BetterForgotten

Madonna Playfully Spanks West Hollywood Nightclub Owner in Front of Addison Rae at Surprise “Confessions II” Performance

And Casey Kaden to go along with the previous post, 1:40 in for the exact segment lol Madonna and Whitney Houston set a new standard for commercial success for women in the mid/late 80’s. Before them, it wasn’t common for women in the rock era to score multiple #1 hits or have album sales on par with, or exceed their male contemporaries. Before them, in the rock era, you’d only have to look back to the Supremes in the 60’s in terms of female acts with similar consistent singles chart success.

Madonna’s Manager Guy Oseary ‘Not Sure Yet’ She’ll Tour Following Sabrina Carpenter Coachella Performance and ‘Confessions II’ Release

The Sabrina collaboration also isn’t totally disingenuous. Sabrina has paid homage to Madonna before - namely wearing the Bob Mackie gown to the 2024 VMAs that Madonna wore at the 1991 Oscars where she performed the Oscar-winner “Sooner or Later” from Dick Tracy and arrived with Michael Jackson as her date, lol

This is awful and he was way too young. RIP.

I think the biggest thing is there feels to be an actual strategy for this album. Not Madonna releasing something to satisfy contractual commitments, but a body of work she spent time on and actually seems very proud of. And of course, having the push/backing of her historical home in Warners makes a huge difference. They know her catalogue and how much millions she’s generated for them and continues to. It all feels very coordinated and strategically planned: ‘I Feel So Free’ was first serviced to PRIDE radio and the clubs - the gay and club audiences have always been Madonna’s core from the very beginning. This is her reminding them that the QUEEN has retuned in great grandeur. This “teaser” single was meant specifically for those audiences who always remained loyal to her and will defend her through anything The Sabrina collab and Coachella appearance was to generate hype and headlines for the wider Pop audiences. Again, reminding them that the Queen has returned, and if certain younger audiences are not too familiar with her, they better do some research and understand who the Queen of Pop is and her importance to culture She’s already building momentum before an official single is serviced to radio (at this point who cares if the ageist radio programmers even play it anyway), released a video, or announced an upcoming tour Again, Madonna is 67 and 43 years into her career - and the fact she can still generate some hype for an album release and isn’t relegated to a being mainly a legacy or holiday act is something very rare and special. We may not always agree with everything she does or releases, but you cannot deny this woman’s impact on popular music and culture.

Her LiveNation era albums (MDNA to Madame X) took a backseat to touring, which is how that contract was set up. They were mostly rushed releases to support her touring-centric contract with them. LiveNation was/is not a real record label, and Interscope only handled the distribution for those albums, so she didn’t have to listen to them and there was no incentive on their end to promote those albums beyond the initial release. Her new arrangement with Warner is very different. The music, not touring, is the first priority. She actually seems to be devoting more than 5 mins of her time this time around to crafting a well thought out album release and strategy. I’m sure a tour announcement will follow (as that’s where the real $$$ is), but for the first time in a long time, the music is not a means to tour to satisfy a multi-million dollar contractual agreement. She got paid handsomely by LiveNation, so she got something out of it, but the actual music from that era was largely rushed work.

It’s apparently a teaser single, not the first official single. There’s a plan in place for this album release, something she didn’t really have with LiveNation in recent previous cycles as they were more concerned with pushing tours and merchandise.

Acra is listed as an additional producer, and I can feel her influence on this track, even though it’s a quintessential Stuart Price production as well.

Full version of ‘I Feel So Free’ and of course, she had an epic launch to this era appearing with Sabrina Carpenter at Coachella last night. This feels like the sibling to ‘Future Lovers’ from the first COADF. Love that it’s 5 minutes long and she’s not catering to the TikTok generation. Mother didn’t come to play this time around it seems. The Queen of Pop, always and forever.

Great article from Josh Ackley at OUT. Parts that resonated with me and my own experiences with her: “For a lot of us, Madonna has never simply been a pop star, she has been a figure we associate with permission, with defiance, with the refusal to shrink when shrinking is what the culture is asking for.” “That is why this announcement lands the way it does now. Not because people are waiting for a soundtrack, not because nostalgia is powerful, but because for many of us Madonna has been tied, across different moments in our lives, to the experience of being given permission when the world was asking us to disappear. She has been tied to survival, not in a dramatic or abstract sense, but in the daily sense of pushing through environments that were not built to accept us, of finding something to look up to when there was very little around us that reflected who we were. There is also something else that is easy to forget if you reduce her to iconography or legacy, which is that Madonna is fun. Not in a trivial way, not as an escape from seriousness, but as a refusal to let seriousness become a cage. The joy, the sexuality, the humor, the excess, the theatricality, all of it has always been part of the same project as the defiance, part of the same insistence that life should not be reduced to something narrow or disciplined into something manageable for other people’s comfort. So when she clears the slate and signals that something new is coming, something that reaches back to one of the last moments the world felt this tightly wound, people react. They stop. They pay attention. Because for those of us who have lived through her at different stages, who have needed what she offered at different points in our lives, it does not feel like a routine album cycle. It feels like the return of a force that has, more than once, made it possible to keep going.”

Preview (apparently full song drops on Friday)

Her first summer release since True Blue in 1986 - almost 40 years ago exactly in fact (TB was released on June 30th).

July 3rd release date! https://x.com/Madonna/status/2044402249976447164?s=20 Available for pre-order in various formats on her official website as well: https://www.madonna.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoqIim6Esfgi13C13_QnAwaWZSXIrxqIE8c0X7qJx8RNm-4_2N5V

Every time Anastasia pops up, I’m like, “Ooh, look! It’s budget Jasmine Guy!”

TCS was already running out of steam when she joined, but I generally found Cousin Pam unbearable and it was clear Erika Alexander was still learning how to act on TV/sitcoms. I guess that’s why her turn as Maxine Shaw in Living Single was such a revelation to me - If I had only seen her as Pam, I wouldn’t have known she had it in her, lol. Living Single, of course, was created by Yvette Lee Bowser, who got her start on ADW and so many of the cast made guest appearances.

I’m kind of most interested in seeing what they do with Freddie in her guest appearance - is she the more polished lawyer (in training at that point) from the last season, or more so in line with Cree’s irreverent, free-spirited real life persona (she’s f.ucking hilarious in interviews to this day). The more I think back on it, they had really run out of ideas for the longtime characters by season 6 and the new characters weren’t all that good or interesting. The premise of the show could always live on, but they didn’t have the characters to support that type of reinvention back then (nor was NBC interested when ratings started to decline sharply).

Take with a grain of salt (but many of his leaks and sources have proven to be accurate in the past), but John Rocha is blaming SMG and saying she was problematic during the development and accusing her and her people of trying to smear Chole Zhao.

This will be the gift that keeps giving…

First trailer released today:

From what most industry sources have said, it was also a troubled pilot with tonal issues, and even in reworked form, it wasn’t deemed good enough by the suits at Hulu. That coupled with execs who aren’t a fan of the IP likely sealed its fate. It is being touted that there is still interest in exploring the IP in the future, but I would have to guess it would be without involvement from SMG and Chloe Zhao.

Robert Meyer Burnett said on John Campea’s show that he read the pilot script and that it just wasn’t very good… (that and SMG only appears in the last page of the script). Campea himself says he heard the pilot Zhao turned in was not at all what Hulu execs were expecting tonally, at least, and they decided not to move forward.