The queen of pop, Madonna, will visit Barcelona as part of her The Celebration Tour, with which she will review her forty-year career and which seems like a farewell to the top of it. The one from Michigan is considered to be the most successful and best-selling soloist on the planet, thanks to her brilliant and pioneering business model that has been established as the basis of great live shows worldwide.
And it is that with Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone started a certain design of the live staging with the support of a group of dancers and choreographies, which went from a subtle strategy to make up for the absence of the band of musicians to nurture sophisticated and complex assemblies in constant progression and depth. Madonna knew how to see better than anyone the enormous possibilities of a show of this type, with the soloist as the center of attention in an elaborate system of choreography and set design. An attractive calico that had already advanced, of course, the king of pop, Michael Jackson, in what is considered the first music video clip in history, that of his single Thriller, from his 1982 self-titled album, with Michael Jackson turned as a zombie, accompanied by many others, in a legendary choreography through a cemetery. That video had a huge global impact, placing the single and the album in unprecedented sales figures and its manager at the top of the pop Olympus.
It is true that just four years before we witnessed another brutal earthquake in show business, caused by dance and choreography, via Saturday Night Fever, the film that would make disco music a planetary phenomenon, John Travolta a star and discotheques an essential element of leisure in society. In it, the cult of dance is situated as a whole lifestyle for a certain social group –that of the Italian-American working class– who finds in the achievement and performance of elaborate steps and careful choreography a way of promotion and social distinction within their community. However, this phenomenon would not leave the environment of the discos and would not go beyond being a fashion that, already entered in the eighties, would be settled. Travolta would not have any musical career either, and his days of dancing and movies would be left behind and almost forgotten… until the premiere of Pulp Fiction in 1994, with the famous dance scene between the actor and Uma Thurman. But let’s go back to the little one of the Jackson brothers.
After the publication of Thriller, the rise and dominance of the world pop scene was in the hands of its king, Michael Jackson, endowing his shows with all those elements that would definitively mark the modern development of live music. At least, the one designed for large assemblies and vast spaces. The world tour of his next album, Bad (Epic, 1987), would mark that change and mark the way forward. Madonna took good note of all that and did the same in parallel to Jacko, until his death from a respiratory arrest on June 25, 2009, with all the paper sold for his then-imminent This is it tour, which had fifty planned concerts.
And while the vast majority of female soloists focused on making a profit from their physical attributes, Madonna scanned the New York underground in search of trends to appropriate to nurture her staging. And such was his eagerness that, according to legend, he was banned from entering Jackie 60, one of the most avant-garde parties in the city, in order to preserve the exclusivity of the outfits of his regulars and the artistic actions that took place there. they were carried out. Of all these appropriations, the most notorious was undoubtedly the one that he embodied in his song Vogue, and its subsequent video, where several dancers from the New York ballroom scene danced voguing, a dance that emerged from the trans and homosexual community, mostly African-American and immigrants. from New York.
That video marked the beginning of the nineties, when Madonna built an entire empire around her, empowering herself and placing herself in charge of her business. She set up her own record label, Maverick, and signed million-dollar contracts, like the one she has exclusively with Live Nation to tour live and many other advertising agreements and rights to this and that. And since then, each new album and presentation tour has shown a step further in the tireless progression of this popular artist in constant mutation, always aware of new trends and surrounding herself with the best teams of music producers, dancers and set designers. .
Forty years later, there are many artists who have followed in his wake and, above all, his business model. In the nineties they would be soloists like Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Kylie Minogue or groups like TLC or Spice Girls. And from 2000 onwards things skyrocketed, with artists like Rihanna or Beyoncé, called to be the successor in her own right to the throne that, forty years later, continues to be occupied by Madonna. At least until the end of this 2023.
