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New albums by established stars are almost always marketed as sequels, but taking a cue from the Beastie Boys' Intergalactic and, say, Mission: Impossible, Madonna's Confessions on a Dancefloor -- and its accompanying stage spectacular, which hit the Garden last night -- is a musical prequel. From the moment Madonna dropped out the rafters in a two-million-dollar Swarovski crystal disco ball, she set out to evoke the adult polyester '70s club culture that her early-'80s nouvelle-vague electropop hits, all rended lingerie and bubblegum insouciance, helped usher into the history books. Allow her the backward glance: in twenty-odd years onstage, it's her first public pang of nostalgia. Having taken a sample of Abba for her recent single "Hung Up," she also appropriated the words "Dancing Queen" for a great white lightbulb-lined cape (brought out late in the show for her version of the infamous James Brown ro utine) and plastered it on tour t-shirts, a move calculated to appeal to her key demographics: gay men and serial bachelorettes. On a personal note, this is a wonderful audience with which to spend a couple of hours. Only at a Madonna concert do you find straight women in the men's bathrooms without the gentlemen batting an eye.More than any pop star before or since, Madonna takes evident delight in curating a Broadway-calibur spectacle. (I'm not sure what Broadway would make of a woman who steps out of a disco ball in jodhpur boots and a riding crop, harnesses a man with a bit in his mouth and rides him like a pony, but here's evidence that lots of well-meaning people will pay big money to see it.) Her performances assault you with imagery, often oblique -- her opening equestrian-themed set, which featured a filmed erotic confrontation between singer and beast to compliment her dancers' onstage horseplay, may or may not have resonated more if you knew she'd broken eight bones in a riding accident last year. Other themes -- pairs of men who attempt to hold hands but never quite succeed; a woman in a dark hooded tunic thrashing about in a steel cage, as if Anakin Skywalker had been interned at Abu Ghraib -- were easier to discern. The music, drawn largely from Confessions, harked backwards; but the lady makes a point of staying up with what's trendy in modern movement technique. During "Jump," her dancers navigated an elaborate set of monkey bars in an exhibition of parkour-style urban-assault gymnastics; and, despite the star’s falling out with her old friend David LaChappelle over a video treatment, many of her show's routines gestured towards krumping, the hyper-aggressive street-dance phenomenon captured in LaChappelle's documentary Rize.
Related:
She’s got legs, The Big Hurt: Pop eroticism, faux sincerity, and sperm motility, Filth and Wisdom, More 
- She’s got legs
Far from mellowing with age, Madonna hit us with wonderfully mean-spirited aggression wrapped up in a misleading sexual come-on.
- The Big Hurt: Pop eroticism, faux sincerity, and sperm motility
I am a man who loves a good corporate doofus, and this week's glistening-prize-hog-doofus quote goes to TOM WELCH , Wal-Mart's senior music buyer, who manages to make Foreigner sound even squarer than Foreigner.
- Filth and Wisdom
As the lead character narrates his “filthy” story, and those of his London flatmates/neighbors, we hit upon boredom long before wisdom can arrive.
- Photos: Madonna at the Garden
Madonna at TD Banknorth Garden, October 15, 2008
- Remix revolutions
For decades now, remixes have been a tool to get pop songs into dance clubs.
- Who’s that girl (now)?
I’d wager that Madonna is not much of a fun person.
- Into the weird
No, it's not your imagination: things are getting smaller. Or at least, it seems that way in the funhouse-mirror world of modern music, where the semi-demise of the major-label factory has colluded with the anti-star obsession of the underground to produce a chasing of microgenres into mazes of musical self-selection.
- Good vibrations
In honor of dancing dirty, as well as Patrick Swayze’s open-shirt-pelvic-thrusting summer camp fantasy, we offer this list of the dirtiest dancing music videos we could find.
- Pride of the Irish
I have a short addendum to Mike Miliard’s excellent piece on current trends in the Irish and Irish-American communities of Boston .
- Indie springs forward
For years we waited. And then we started making jokes about it. And then the jokes got old. So we waited some more. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, "Love Song No. 7" (mp3)
- Primadonna
This article originally appeared in the July 29, 1986 issue of the Boston Phoenix .
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Live Reviews
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, Madonna (Entertainer), Celebrity News, Entertainment, Music Stars, Music, Pop and Rock Music, Punk Rock, James Brown, The Beastie Boys, Madonna, Less
