by or make an appearance on the show?

Mazar: Oh, definitely not! Never! First of all, she just ended a world tour and Madonna’s never seen Dancing with the Stars. The tabloids wrote that she called me. Madonna doesn’t call anybody on tour. I e-mailed her to go, “Oh my God! I’ve taken this job called Dancing with the Stars! My feet are killing me! Should I rehearse in flats?” She goes, “Oh, I always rehearse in heels. I’m really good at ballroom dancing.” [Laughs] And that’s the only advice she gave me! In terms of coming to see me — no. She’s busy. With the amount of attention and cameras coming here, she wouldn’t want to be involved in all of this. But I’ll make her vote and make her spread the word. She doesn’t really watch TV, but she’ll TiVo me.

Provocateur-of-the-moment Lady Gaga and provocateur-of-a-generation Madonna, both sat front row at Marc’s show, taking in the theatrical, cabaret-inspired collection and no doubt making mental notes of which pieces would pack the most dramatic punch for their respective performances.

At the VMAs, Madonna chatted with MTV News backstage and said that comparisons to Lady Gaga made her feel “very flattered.” She also described GaGa’s look by saying, “She looks like she’s going to carnival in Venice, very beautiful.”

According to New York Magazine, Marc Jacobs didn’t invite Madonna and Lada Gaga to his spring show yesterday; they called and asked to attend. Of Madonna, says Jacobs, “I couldn’t say no.”

Some pics after the click !

Most reactions were positive to Madonna’s speech but some weren’t…
On The view, Kate Gosselin, Shephard, Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg said Madonna’s words were rather egocentric, talking about how almost every line of which was ended with “so did I,”
Gosselin even said that if it had continued Madonna would have ventured, “Michael Jackson passed away, but I haven’t.”

Almost nine million viewers tuned into MTV, meaning that the VMAs’ largest television audience since making the VMAs’, the Number One cable program this year for the much-desired 12-34 demographic.

“A lot of people are really just confused by me. They don’t know what to think of me, so they try to diminish me,” Madonna tells the Times.

From her early life in New York to her move to Britian, Madonna talks the magazine through her evolving career in a rare and candid encounter with Dan Cairns.

Rolling Stone : Day and Age producer Stuart Price compared you to Madonna, saying that you two shared a similar drive and determination to succeed. In your case, where does that come from?
Brandon Flowers: I’ve never had anything very traumatic happen to me, like Madonna [losing her mother], so I can’t say anything like that. I don’t know exactly where it comes from, but I have a hunger.

“I love my body, and I’m not opposed to nude pictures. But coming out of that, I didn’t want to feel further objectified, If it’s good enough for Madonna, it’s good enough for me,”