‘OK to be different’: Madonna gives rousing speech at GLAAD awards
Honoree Madonna accepts the advocate for change award at the 30th annual GLAAD Media Awards at the New York Hilton Midtown on Saturday, May 4, 2019, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Mesfin Fekadu, The Associated Press
Published Sunday, May 5, 2019 8:21AM EDT
Published Sunday, May 5, 2019 8:21AM EDT
NEW YORK — Madonna, a pioneer for gay rights, accepted the Advocate for Change Award at the 2019 GLAAD Media Awards with a rousing speech that went from playful to emotional, bringing the audience to its feet.
The 60-year-old pop icon turned heads as she walked to her table at the Hilton Midtown in New York on Saturday night, before taking the stage to celebrate her three decades of advocacy work in the LGBTQ community.
“Why have I always fought for change? That’s a hard question to answer. It’s like trying to explain the importance of reading or the need to love. Growing up I always felt like an outsider, like I didn’t fit in. It wasn’t because I didn’t shave under my armpits, I just didn’t fit in, OK,” she said. “The first gay man I ever met was named Christopher Flynn. He was my ballet teacher in high school and he was the first person that believed in me, that made me feel special as a dancer, as an artist and as a human being. I know this sounds trivial and superficial, but he was the first man to tell me I was beautiful.”
Madonna went on to say Flynn took her to her first gay club in Detroit, and that the evening changed her life.
“For the first time I saw men kissing men, girls dressed like boys, boys wearing hot pants, insane, incredible dancing and a kind of freedom and joy and happiness that I had never seen before,” she said. “I finally felt like I was not alone, that it was OK to be different and to not be like everybody else. And that after all, I was not a freak. I felt at home, and it gave me hope.”
Madonna also said Flynn pushed her to leave Michigan and go to New York to pursue her dreams. And when she arrived in the Big Apple in 1977, she was in awe with all New York had to offer — diversity, creativity — but she also learned about the AIDS epidemic.
“The plague that moved in like a black cloud over New York City and in a blink of an eye,” she said and snapped her fingers, “took out all of my friends.”
“After I lost my best friend and roommate Martin Burgoyne and then Keith Haring — happy birthday Keith — I decided to take up the bull horn and really fight back,” she added.
Madonna, teary-eyed from her seat, received the award from Anderson Cooper, Mykki Blanco and Rosie O’Donnell, who gave a powerful speech about how Madonna helped her become more comfortable in her own skin.
“So here I was — VG, very gay — dating a man and I went to Madonna for advice,” said O’Donnell, who co-starred in 1992’s “A League of Their Own” with the singer. “I was questioning and unsure, my gay life was blossoming but I didn’t quite know what to do. And she told me, ‘Rosie, just follow your heart’ — advice I still follow to this day.”
The multi-hour GLAAD event also gave awards to Andy Cohen, the FX series “Pose” and “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” Samantha Bee, the film “Boy Erased,” CNN’s Don Lemon and R&B singer Janelle Monae. The event will air on Logo on May 12.
Despite winning seven Grammys, two Golden Globes and countless other honours, Madonna said getting GLAAD’s Advocate for Change Award has a special place in her heart.
“Because it’s recognition of years and years of work that I’ve done over three decades. It’s not anything superficial,” Madonna said in an interview with The Associated Press after receiving her honour. “It means something to me because I put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into all the work that I’ve done over the years advocating for change.”
Madonna will release her 14th album, “Madame X,” on June 14. It was inspired from living in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last few years and includes collaborations with Colombian singer Maluma, Migos rapper Quavo, Brazilian singer Anitta, and singer-rapper-songwriter Swae Lee of the duo Rae Sremmurd.
The album also features the track “Batuka,” co-written by Madonna’s 13-year-old son, David Banda.
“That was a family affair — the call and response song,” Madonna said. “(David) likes to take more of the credit than the rest of my children. It’s always fun to work with my kids, especially David.”
More at CTV News
Madonna gives emotional speech at GLAAD Awards
NEW YORK (AP) — Madonna, a pioneer for gay rights, accepted the Advocate for Change Award at the 2019 GLAAD Media Awards with a rousing speech that went from playful to emotional, bringing the audience to its feet.
The 60-year-old pop icon turned heads as she walked to her table at the Hilton Midtown in New York on Saturday night, before taking the stage to celebrate her three decades of advocacy work in the LGBTQ community.
Madonna, teary-eyed from her seat, received the award from Anderson Cooper, Mykki Blanco and Rosie O’Donnell, who gave a powerful speech about how Madonna helped her become more comfortable in her own skin.
The multi-hour GLAAD event also gave awards to Andy Cohen, the FX series “Pose,” Samantha Bee, the film “Boy Erased,” CNN’s Don Lemon and R&B singer Janelle Monae.
Madonna onstage at the GLAAD Media Awards (press images)
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – MAY 04: Madonna speaks onstage during the 30th Annual GLAAD Media Awards New York at New York Hilton Midtown on May 04, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for GLAAD)Embed from Getty ImagesEmbed from Getty ImagesEmbed from Getty ImagesEmbed from Getty ImagesEmbed from Getty Images
Madame X Tour ticket request available for New York dates?
It seems you are already able to request tickets for the supposed New York dates (7 dates, September 12-22 Bam Howard Gilman Opera House).
To check out more info click HERE (sign in with your Ticketmaster account)
MADAME X TOUR – Chicago dates online?
Well if this is in fact true, we can surely go for that theater (and very expensive) tour, although these are ‘travel packages’. Image taken from HERE
Madame X Tour official Live Nation website live
The official website for the upcoming Madame X Tour is live, check this out HERE
Full details will be revealed there this Monday
MADAME X TOUR – official announcement on Monday
The MADAME X TOUR will officially be announced this Monday, this shown after an advertisement in this Sunday’s New York Times newspaper. Dates and ticket info will all be revealed then. It may not bee too long before tickets will go on sale, so get ready!
Is The Fight Against Ageism Madonna’s Biggest Revolution Ever?
With her new album Madame X, out June 14th, Madonna stages another reinvention in her revolutionary career. But in a new era of self-expression, individual freedom and all-encompassing diversity, it’s perplexing that her age remains her biggest barrier, argues Anders Christian Madsen.
The morning after Madonna’s red-blooded performance at the Billboard Awards on Wednesday evening, entertainment websites quoted the court of Twitter. It was the same old story: granny emojis, ageist slurs and chauvinist memes. At the release of Madame X, her fourteenth studio album, 60-year-old rebel Madonna is still facing the toughest of all her revolutions: making the world accept that women at sixty can create, perform and make an impact with the same freedom of expression as a thirty-year-old. Regardless of her artistic merit, age and ageism have formed the background noise to every album Madonna has released since she turned fifty; perhaps even forty. What seems to be society’s issue with her is that she refuses to abide by the unwritten rules of age pertaining to everything from behaviour to dress codes and humour. The implication is that Madonna is in denial of her age; that she wants to trick us into thinking she’s young. The nerve!
Yet, on the contrary, Madonna’s music and performances in recent years have owned and celebrated her age and legacy, from the way she proudly references every reinvention of her career on her every tour, to her nostalgically reflective lyrics and samples of her own evergreens on her last album Rebel Heart, and her new single Medellín, which opens with verses that entirely embrace where she’s at in life: “I took a pill and had a dream, I went back to my seventeenth year. Allowed myself to be naïve, to be someone I’ve never been.” At sixty, Madonna is anything but old news. Medellín, a duet with Maluma, is the most experimental work she’s written since Ray of Light: a multi-layered, mostly Spanish-language song that breaks all the conventions of pop music, yet echoes in your ear like the catchiest of Generation Z radio hits. So why is BBC’s Radio 1 – home to all the popstars for whom Madonna paved the way – not adding Medellín to its playlist?
Full article HERE
Madonna Shares Powerful New Song ‘I Rise’ Featuring Sample of Stoneman Student Emma Gonzalez: Stream It Now
It’s been a huge couple weeks for Madonna.
The Queen of pop last month announced a new album, Madame X, and released the first single from it, “Medellín,” featuring Maluma. The pair stormed Las Vegas on Thursday night to perform the song for the first time at the Billboard Music Awards.
And now, a new track, “I Rise,” which arrived at midnight.
It’s a mid-tempo piece with touches of Autotune and, as the title would suggest, its all about self-empowerment. On it, Madonna sings: “There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t been done/ Not bulletproof, shouldn’t have to run from a gun/ River of tears ran dry, let ’em run/ No game that you can play with me, I ain’t one.” The song’s intro features a sample of Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor and gun control activist Emma Gonzalez’s signature exhortation, “[They say] us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call BS!”
Madame X is Madonna’s 14th studio album and it’s slated for release June 14.
(@Billboard.com)
Inside Madonna’s Ambitious ‘Madame X’ Album Campaign: Augmented Reality, Multiple Tracks, Tour Prep and TikTok
Less than an hour after she delivered one of the most imaginative awards show performances in a career full of them, Madonna stood backstage in an eye patch at the Billboard Music Awards, explaining how the seeds of her forthcoming album, Madame X, were planted more than three decades ago.
“[Madame X] was a name given to me when I was 19 and I first moved to New York, by a woman who I looked up to and admired,” Madonna told Billboard‘s Senior Director of Charts Keith Caulfield. The woman she was referring to was modern dance genius Martha Graham, who influenced Madonna’s choreography as a mentor, prior to her death in 1991. “And she gave me that name because she said she couldn’t recognize all my different personas, because I kept changing the way I looked.
“And that was in the beginning of my career, when I didn’t think about who I should be or what I should be — I was experimenting,” Madonna continued. “And so I felt like I had come full circle, and gave the record that name, because I’m in the same frame of mind.”
Then there was the pair’s Billboard Music Awards showcase of the song, which combined live dancers and light BDSM play with augmented reality technology, which allowed multiple avatars of Madonna to seemingly grace the stage on the ceremony’s telecast. Madonna says that she came up with the concept for the eye-popping set piece “many, many months ago,” and required weeks of rehearsals to properly configure her AR personas for the green screen.
Yet as ambitious as the visual presentations of “Medellín” have been, the song represents just the first piece of the multi-track pre-album rollout that Madonna has planned over the next six weeks. The Maluma collaboration has already been followed by “I Rise,” the theatrical solo song that closes out the Madame X track list and was unveiled on Friday (May 3). The inspirational track features a sample of speech made by Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School school shooting survivor Emma González.
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Madonna Shares Powerful New Song ‘I Rise’ Featuring Sample of Stoneman Student Emma Gonzalez: Stream It Now
Next up is “Crave,” the combustible team-up with Swae Lee, on May 10; the Rae Sremmurd rapper is currently riding a hot streak as a featured artist thanks to his appearance on French Montana’s “Unforgettable,” Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode” and Ellie Goulding and Diplo’s “Close to Me.” After “Crave” comes “Future,” a Quavo collaboration that was also produced by Diplo, on May 17, and finally June 7 will bring “Dark Ballet,” one of the more multi-dimensional songs on the new album, according to President of Maverick Music Greg Thompson.
“[The album] is a journey, and there are a lot of chapters,” Thompson explains of the decision to slowly trickle out five tracks ahead of the release, a deviation from Madonna’s previous rollouts. Her last album, 2015’s Rebel Heart, suffered leaks months ahead of release, resulting in six songs being rushed out early for an iTunes pre-order. “In a world where we’re more song-driven than we’ve been in a long time as an industry, it became a real question and a challenge: How do we make sure that people really understand this album by the time it comes out, but still have songs that can be hit singles in certain areas?”
To that end, “Crave” with Swae Lee will become the de facto pop radio single upon its release, with an official music video to soon follow. Meanwhile, “Medellín” — which received a global television launch across Viacom networks in April — will continue being pushed in Latin markets. The decision to lead with “Medellín” instead of “Crave” came down to the belief that it was “the signature track to the body of work, and the right place to start telling the story,” says Thompson. He adds, “I think we have a good shot to get a top five club record with some [‘Medellín’] remixes, and get that song into people’s spaces that they might not anticipate.” (Madonna has notched a record 57 top five-charting hits on Billboard’s Dance Club Songs chart.)
Aside from the upcoming song and video releases, Madonna confirmed to Billboard that there have already been production meetings for her next tour, which would follow the 82-date run in support of Rebel Heart. The Madame Xcampaign will also feature a few more surprises — including further use of the growing lip-sync video platform TikTok, where Madonna launched the “Medellín cha cha cha challenge” earlier this week. “She started playing with it,” Thompson says with a laugh, “and we’re having some fun with it. We think it’s cool.”
Above all, the rollout is designed to capture the multi-continent creation of Madame X, after Madonna relocated to Lisbon in 2017. “Crave” was one of the songs that was conceived in Portugal as the pop superstar started to focus on the follow-up to Rebel Heart, while other tracks — which range in language, from English to Spanish to Portuguese — were birthed in Colombia, Brazil and the States, among other locations.
So out of that 13-song track list, what do those five pre-release tracks represent to Madonna? “A little smorgasbord of delights,” she says with a wide smile. “Appetizers from around the world.”
More at Billboard
Madonna covers the June 2019 issue of British Vogue
photographed by Mert & Marcus, styled by Benjamin Bruno, with hair by Andy Lecompte, make-up by Isamaya Ffrench, nails by @JennyLongworth and set design by Emma Roach for the June 2019 issue of British Vogue, on newsstands Friday 10 May
MADONNA RELEASES EMPOWERING BALLAD “I RISE” (press release)
Madonna today released the empowering and anthemic ballad “I Rise,” the second track of five songs to be previewed before her highly-anticipated new studio album Madame X debuts globally on June 14th. Following the release of the critically-acclaimed “Medellín,” additional songs to be shared with fans include the infectious pop gem “Crave” featuring Swae Lee and produced by Mike Dean on May 10, the Jamaican dancehall vibes of “Future” featuring Quavo on May 17, as well as the sonically innovative “Dark Ballet” on June 7. Listen to “I Rise,” HERE.
Madonna says, “I wrote ‘I Rise’ as a way of giving a voice to all marginalized people who feel they don’t have the opportunity to speak their mind. This year is the 50th anniversary of Pride and I hope this song encourages all individuals to be who they are, to speak their minds and to love themselves.”
As previously announced, on May 4 GLAAD, the world’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) media advocacy organization will honor Madonna with the Advocate for Change Award at the 30th Annual GLAAD Media Awards in New York City. Madonna is the second person and first woman to ever receive this recognition, which is awarded to a person who changed the game for LGBTQ people around the world through their work.
Influenced creatively by living in Lisbon, Portugal over the past several years, Madame X is a collection of 15 new songs that celebrate Madonna’s career-long affair with Latin music and culture as well as other global influences. Singing in Portuguese, Spanish and English, Madonna collaborated on Madame X with longtime producer Mirwais, as well as with producers Mike Dean and Diplo, among others.
NPR says, “Medellín is a carefully dosed combination of…coolly narcotic dance-pop…and energetic reggaetón,” while Entertainment Weekly declares the song is, “A breezy, summer-ready anthem…” NME calls Medellín a “self-reflective gem of a pop song” and The Guardian says, “Medellín is a potent reminder of Madonna’s deft history of meshing genres.”
Madame X from Live Nation, Interscope Records and Maverick will come in a standard and deluxe version of the album and is now available for pre-order. Album pre-orders include a download of “Medellín” and “I Rise,” which is available across Apple, Spotify (pre-save), Amazon and all DSPs. Further details regarding the album, videos and appearances will be announced in the coming weeks.