The Polaroid bitch (a nickname best used to describe those who shell out thousands of dollars/euros for a picture Madonna takes of herself during the Madame X Tour) is Jörg from Germany. He is the one willing to surpass the 1,500 euros offered for it from the previous night with 2,000. Madonna notes, “The person from last night was German, too. I guess French people just don’t have any money.” As usual, her tendency to bulldoze over a cultural wound like a rhinoceros was in full effect. For the French are certainly feeling the weight of their rebellion these days, with general strikes and gilets jaunes furor having prompted the opportunity for certain “scabs” to come in and fulfill a role (whether in waste management, transportation, etc.) while the others futilely voice their opinions over, among other things, Macron trying to raise the retirement age to sixty-five (something Americans would balk at as they’ve long ago resigned themselves to working until, at the bare minimum, seventy. Plus, they’ve never known what to do with themselves otherwise–just look at Madonna, workaholic extraordinaire). Madonna does not seem aware of this. To her, the more digging a joke, the more it means one is expressing “love.” It stems from the Italian blood in her, in addition to most of her years being spent in New York, where throwing shade is a second nature daily activity on par with eating. This is perhaps why she also adds later on, “I’ve noticed French people don’t laugh a lot. Am I not funny?” The crowd screams to negate her. “Just funny looking?” she further demands.
Surprisingly, to Europeans, no. She is not funny looking, but funny. More than any other continent on this earth, the denizens here can appreciate a wry, sick sense of humor, particularly in France and England. They simply do not possess the uncouth, overzealous forms of expression that Madonna can’t untrain herself from expecting as an American accustomed to the nondescript squawkings of New Yorkers. And, as an American, she has like so many of her kind, always had a complicated relationship with Europe. On the one hand, she is charmed by the priorities here, including the notion of creating art purely for art’s sake, as she calls out at one point before her performance of “Batuka” with the Batukadeiras. Of taking life at a slower pace and realizing that money isn’t the god that America has long made it out to be. On the other, Madonna is at war with these ideals she would like to wholly subscribe to but can’t. Maybe the best way to elucidate this is to go back to the Blond Ambition Tour, the first major tour of any kind and certainly uncharted territory for Madonna in terms of all the technical difficulties that could go awry with a production of such a massive scale. What’s worse, failing to take into account the climate of other places outside of the U.S. after scheduling dates in Japan during its torrential downpour season that forced her to amend the show’s costuming and choreography. Of the self-censorship, Madonna remarked, “The only thing that kept me from slashing my wrists was the thought of coming back to America and doing the show the way it was meant to be.”
Last night, too, Madonna might have had a similar sentiment (though her American leg is over) as the screen telling of the origins of batuque music before she was to delve into her collaborative performance of “Batuka” was cut short due to an unforeseen glitch, courtesy of the Grand Rex’s general inability to accommodate her stage and screens thus far. After several minutes of confusion (though seasoned fans were well-aware this was not meant to be part of the show), Madonna turned up to admit there was a technical issue and that she would have to take this time to entertain them with a brief a capella rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You.” Once she finished that, Madonna was egged on to sing “La Vie En Rose” (a regular part of her setlist during 2015’s Rebel Heart Tour), but couldn’t seem to find the words after explaining that she’d spent the last three years learning Portuguese and had forgotten. The French, as usual, were betrayed. But before they could verbalize that too much, the screens started working again, “Batuka” went forth and, after, M sang “Fado Pechincha,” made famous by Isabel de Oliveira and Celeste Rodrigues, the latter being the one who helped turn Madonna on to fado music in the first place. To further honor her memory in the wake of her recent death, Rodrigues’ great grandson, Gaspar Varela, is part of the tour, and appeared onstage with M for “Can’t Help Falling in Love”–somewhat ruining the surprise, Madonna called out later when she unveiled him to help with “Fado Pechincha” and explained its significance, as well as Gaspar’s.
What one felt Madonna also needed to explain the significance for, at times, was her talk of American politics as opposed to those of a more global nature (one so wishes she had addressed the recent outburst of coronavirus cases in Northern Italy to show some semblance of awareness for her geographical location). Instead comments like “I still have hope for America” despite Trump’s seeming inability to be impeached were met with cricket silence. That is, until she went into her very Reinvention Tour-esque performance of “American Life.” Indeed, there are numerous elements of the show that harken back to previous tours, as though the Madame X Tour is a thesis on all of them, combining M’s usual imagery of world destruction, Catholicism and the hope that somehow the future might be better if we all come together.
Noticeably missing from the show, however, was Madonna’s usual brand of sexual bawdiness. Save for a few instances of being felt up by Dick Tracy-esque men in trench coats during “I Don’t Search I Find,” it seemed as though she had either toned it down for the sake of her physical health or out of respect to her backup dancer boyfriend, Ahlamalik Williams, the person most obviously affectionate toward her onstage, particularly during the fado segment of the show, featuring “Killers Who Are Partying,” “Crazy,” “La Isla Bonita” and “Medellín” (conceptually unchanged from the first time M performed it at the Billboard Music Awards). Although one of the seemingly simpler performances of the show, “Extreme Occident” is among the most poignant as Madonna and a pair of dancers ride upon a slew of staircases (which Madonna mentioned were not very compatible with the Grand Rex’s small stage) that careen back and forth in a circular motion to iterate the primary aphorism of the song, “Life is a circle.” That it is, for Madonna inevitably keeps returning to Paris, the city that gave her a first real taste of what star treatment could be like, for it was where she once might have been made into a “disco tart” by the same producers responsible for Patrick Hernandez, a France-born one-hit wonder of the genre that M was selected to tour with in Paris circa 1979. She was even furnished with a place to live on the Boulevard de Courcelles across from Parc Monceau.
Alas, she traded in the Svengali approach to fame for making it on her own again in NY, a city she admits does not have as beautiful of buildings as Paris. And one does wonder if perhaps Madonna would be more in tune with the European spirit had she stayed instead of going back to Corona, Queens (dare one say she got her own Corona-virus?). Less prone to being pulled back to the U.S. had she been trained at a young age to accept the “ghetto” that comes with the beauty of Europe. Considering her unshakeable perfectionism, maybe it was never meant to be. For it’s a perfectionism that led to the omission of the Madame X Tour’s iconic opening number, “God Control,” during which Madonna dons an American Revolutionary getup (think a more fabulous version of Thomas Jefferson, himself as interconnected with France as Madonna). She also skipped “Dark Ballet,” “Human Nature,” “Express Yourself,” “Papa Don’t Preach” and “Crave” likely thanks to the injuries that have caused performances to be abridged and amended as the tour dates have worn on.
Even so, of course every song is memorable and moving for different reasons. What’s more, it is quite possibly because Madonna knows that she can’t rely as much on the physical performance aspect of impressing people that she has made certain her vocals are more on point than they’ve ever been, standing out particularly during “Frozen” (which is already chilling in and of itself purely for the giant projections of daughter Lourdes superimposed over her and the “Rescue Me” intro that precedes it), “Come Alive” and “Like A Prayer” (consistently the most crowd-pleasing hit apart from “Vogue” and one of the best versions of it she’s delivered since the Blond Ambition Tour).
As a spectacle rife with philosophical musings (including an opening voiceover that reminds, “And remember, none of this is real”), Madonna is a daughter of Paris in many ways. In the end, however, her crude NYC by way of the Midwest mannerisms can’t help but constantly stand out all the more when she’s in a country like France. Getting back to the Polaroid bitch, he tells Madonna what he does for a living: “I sell mortgages to people.” When Madonna asks if he likes his work, he replies that it can get boring (no shit). She then inquires as to why he doesn’t get a job he likes better, to which Jörg reminds that it makes him good money. The kind that can furnish him with 2K to buy a Polaroid. Madonna admits that’s a fair reason, herself having perpetually been more of a business-minded person than an artist, merely having the acumen to make money off the latter classification (and who’s to say she might not have ended up selling mortgages herself back in Detroit if the fame thing didn’t pan out?).
Yet she can’t seem to fathom that for most, these two concepts of art and commerce will never merge together. Many must simply choose between the artist’s life of poverty or selling out entirely like Jörg. Jörg who sweetly questions after surrendering his cash, “Can I say one more thing?” M quips, “You mean before you die?” He responds, “Thank you for educating us with your art.” A French person, of course, would never say this to Madonna. They already wrote the proverbial book on Art. Which is why they have the taste to know when it’s as good as this show. But M ought not expect anything beyond staid approval.
