FinishMySong Blog

The first item on the Yahoo! Entertainment News today, about the in's and out's of Madonna's concert in Los Angeles last night, certainly amused me :

"During one of her half-dozen costume changes, another video montage juxtaposed images of Bush, members of his administration and Prime Minister Tony Blair with footage of Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe. Midway through the new song "I Love New York," she deviated from the script and made a crude reference to Bush and oral sex."

Earlier video montages that Madonna had organised for this stage production of her Confessions tour apparently "showed images of third-world poverty and reeled off grim statistics". I've got to say that I get the impression Madge is very much jumping on the band-wagon of celebs who are suddenly 'concerned' for the wellbeing of the world's poor, whilst also continuing to live a lavish, very expensive lifestyle (in terms of both finance and resources) that supports the notion of the Western world's greed as being hugely more important than the concerns of the impoverished majority on the other side of the globe. I remember when she was interviewed by Jonathon Ross after her performance at the Live 8 concert last summer : she barely acknowledged at that time that she had any interest in the issues at hand whatsoever, nonchalantly remarking that she just happened to have a space in her diary to perform.

Having said that, anyone who is willing to stand up and publicly slate George Bush, albeit in a crude and probably ineffective manner, gets my attention, especially when Americans are brave enough to do so in their own homeland, populated by many who believe that their President is chosen and should be trusted as some deity-type figure.

It's just a shame that the music Madonna performs these days isn't so remarkable as the antics she gets up to on stage - I don't think I've enjoyed anything Madonna has done in the last 10 years, the most recent notable performance being her appearance as Eva Peron in the 1996 film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Evita. To be fair, I thought she pulled off this role much more successfully than I'd expected, although it was annoying that the sequence of songs was pulled around a bit so that Madonna got to sing all of the big numbers, including Another Suitcase in Another Hall which otherwise would have been performed by Andrea Corr who also appeared, very briefly, in the movie.