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Madonna news - April 2021
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Madonna and Mike Dean working on sound mix of Madame X documentary
Source: Instagram - 24 April 2021Those of you who were hopeful that the Madame X documentary is ready and could drop any day now, should wait a bit longer still. But at least we're another step closer to the release.
Yesterday, Madonna posted a video in which she's in the studio with her audio engineer Mike Dean, musician Sean Solymar, producer and mixer Lauren Delia, and Sage Skolfield, as they are working on the sound mix of the upcoming documentary.
M commented:
Starting The Sound Mix for Madame ❌.................We are almost at the end of the journey!!! In the Stu with @therealmikedean
Who just dropped a record today! 🎹🎼 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Its great to be back with the E-Z riders #ganggang . @seansolymar @laurendelia @onlysageskolfield
Primary Wave buys catalog of Madonna collaborator Patrick Leonard in 'multi-million-dollar deal'
Source: Music Business Worldwide - 22 April 2021Primary Wave Music has struck a catalog acquisition deal with Grammy-nominated songwriter, producer, and longtime Madonna collaborator Patrick Leonard.
The deal sees the company acquire his rights in his music publishing and recorded music catalogs, as well as his master royalties as a producer.
Included in what Primary Wave describes as a “multi-million-dollar deal”, are Leonard’s share of a number of hits from Leonard Cohen such as You Want It Darker, It Seemed the Better Way, and If I Didn’t Have Your Love.
The deal also encompasses his share of songwriter royalties from his work with Madonna. Songs include a number of her No.1 hits such as La Isla Bonita, Frozen, and the classic Like A Prayer.
Leonard is also an accomplished producer having worked with a number of award-winning singers throughout his career including Roger Waters, Bon Jovi, Rod Stewart, Elton John, Jewel, Fleetwood Mac and many others.
Primary Wave says that the deal will see it enter into “go-forward deals” with Leonard to administer his publishing as well as distribute his masters on all future projects.
Additionally, the company says that Leonard will also now have access to its marketing team and publishing infrastructure, which includes digital strategy, licensing, synch opportunities as well as film, television and theatrical production.
He’s probably best known, however, for his long-time collaboration with Madonna.
His work with the singer includes her albums True Blue, Who's That Girl, Like a Prayer, I'm Breathless and Ray of Light.
He also scored Madonna's 2008 documentary I Am Because We Are, played keyboards with her at Live Aid in 1985, and was both musical director and keyboardist on the singer's The Virgin Tour and Who's That Girl World Tour.
Madonna poses in Burberry
Source: Instagram - 22 April 2021Madonna gave out a shout to her friend and Italian fashion designer Riccardo Tisci, while posing in his new collection for Burberry from her balcony.
Good Luck @riccardotisci17 ....... You better Werk . New Collection is fire 🔥🔥🔥. ......... Italians do it better! 🖤 🖤🖤 @burberry #BurberryAW21
A toast to Riccardo Tisci 🥂 These boots are so 🔥🔥🔥
@riccardotisci17 @burberry #BurberryAW21
Madonna brings gun control message to the streets of LA
Source: Instagram - 18 April 2021The US has a weird love for guns and it has caused way too many young lives. Madonna has lived long enough in Europe to know that the rest of the Western world has taken gun control to heart.
After several days of intense posting online in favour of gun control, and even getting into a heated debate with an online troll, Madonna now has taken to the streets of LA to get her message across.
Together with a few accomplices, she went out at night to hang up posters with #guncontrolnow and #wakeupamerica on the walls of Melrose Avenue, LA.
Madonna has taken the fight against gun violence to heart; in June 2019 she launched her God Control video which reenacts a mass shooting. There are literally several of those mass shootings every month in the US, something that is completely absent in countries with gun control laws. When will America wake up and learn?
Madonna poses in Gucci, talks about Madame X docu preview
Source: Instagram - 14 April 2021Madonna has been busy posting new photoshoots with Ricardo Gomes lately. Tonight, she posted a series of 7 pictures of her wearing Gucci.
She talks about how the Madame X documentary has been previewed by 12 people, but that it's (still) not ready for release:
[S]creened Madame ❌ in a 500 seat theatre!! Only 12 people were there but it was so GREAT to see it on a big. screen! Cant wait to show it to the world!!! 🚀🚀🚀.
Thank you to everyone who worked so hard these last 7 months on post. (and we still aren't finished) but i see light at the end of the tunnel.
Madonna lashes out to trolling Karen on gun control post
Source: Uproxx - 14 April 2021As the recent police killing of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota continues to draw scrutiny, more and more stars have become more and more outspoken about the need for police reform (or abolition). One of those stars, Madonna, took one of her commenters to task after they derided her post about the killing, challenging the detractor and pointing out their name was fitting, considering the content of their comment.
Posting the video of the shooting to Instagram, if you're so inclined), Madonna argued in the caption, "This is so infuriating and unacceptable," and calling police spokesman Tim Gannon's "deeply upsetting." Adding the hashtag #guncontrol, she appeared to be advocating for a disarmed police force, in line with previous, similar posts of hers demanding more gun control overall.
However, this drew the attention of @karengayler, an anonymous troll who pulled out all the usual bad faith arguments to question Madonna's post. "I would bet you have people with guns to protect you and your family," they wrote. "But the little people can be left unarmed. If you take the guns away criminals will ALWAYS find weapons."
Madonna wasn't hearing any of it. "B****h I don't have any security or armed guards around me," she corrected. "Come see me and tell me to my face how not real my world is. I dare you. You know nothing about me or my life. The only criminals I see right now are the police who are paid to protect the people." She finished her tirade with the perfect flourish to underline the disingenuousness of the commenter's statements: "Of course your name is Karen."
Madonna drops $19.3 million on The Weeknd's Hidden Hills estate
Source: Dirt - 12 April 2021
Seller: The Weeknd Buyer: Madonna Location: Hidden Hills, Los Angeles, Calif. Price: $19.3 million Year: 2017 Specs: 12,547 square feet, 9 bedrooms, 9 full and 2 half bathrooms Lot Size: 2.94 acres
She's back! After a dozen years hopping around between New York City, the Hamptons and Lisbon, Portugal, Madonna has decided to set down some multimillion-dollar roots in Los Angeles.
Though she's recently been on the East Coast, where she celebrated Easter in the Hamptons, the shape-shifting pop star returned to the City of Angels last year amid the Covid-19 quarantines, and while in town as been holed up in a lavish rented estate in the Coldwater Canyon area of Beverly Hills. Her decision to stay a while just might have something to do with the the biopic about her life that she's slated to direct and that she has co-written with Diablo Cody.
The mononymous "Like A Virgin" singer, now 62, social media savvy and still pushing sociocultural buttons, turning out fashion trends and making hit records— her 14th studio album, Madame X, released in 2019, was her ninth to debut at the top of the Billboard 200, looked far and wide for a suitable mansion to call home. In the end she eschewed her former real estate stomping grounds of Beverly Hills and the Hollywood Hills, where she's owned homes in decades past, and instead headed for the suburbs, dropping $19.3 million on The Weeknd's mansion in guard-gated and celeb-filled Hidden Hills.
The Weeknd purchased the then brand-new mansion almost four years ago for $18.2 million, and initially put it on the market amid piles of publicity with a much-too-optimistic ask of not quite $25 million. The price eventually dipped to almost $22 million before Madge came along and bargained another $2.7 million off the price. With nine bedrooms and nine full and two half bathrooms spread over about 12,500 square feet between the seven-bedroom main house and two-bedroom guest house, there's plenty of room for the gap-toothed OG Material Girl, who rolls deep with four of her six children along with a retinue of assistants, nannies and security personnel.
The Weeknd was represented by Angel Salvador at The Agency while Madonna was represented in the deal by Trevor Wright at The Beverly Hills Estates.
Mary Lambert reflects on directing controversial "Like a Prayer" music video
Source: Hollywood Reporter - 9 April 2021Lil Nas X's video for "Montero (Call Me by Your Name)" — with its glistening pole to hell and sexy satanic lap dance — has reignited the culture wars in ways not seen since the 1980s. Back then, Madonna's video for "Like a Prayer" was the controversy to beat.
It featured the singer, then 30, dancing in front of burning crosses, experiencing stigmata and kissing a statue of a Black Jesus who comes to life in a church. (The "Saint," as he was described in the script to appease production executives, was portrayed by actor Leon, who also plays a young man wrongly accused of a crime in the piece.) The video debuted on MTV on Feb. 23, 1989 and was the fifth that Mary Lambert had conceived and directed for the pop star.
"I wanted to explore the correlation between sexual ecstasy and religious ecstasy," Lambert, 69, tells THR, adding that "the idea of a Black Jesus was scary to a lot of people." That character "came from Madonna telling me she wanted to 'fuck a Black guy on the altar,' " Lambert recalls. "I said, 'Well, why not have it be a Black Jesus? Let's just go all the way.' She liked that." The burning crosses evoked "the idea of appropriation," Lambert continues, "that the Ku Klux Klan could take a cross, which is a holy symbol to a lot of people, and appropriate it in a way to instill fear and horror and promote race hatred. I wanted to turn that on its head."
The backlash to the video was intense: The Vatican banned it, and Pope John Paul II encouraged fans to boycott Madonna in Italy. "I don't remember anybody standing up for it," she says. "Except the general public." A far tamer Pepsi commercial set to the song (and made for four times the budget) was yanked fast. "I was very proud of that," Lambert says.
As for Lil Nas X's effort, Lambert is impressed, calling it "an amazing visual poem — a sort of folktale about fucking the devil, basically."
Listen to this 4h-long Madonna megamix
Source: Kenne Perry - 5 April 2021Ready for your Madonna overload for Easter?
Belgian DJ Kenne Perry has uploaded a 4-hour long megamix, consisting of 50 remixed Madonna tracks.
Diablo Cody didn't 'quit' Madonna biopic despite reports
Source: ET - 3 April 2021EW has confirmed Madonna and the Oscar-nominated Juno writer turned in a final draft of the script before the latter 'moved on' to a new project.
Reports swirled earlier this week that Diablo Cody had shown Madonna's self-directed biopic the power of goodbye, but EW can confirm that the pair turned in a finished, final draft of the script they spent months working on throughout 2020.
A studio source at Universal, where the film is gestating, tells EW that reports of the Oscar-winning Juno screenwriter's "departure" from the movie have been exaggerated, and that Cody simply completed her work and moved on to her next project.
Cody and Madonna recently delivered a completed draft of the film to the studio, which is looking at developing the current version ahead of production. It's unclear whether additional work will be done on the version the women turned in, as big-budget productions normally go through rewrites, treatments, and polishing before shooting begins.
The Sun first reported news of Cody's alleged exit, indicating difficulties between the two reportedly leading to Cody's decision to walk away. Representatives for Cody and Madonna didn't respond to EW's requests for comment.
After months of teasing a secret project with Cody throughout 2020, Madonna announced in September that they had indeed been working on a biopic about her life that she would direct herself, and further revealed extensive plot details that the writer-director pair had included so far in the unfinished draft's first 107 pages.
Most of the film, Madonna said, would follow her "struggle as an artist trying to survive in a man's world as a woman, and really just the journey," which she described as a "happy, sad, mad, crazy, good, bad, and ugly" tale of the making of a superstar. Milestones Madonna and Cody discussed at the time included the pop icon's rise through the entertainment industry in New York City, writing "Like a Prayer," filming Evita, and her connection with Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza and Luis Xtravaganza, two members of New York City's Harlem ballroom scene that played a monumental role in the success of her 1990 smash song "Vogue."
Fans have since speculated as to who could portray Madonna in the film, with unconfirmed reports swirling that Oscar nominee Florence Pugh was considered for the part alongside Ozark's Julia Garner. 13 Reasons Why star Anne Winters made a public plea for the role late last year, donning a series of Madonna-inspired looks in an Instagram photo set.
Elsewhere, Cody is working in Atlanta to bring the CW's live-action Powerpuff Girls adaptation to life as the project's executive producer and writer. Chloe Bennet (Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), Dove Cameron (Descendants), and Yana Perrault (Jagged Little Pill) are set to star in the prospective series.
A release date for the currently untitled Madonna biopic has yet to be announced.
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