A Pop Music Concert Event Feature
An unprecedented moment setting a new milestone as MADONNA closes THE CELEBRATION TOUR marking Four Decades of Music with a free live show on the beach in Rio De Janeiro to an audience of more than 2 million!
If you’re the biggest, most iconic, pop star in the world, how do you close a chapter in a career that has radically influenced the world? If you’re Madonna you put on the greatest show on earth, one that would be the envy of P.T. Barnum. one that properly cements four decades in music that revolutionized, inspired, and moved the bar for generations that followed. You put on the type of show that shakes up not only the audience but also imprints on every culture across the planet — something unparalleled, unprecedented, and uniquely Madonna!
On Saturday, May 4th, Madonna ended the 80 show run of The Celebration Tour, her first-ever live show solely dedicated entirely to promoting her 4 decades in music, with a performance on the largest dance floor in the world. The Queen of Pop took over the beach at Copacabana in Rio De Janeiro and played to an audience of more than 2 million. That’s not including the fans who tuned in from all over the planet to watch the finale live as it streamed on the internet.
It’s been nearly two weeks since the historic performance, and it feels like that’s approximately the appropriate time it’s taken to digest the enormity of it all. For the artist herself, this is a journey that started a year and a half ago and hit a snag, when Madonna was hospitalized with a bacterial infection that left her in a coma. The tour was effectively put on hold until she regained her health, and although the North American launch dates in the itinerary were nixed and shuffled until later, that didn’t prevent the celebration from taking off in London last fall, returning to the States in December.
Where’s the Party?
Unlike Madonna’s previous tours, The Celebration Tour wasn’t crafted to support a new album of original music. The tour was manufactured instead on the heels of the release of the artist’s latest greatest hits package Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones which collected her chart-topping, career-spanning hits that were remixed for the dance floor. Perhaps the nostalgia surrounding putting such a retrospective together triggered something in her, something her fans had been asking for decades: a live concert experience that featured her greatest hits, that took fans back to where it all started.
When one considers, according to biographer Mary Gabriel in her recent release “Madonna: A Rebel Life” suggests that in 2001, Madonna was prepared and contemplating retiring from touring. The Drowned World Tour might have been the last time fans saw her in her element, and that show was eight years after her last live outing The Girlie Show. Fortunately for fans, that wasn’t the case and Madonna would subsequently perform live concerts six more times between Drowned World and The Celebration Tour, but this time she was bringing the party to an all-new level.
This tour would be Madonna’s twelfth concert tour and her first all-arena tour since 2016, which immediately suggested the scale of the show would be enormous. Madonna had promised that if she would mount a “greatest hits” tour, she would want to “explore as many songs as possible…give my fans the show they have been waiting for.” Working with her longtime musical director Stuart Price their approach to putting together such a daunting undertaking was simplified by curating many of the original recordings of the tracks, and programming them to fill the venues.
Returning to the fold was Jamie King, sharing creative director duties with Lewis James. Madonna had a clear vision of how she wanted to tell her story, and the pair were tasked with bringing that vision to the stage. The platforms would be built and designed by the London-based production company Stufish who had been working with the artist and her elaborate ideas since 2012’s MDNA Tour. The design was inspired by a map of New York City, with Uptown, Downtown, Midtown, East and West stages evoking Madonna’s 40-year musical journey, which began in the heart of Manhattan.
It’s a Celebration!
As has always been true with Madonna, her concerts are installations, performance art with dancers as living sculptures, and video backdrops and stage platforms that enhance the environment and elevate the musical experience. It was an art she, along with her brother and creative director Christopher Ciccone introduced with 1990’s Blond Ambition Tour. With this event taking a profound look at her career, through an examination of her evolution as an artist, it only made sense that the fashion, and elements culminated to best reflect the artist’s inspiration.
The staging for The Celebration Tour evokes movement, in space as well as time. Madonna has often intended her staged shows to be transportive and on her twelfth live tour, she would move her audiences through four decades of pop culture. On the Copacabana Beach in Rio, to the millions of fans that attended the free event, the celebration was felt from end to end. The outdoor venue, with the beach to one side and the mountains to the other, provided the perfect inspiration. Madonna may not had intended to or been out to set a record, but inevitably she did — this closing of her latest tour, the 81st show in the itinerary, marked her the largest live crowd of any concert ever!
To her fans, it was indeed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience Madonna like never before. In a career that was filled with statements, the provocateur didn’t refrain from her usual tricks. At 65 the Queen of Pop is endeavoring to change the way society views people, especially women of a certain age, who might be considered obsolete. Throughout the 2-hour plus performance Madonna performed a setlist of tracks that challenged her religious beliefs, life, death, sex, and undeniably her endurance. Since 1983, the artist has continued to prove the most defiant step she’s taken, was in sticking around.
Until The Next Time
Certainly, of course, everyone is wondering what the artist will do next. After following up such a joyful, and triumphant experience as The Celebration Tour is this Madonna’s final act? That entirely is up to her, but if the rumors are true, she is hard at work on her next studio album. Some of the new music has been reported to have been recorded during the tour, and the songs may be a collection of collaborations. Madonna has always enjoyed collaborative efforts, and her recent projects have featured duets with Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, and most recently Maluma on 2019’s Madame X.
Whatever course Madonna decides to take, the truth is this: after 4 decades of entertaining, creating, educating, pushing buttons, and most of all inspiring, her’s is a spirit that can’t be stopped. Madonna’s is a journey that continues to move forward, and if her recent takeover of Rio is any indication, it is a path that many of her fans are ready to continue to follow. Likely, the next time that she surfaces, Madonna will be releasing in some version, the live Celebration Tour experience, and for all of us that have stepped to the beat, we will continue to celebrate along, and ask: where’s the next party?
THE CELEBRATION TOUR FOUR DECADES 2023-2024 | Madonna | has concluded its historic and record-breaking run with a closing show on the beach of Copacabana in Rio De Janeiro on May, 4th, 2024. The event which was free and open to the public was reported to have been attended by more than 2 million spectators and was broadcast on TVGlobo.
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