Madonna initially pitched her career-spanning Celebration tour as pop’s most infamous boundary-pusher finally surrendering to nostalgia. “I am excited to explore as many songs as possible in hopes to give my fans the show they have been waiting for,” she said in a statement that didn’t exactly abound with excitement. But, by the time she mounted the first dates in London this month, three months delayed by a bacterial infection that nearly killed her, the show had taken on a different hue: less what fans have been waiting for than what they almost lost.
Conceived prior to her illness, the Celebration tour was already pitched as a memorial, hymning a grimy 70s NYC downtown subsumed by gentrification, the generation of artists lost to Aids, Madonna’s late MTV-era icons Prince and Michael Jackson, and her own mother, who died of breast cancer when she was five years old. No matter how many dancers flanked Madonna on stage, the 65-year-old star cut an implicitly lonely figure – the last of a dying breed. But knowing how precariously she stood at the centre of this spectacle, re-enacting her past almost as if it were a mythological trial, heightened the stakes. What did she have to prove? You could divide the show into two parts: how history shaped Madonna, from the Paradise Garage to photographer Peter Hujar, then how Madonna shaped history, becoming the forcefield into which others were drawn. You could divide it into Madonna the daughter and Madonna the mother – to her literal children, four of whom shared the stage with her, to the LGBTQ+ community (as mother) and to the genre of MTV-era spectacle that set the standard for modern pop stardom.
