Thursday, December 13, 2012

13D: time to extract Madonna’s DNA

Pop icon’s world tour arrives in Buenos Aires

The timing for Madonna’s third visit to Argentina may not be perfect — while 15 years have elapsed between The Girlie Show (1993) and Sticky & Sweet (2008), the MDNA Tour comes too close on the heels of the last landmark tour and at a moment when Argentines are far more concerned with other Ds rather than MDNA’s.

The words and the statement may be there from the beginning, but expect no act of contrition when pop superstar Madonna opens the Argentine leg of her globe-trotting MDNA Tour tonight at River Plate stadium. Do, however, expect the unexpected, like Madonna ditching MDNA’s most frequent set list and flagship number — yes, you guessed it, the cheerleader act — and instead firing things up with, say, the inexhaustible power of Express Yourself which she has been revamping over and over. Should this be the case, drums and drummers will fly up in the air while the remaining musicians, dancers and the diva herself will watch them ascend and glide down.

When it comes to set lists, there is nothing as stable as a “set list,” and artists will indeed shuffle and reposition the same numbers, include or omit others, improvise, insert hooks and segue different songs. For example, cueing a ballad into an infectious dance number, then proceeding to pick up a guitar and rock, which Madonna has consistently been doing since her Drowned World Tour and which she took to unprecedented heights during the rousing rendition of I Love New York on the Confessions Tour.

If you agree with the notion that there’s no such thing as a set list, you may acknowledge that there are wish lists, and that most self-respecting artists will rarely give in to the temptation of playing one string of crowd pleasers after the other. Madonna will not tumble the dice, for she’s known to plan things down to their tiniest detail, but this is what her fans will most likely get tonight:

The MDNA show should last approximately 116 minutes and include only seven songs from Madonna’s new album, while the rest of the gig will be made up of a meticulous selection of previous material reworked into shiny and new “bootleggeable” pieces.

Choosing at random and taking a wild guess, Madonna is not unlikely to come up with an even better and more unusual mashup than Act of Contrition/Girl Gone Wild, for she is full of grace and fans are with her, as she herself would probably like to say, and this is no heresy.

Where & when

MDNA Tour. Today and Saturday at 8pm at River Plate Stadium, Ave. Figueroa Alcorta 7597. Saturday 22 at 8pm at Mario Kempes Stadium, Córdoba City.