Madonna: Not So Great in Great Britain

The Material Girl should have worn a little more material:

Last night hundreds of die-hard Madonna fans abandoned their Queen of Pop by marching out of London’s Hyde Park during her MDNA concert – some branding it the worst they had ever seen.

Even a sexy striptease on stage left fans cold- one simply stated: ‘When Madonna has concerts in her 50s where she strips herself on stage, you know her career is as dead as myspace.’

It took me a long time to warm up to Madonna. Her first single I remember, “Holiday,” was a bad Go-Gos ripoff, and that just left me cold. “Like A Virgin,” sorry, isn’t a very interesting song. I thought the “Material Girl” video was a nice homage to Marilyn, but again, the music was just uninteresting.

True Blue had a couple nice cuts on it, though, and I remember enjoying the heck out of “Like A Prayer” when I was playing it during my morning gig at KXGO.

Then she released the Dick Tracy soundtrack, and I was impressed. The material — much of it written by Steven Sondheim — was a huge step up from her previous pop-fluff. And her vocals… impressed. Her Carmen Miranda bit on “Going Bananas” is still lots of fun.

Madonna followed that up with Erotica, which was the first album of hers I ever spent my own money on. It’s one of the few albums I’ll still occasionally take the time to listen to all the way through. Great stuff.

Everything since then? What little I can remember makes me yawn, and she’ll go down in history as having performed the absolute worst James Bond theme of all time. I could record a better Bond song than Die Another Day, and my singing voice can kill livestock at 200 paces. I’m not talking chickens here, either, but the big cattle.

A few weeks ago on Trifecta, Scott and Bill and I took some heat for the adolescent fun we had at Madonna’s expense, the first time she tried this mock-daring strip-tease act. But I stand by it. She wanted attention in the worst way, and so we gave it to her in the worst way. It’s not that she was stripping at 50 — hell, I’d pay good money to see Raquel Welch show some skin at 60. No, it’s that Madonna was uninteresting and mock-daring at 23, and she’s still uninteresting and mock-daring at 50.