Let your body move to the music

August 10, 2023 6:00 AM

Serving as a tour for both her mammoth Like A Prayer album and her Dick Tracy/I'm Breathless project, Madonna's 1990 Blond Ambition Tour ended in Nice, France on August 5 [1h53m]. It's like a Broadway Musical Tone Poem, with gigantic set pieces, a loose storyline across a 4-act structure, and some of the best concert performances and pop choreography ever put before an audience.

Guardian review from 2020 for the 30th Anniversary of the tour.

BONUS: Strike A Pose [Part 1, Part 2, DailyMotion, 1h16m total], a 2016 documentary telling the varied stories of Madonna's troupe of male backup dancers swept up in the maelstrom of the Blond Ambition Tour. This does cover some about the lawsuit [Wikipedia] filed by some of the dancers.

Additional Material: The documentary Paris Is Burning [1990, 1h16m], which brought New York ballroom culture culture into the public eye. Madonna was reportedly at opening night in Los Angeles.

posted by hippybear (12 comments total)

And you're gonna want that Immaculate Collection with that Q-Sound.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 6:09 AM on August 10, 2023

I saw a Madonna show in the late 80s (time uncertain) because my younger brother needed facilitation/ride/etc. So I bought two nosebleeds and brought my bestie along. He decided to borrow my girlfriends poly plaid Catholic school uniform to wear with his combat boots, such was the time and era. She put on an amazing show, and since our seats were far away from my brother’s good ones, he and his friend had their own good time. We were heading back to the car and I noticed my friend was cross. I couldn’t figure out why until he walked up to a cluster of college age boys and yelled “Nice pants you have there, buddy!”. It seems no one had given any Fs or paid him any mind and so his was a slightly failed entertainment. I started to respect Madonna and her impact a lot more after that event.
posted by drowsy at 6:31 AM on August 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

Thank you for this. I have to spend some time going through it, but since I have been listening to old Madonna lately -- courtesy of Youtube, which has decided I like Classic Rock with the Hits of the 80s 90s and Today -- I am interested to do it. Her music seems so fresh, her face so lovely. I saw candid shots of her in the subway before she was famous, bumming around in jeans, and she was just so stunning and genuine. Genuine what? Well, there's probably a graduate thesis on that.

In 1992 I was a tween, and I wasn't so interested in her music anymore because she'd changed her whole deal. I had also read this bitchy column, which stuck in my memory because it's not in Molly Ivins' wheelhouse. Now that I read it again, I'm surprised at her; she was never one for internalized misogyny.

Anyway, now that I am older, I absolutely understand the appeal of becoming a completely different person every 5 to 10 years, as Madonna does.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:36 AM on August 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

After posting it occurs to me that my children and all their friends, cis/trans/etc., would have had more variety in the squad and the same or more fun. My pal was being earnest in his way, he made it his mission in high school to expand what “normal” was, but it was a planned thing. He was surprised that Madonna fans already got the memo, and we didn't realize that because we were in an alt bubble of sorts. It was v cool to find that out, and it remained with me. Fast-forward and my kids’ gaggle would simply be themselves putting on their own gear to go out. Maybe to some extent Madge has a role in that. It is a happy thought to have. Thanks for prompting it with the OP.
posted by drowsy at 6:50 AM on August 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

These sorts of concert videos sort of ruined live music for me for a while - as a kid I expected concerts to be these kinds of big set piece affairs with dancers and props and whatnot, and so having most shows be, y'know, just the musicians making music was always sort of a let down.

To date I think I've only been to one show that was a big elaborate affair and lord how my heart sang.
posted by Kyol at 7:27 AM on August 10, 2023

Bravo to Madonna for this tour. It is amazing that she sings and dances continuously (and vigorously) for the whole 2 hour show, except for the 'Dick Tracy' routine where she tells the crowd outright that she will be lip-syncing. She is clearly breathing pretty hard by the end of it. Auto-tune as we know it didn't really exist, though maybe there were those expensive rack mountable hardware harmonizers to help? if you didn't use backing tracks.

This show made me think at the time "the best way to truly excel at continuous live performances is to optimize your body, maybe like you are training for the Olympics." Sure, younger folks have a high tolerance for the drugs n' drama part of rock n roll, but that is generally not sustainable unless you have a genetic gift for performing and sounding good while under the influence. Or at least not much past age 30+. Which is not to say we didn't already know this? but as a young dude in rock bands (as opposed to say, a professional sport or musical theatre where they likely knew this) I admired it.
posted by bitterkitten at 7:46 AM on August 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

This concert was on the TV at the house of some friends of my parents when they had a big party going. I was about 10 and was basically unsupervised for the duration of the party. This is absolutely seared into my memory as I had the feeling that it was a bit too much for someone my age, but I couldn't take my eyes off of it. There were a couple other kids my age and a bit older and they were also transfixed. I remember my mom or one of the other adults came in randomly and commented on the artistry of the whole production and said we probably shouldn't be watching it but didn't seem too bothered and let us continue.
posted by zsazsa at 7:49 AM on August 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

This show made me think at the time "the best way to truly excel at continuous live performances is to optimize your body, maybe like you are training for the Olympics."

Mick Jagger used to (and maybe still does) train by singing while jogging fairly long distances. This is really difficult, if you've never tried it, because in a sense singing (and talking to a lesser extent) is holding your breath and letting it out in a controlled way. Very easy to get short of breath if you're trying to sing while moving around vigorously.
posted by slkinsey at 8:01 AM on August 10, 2023

Back when Madonna was a force of nature and not on the run for assassinating Weird Al!

I'm always impressed by performers at their peak and what they can do even if I'm not the biggest fan of their work. (Like I took my wife to see the Spice Girls where she lost her flippin mind and it was an amazing feat, but the music is solidly not my cuppa)

Would love to see an analysis of what the "big" female performer of the time says about the time. (i.e. Madonna, Brittney, Beyonce and now Taylor)
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:18 AM on August 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

This video's been upscaled from VHS to modern qualities using AI-diffusion models, in case anyone's wondering why the video seems so weird.
posted by daHIFI at 3:58 PM on August 10, 2023

I'm pretty sure it's a Laserdisc rip, and I found the video to be pretty sharp on my desktop. It was never issued on VHS.
posted by hippybear at 4:29 PM on August 10, 2023

If anything there's probably been some extrapolation to remove the interlacing that was common to be hard-coded into NTSC video sources. I'm not sure if this is true for Laserdisc or not, but if there is any artifacting, it's likely going to be from that. I didn't notice any issues when I watched it a couple of times, but I wasn't looking at it on a gigantic screen.
posted by hippybear at 4:39 PM on August 10, 2023