Published by MTV News on Tuesday, April 29, 2008

We here at Newsroom have learned how intense Madonna fans can be. So we were not surprised to find hardcore devotees of La Dance Diva lined up in the rain for the chance to see her shake her frighteningly toned booty. That’s what you get when Madonna is not only performing, but she’s giving a free performance of Hard Candy (out today) — tomorrow night at NY’s Roseland Ballroom. It’s her “way of saying thank you” to fans yadda yadda, and the tickets are first-come, first-serve starting 6 a.m. tomorrow morning.

So, obviously, lifers are taking no chances.

Dana Spera, the first person in line, arrived outside of the club Monday at 10am — that’s right: Monday. Others arrived soon thereafter. As of 2pm this afternoon, the line wrapped around the corner of 52nd and Broadway.

Armed with food, clothes, camping gear, flannel blankets, plastic tarps, trash bags, and anything to keep them warm on this freakishly wintry day (though thankfully no leg warmers or bows, because that would be so mid-80’s), the crowd came prepared to wait…and wait…and wait…

But they weren’t expecting the cops who arrived to hassle them after neighbors complained. Jack Murray, numero dos in line, says the police made them take down a self-made tent covering the barricades while it was pouring outside. So mean, NYPD!

Despite the crappy weather, the group remains united in their mission to see Madonna. They’re helping each other out by holding spots if someone needs to get out of line for a few minutes to grab food or find an available bathroom. Though, one man — let’s just call him “Russell Jones” — said he was a little bummed out. He hasn’t been able to buy the new album yet because he’s been holding a spot near the front of the line. Russell politely refused to be identified for fear of being “reprimanded” by work for playing hookie. For chrissakes, it’s Madge!

Others played it safe. Chris Barone from Connecticut took three days off from work. That’s three vacation days. To him, the chance to see Madonna is priceless. “Too much time has been invested,” said Chris.

Um, we’re not sure if he means love hours or actual wait time.

More pics of the Madonna devotees straining their sanity.  Read more…

Source: http://newsroom.mtv.com/

***½ (out of 4 stars)

J.D. CONSIDINE

Of all the adjectives that have been applied to Madonna (and you could probably fill a book with them), “sweet” would not be high on the list, if it appeared at all. Smart, strong, sexy, scary – sure. But it’s easier to imagine her being considered cute and cuddly than to imagine Madonna being called sweet. It just doesn’t compute.

You can bet, however, that she dubbed her new disc Hard Candy precisely because of the heavy cognitive dissonance the association with sweetness would produce. Madonna is nothing if not a master of image manipulation, and the album cover alone is enough to keep a team of semioticians busy for weeks.

There she is, superimposed over an image of a pink-and-white all-day sucker, with bobbed blond hair and eye-widening mascara, dressed in thigh-high, lace-up black books and a black teddy, with a championship wrestling belt reading “Give It To Me” and a knuckle-spanning pimp ring. Stamped across the picture, in cheap blue-and-white lettering worthy of a seventies porn flick, are the words Hard Candy.

It’s naughty, provocative and funny, yet presented with a fierceness that seems to undercut any promise of pleasure. And that seems strange, because the music itself is all about pleasure.

Working with Timbaland and the Neptunes, two of the hottest dance-pop brands in the business, she’s assembled an album chock full of infectious beats and luscious ear candy, from the sinuous percussion and snaky Orientalia of Candy Shop to the synthetic brass and soundtrack pomp of 4 Minutes. It’s hard to imagine the pop fan who wouldn’t be snared by its aural allure.

To some extent, the album’s musical smarts seem a bit like muscle-flexing, as if Madonna wanted to remind us just how potent a pop star she is. What has kept her in the headlines recently hasn’t been her music so much as her home life (particularly her adoption of a Malawian boy) and spiritual interests (especially her devotion to Kabbalah). Not only was it beginning to seem as if Madonna was turning into just another celebrity, but she seemed to be losing her status as music’s No. 1 pop tart to a host of younger vixens, from Gwen Stefani and Britney Spears to Nelly Furtado and Rihanna.

But Madonna is hardly ready to retire her bustier, and she takes a few well-placed swipes at the competition with the slyly titled She’s Not Me. Although the lyric is couched in terms of a woman trying to keep her man from being stolen away, it’s easy enough to read the song as an accept-no-substitutes warning from Madonna to her audience. After all, there are more than a few pop starlets who could plead guilty to this couplet: “She started dying her hair and wearing the same perfume as me/ She started reading my books and stealing my looks and lingerie.”

That she delivers such lines in a perfect deadpan only adds to the effect. There’s a dizzying post-ironic sensibility at work here, with Madonna taking pop’s most obvious conventions – music can save the world (4 Minutes), dancing is like sex (Dance 2Night), sex is like candy (Candy Shop) – and turning them inside out, so we can see the clockwork ticking away. The album wants us to embrace those conventions even as it demystifies them, to simultaneously enjoy and see through them.

With Hard Candy Madonna wants to have her pop and eat it too. She has given us an album that is both deeply intellectual and mindlessly enjoyable, and slyly insinuating on both counts. Frankly, all I can say is . . . sweet!

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080429.wcd29/BNStory/Entertainment/home

Thanks to M.C. for the link!

Check out who was there FIRST to purchase her new CD!

http://worldofwonder.net/archives/2008/Apr/29/the_daily_freak_show.wow

Rehearsal audio from roseland on monday:

http://www.mediafire.com/?vvtjgldyzmm

http://joetohell.blogspot.com/

For those of you who want something really special, there will be a limited edition version of ‘Hard Candy’ released on May 12th, which includes the CD plus bonus remixes of ’4 Minutes’ and a 16 page booklet packaged in a in DVD-sized box. You’ll also get a packet of Madonna ‘Starlite Candy’!

Pre-order the special edition CD HERE

You and your Absolute Madonna readers should be sure to check out AT&T blue room’s EXCLUSIVE interview with the Material Girl about her new album, “Hard Candy,” now available online at http://www.attblueroom.com/music.

For quick teasers to the three-part interview, check out these clips: http://youtube.com/watch?v=MHIjal6mn6Y&feature=related and http://youtube.com/watch?v=e3Nzf2-ynqQ&feature=related.

Madonna reveals behind the scenes insights into the making of “Hard Candy,” including what it was like to work with Justin Timberlake and Pharell, as well as background on the album’s top songs.

Describing “Hard Candy,” Madonna says “everybody experiences loss, everybody wants something they can’t have, everybody takes things for granted, everybody wants to have fun…so I think [“Hard Candy” has] very universal themes.”

From David Fishman at AT&T

Madonna.com has received a re-invention! Check it out!

A Live Video Stream
Brings the Singer’s Concert
To Fans Around the World

By JOHN JURGENSEN
April 26, 2008; Page W2

With her 11th studio album to promote, Madonna is mounting an intimate free concert for fans — and anyone else who wants to watch live online.

On Wednesday night, a day after “Hard Candy” is released, the pop star will perform at the Roseland Ballroom, a New York club with room for about 3,000 people. Capturing the action will be a crew from Control Room, which produces concerts for distribution on the Web and other platforms. Control Room’s biggest production was Live Earth, a global series of concerts staged over 24 hours last summer.

Though video sites such as YouTube are littered with bootleg concert clips, it’s hard to find sanctioned shows from major music acts online. The main reason: the costly process of getting clearances from artists, record labels, music publishers, venues and sundry rights holders.

Wednesday’s concert will be supplemented by a prerecorded interview with Madonna, rehearsals and scenes from backstage. The concert footage will be edited on the fly and streamed via Microsoft’s MSN network (music.msn.com/inconcert). The show also will be archived there for a limited time.

Write to John Jurgensen at john.jurgensen@wsj.com

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120915827211445737.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

By J. Freedom du Lac

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 29, 2008; Page C01

It is not yet time to stick a fork in Madonna. The grande dame of pop isn’t done just yet.

Pop music is supposed to be a young person’s game, but Madonna, as she’s done so often throughout her quarter-century career, ignores the rules by sounding vital and relevant, even as she approaches her 50th birthday.

“They say that a good thing never lasts, and then it has to fall,” she sings on her new album, “Hard Candy.” “Those are the people that didn’t amount to much at all.”

The 11th studio set of her career — and her last for Warner Bros. Records, the longtime label that she’s leaving for a wide-ranging deal with concert promoter Live Nation — “Hard Candy” is a heady, frisky sugar rush of urban dance-pop come-ons in which Madge finally gets into the hip-hop groove.

“See which flavor you like/And I’ll have it for you,” she coos in album opener, “Candy Shop,” a hooky song driven by a twitchy, syncopated drum pattern. “Come on into my store/I’ve got candy galore.” Advertising herself as “your one-stop candy store,” she purrs: “Sticky and sweet/My sugar is raw.”

The recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee has succeeded for so long, with more than 200 million records sold worldwide since 1982, in large measure because she’s always had a knack for identifying interesting trends and adopting them as her own. (Well, that, along with self-promotional genius and sheer personality.)

Though lust is hardly a new addition to the “Sex” author’s repertoire, the sound on “Hard Candy” represents a welcome new twist for Madonna: It’s dance-pop pressed through a hip-hop filter with the help of several urban-music studio heavies — namely Pharrell Williams, Timbaland and Nate “Danja” Hills. (It’s another signature Madonna move, as she’s been collaborating with hot producers since the early days of her career, when she teamed with the likes of Jellybean Benitez and Niles Rodgers.)

Given hip-hop’s long-standing ubiquity, Madonna is arriving late to this particular party, suggesting that she might be slowing down in her advanced age. But even if she’s not starting any new trends in following the lead of Nelly Furtado, Gwen Stefani and such, Madge still manages to sound perfectly at home in the hip-hop world, where her sharp pop sensibilities — particularly her ability to craft killer hooks — are given a mostly fresh rhythmic framework.

If it’s not the boldest move of her career, it’s still a successful gambit from one of the great all-time shape-shifters.

It works best when Madonna isn’t trying to act like she’s down with the hip-hop kids, which just sounds weird. In “Heartbeat,” for instance, over a stuttering beat accented by a cowbell, we find Madonna quasi-rapping the line “see my booty get down” over and over as Pharrell eggs her on: “A little lower, baby.” Awk-ward!

More cowbell, less of Madonna’s booty raps, please. (She should leave that to the pros, as with Kanye West, who cameos on “Beat Goes On.”)

Much better is the album’s lead single, “4 Minutes,” which Madonna co-wrote with Timbaland, Hills and Justin Timberlake, who also makes a vocal cameo. It’s a busy, brassy song propelled by a detonative marching-band beat, and it’s one of the most thrilling things Madonna has done in this decade.

“Give It 2 Me” is also a highlight, a thumping, super-sexualized banger in which Madonna demands “it” over lurching synth stabs and a rump-shaking rhythm. “Don’t stop me now, don’t need to catch my breath/I can go on and on and on,” she sings convincingly. Maybe 50 is the new 25.

And, in fact, it’s easy to forget that Madonna is just months removed from the half-century mark and that Timberlake wasn’t yet 2 years old when her first single, “Everybody,” was released in 1982.

This is not the soundtrack to “The Cougar Den,” though, as Madonna wears her youthful sexuality well, managing to avoid sounding creepy during her multiple come-ons.

Pop music’s Everlasting Gobstopper, she keeps on ticking — and, um, licking — as time and trends march on.

DOWNLOAD THESE:“4 Minutes,” “Incredible,” “Give It 2 Me”

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/28/AR2008042802822.html

More info is located on www.chrisryannyc.com 

Thank you Chris Ryan for the news!