Madonna acts her age - Ingles
The bad girl is a grown-up now, like it or not. Madonna, 53, danced her way back toward worldwide visibility Sunday as the halftime attraction for the Super Bowl, with a giant supporting cast — gladiators, acrobats, cheerleaders, drummers, a gospel choir — and a downright benign stance.
She sang about dancing, music, loving and praying, with a little star power on the side. It’s impossible to guess what the Madonna of decades past, fascinated with lust, power, religion and transgression, might have done with this platform. But it’s probably not something the Super Bowl would have booked in the first place.
Madonna has a new album, “MDNA,” coming out next month, her first since “Hard Candy” in 2008. (In 2007, she signed a 10-year partnership with Live Nation reportedly worth $120 million.) A football-themed video clip for her new single, “Give Me All Your Luvin’,” came out Friday, and the song started blasting across the Clear Channel empire of radio stations and billboards worldwide. More than 14 million people were exposed to the song even before the Super Bowl.
For the worldwide audience of her halftime show, Madonna went all out on spectacle; at the Super Bowl, anything less would be dwarfed. She arrived on the field to sing “Vogue” as a gold-robed queen with a platoon of gladiators, dancing on a giant throne and doing precise, right-angle moves amid acrobats from Cirque du Soleil. “Music” brought her to the top of a bleacher-like set surrounded by more acrobatics; soon, she was assisted in cartwheels that had her head-over-heels. The pop duo LMFAO joined her, interspersing their 2011 hit “Party Rock Anthem” and giving Madonna a chance to deliver the line “I’m sexy and I know it” from another LMFAO song.
As a chorus line of cheerleaders filled the stage, Madonna grabbed golden pompoms for “Give Me All Your Luvin’,” which has a handclapping beat reminiscent of Toni Basil’s 1982 “Mickey.” It’s a heavy-handedly self-promoting song — “L-U-V Madonna, Y-O-U you wanna” — that’s second-tier Madonna at best. Guest raps by Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. didn’t make the song’s retro-rock any fresher. But M.I.A. offered the Super Bowl set’s glimmer of transgression: Her verse included half of a four-letter word while she raised her middle finger.
The drum corps appeared, with the singer Cee Lo Green, to back Madonna and Green for snippets of her “Open Your Heart” and “Express Yourself.” Then came the reverence in “Like a Prayer,” a song that has shed any hint of double-entendre it might have had when it was released in 1989. A black-and-white-robed choir joined Green and Madonna, who had gotten herself into a long dress. The stadium flickered with white lights, Green belted like a soul-gospel singer and Madonna beamed, on and off her knees, until she disappeared in a blast of smoke, singing, “I hear you call my name and it feels like home.”
Madonna wasn’t the indefatigable trouper of years past. Though she’s still lithe, she measured her moves, letting her supporting cast offer distractions. As she climbed into the bleachers during “Music,” she missed a step, though she recovered fast. At the Super Bowl, Madonna was the party girl turned regent: a queen on her throne, a homecoming queen strutting in the bleachers, a church singer fronting a choir. At the end, the words World Peace glowed from the field in giant letters. Madonna was proffering virtue.
This article was written by Jon Pareles and appeared in the New York Times.
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