1990. It is the year of Germany's reunification. Also of Margaret Thatcher's resignation and Nelson Mandela's liberation. More anniversaries? In '90, Octavio Paz received the Nobel Prize in Literature and, in the United States, the World Wide Web was launched. Well, the same year that Europe sutured one of the great wounds of the Second World War, the United Kingdom bid farewell to the Iron Lady and the Internet was taking its first steps, Madonna performed for the first time in Barcelona. Without a doubt, a concert for the city's history.
As I say, more than thirty years ago, Madonna took to a Barcelona stage for the first time. Specifically, at the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys, renovated for the Olympic Games that would be held two summers later. It was August 1st and the Barcelona audience was able to witness one of the most mythical tours of all time: the Blond Ambition Tour. The name is already quite eloquent. A year earlier, Madonna had released one of her best albums, Like a Prayer, with hit songs danced and covered ad nauseam such as Express Yourself, Cherish or, of course, the Like a Prayer that gives the album its name. The Barcelona concert was the penultimate of a long international tour and came accompanied by large doses of controversy and provocation. Yes, Madonna was already Madonna. The queen. The controversial one. The scandalous one. The irreverent one. In short, the one who blazed a trail. The only one capable of going on stage dressed only in a pink satin corset with a conical bra, a piece created by her friend Jean-Paul Gautier and which, as we have recently seen at CaixaForum, is already a museum piece.
Journalistic chronicles of the time say that Madonna did not manage to completely fill the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys. Also that the singer and her entourage occupied 180 of the 208 rooms of the old Ramada Renaissance on La Rambla or that she could be seen in the city's streets jogging, as we used to say then, surrounded by bodyguards. By the way, after one of these street exercise sessions, one of these guards punched a photojournalist from El Periódico de Catalunya, in an evident excess of zeal.
Slap aside, Barcelona captivated Madonna, since in 2001 she chose our city to premiere her second major tour: Drowned World Tour. The Queen of Pop filled the Palau Sant Jordi for two consecutive nights, June 9 and 10, to present two major albums: Ray of light (1998) and Music (2000).
In 2006 she gave us the cold shoulder and didn't stop by Barcelona to present Confessions on a Dance Floor, but she made up for it three years later with the Sticky & Sweet Tour. When the concert date, June 21, was announced, I instantly decided it was time to see Madonna live. Also, that if I was going to see the queen, I wanted to see her well, so I dug into my pocket and bought the best tickets. I didn't calculate, however, that the price of being next to the stage was having to follow the concert standing up and, when the opening acts were still performing, I regretted not being comfortably seated in the stands, and that was when I had barely turned thirty. I've never been a concert person. However, when Madonna, who was already over fifty, came out on stage, all my troubles vanished. What energy! What electricity! What mysticism! Was this what Saint Teresa of Jesus felt? Ecstatic is an understatement!
We move forward to June 20 and 21, 2012. The MDNA Tour brought Madonna back to Barcelona. I read that the Queen of Pop made her audience wait a good 45 minutes, but when the show of music, dance, and special effects began, she once again left the audience speechless. In 2015, Madonna, who was already seeing sixty on the horizon, returned to Barcelona as part of the Rebel Heart Tour. It was another great concert.
Well, now, after eight years of absence, Madonna is back. She does so as part of a major tour to celebrate her forty years of musical career: The Celebration Tour. Tickets for the double concert scheduled for November 1 and 2 at Palau Sant Jordi flew in a few minutes, literally, even though they were extremely expensive. Her fans, whether twenty or sixty years old, do not want to miss the opportunity to see her live again. An enthusiasm that contrasts with the ageist attacks she has been receiving for some time, both on social media and in supposedly serious journalistic columns. Gentlemen – because most of these professional opinion-makers are male – who do not hesitate to call her a "ridiculous old woman" or the "grandmother of Pop," even though they themselves, already quite mature, thoroughly enjoy concerts by the Boss (73 years old) or the Stones (the youngest 70 and the oldest 74). For years they have maintained that Madonna is musically finished and that she is no longer old enough to perform on the world's main stages. Do they perhaps want her locked up at home doing cross-stitch and signed up for Aquagym on Thursday afternoons?
There are also those who believe that Madonna does not look like Madonna. That she makes music that has nothing to do with her great hits of yesteryear. Moreover, that the face of the current Madonna also has nothing to do with that of Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone who, in the 80s, was making her way in the world of music. I believe that Madonna's essence is precisely this. Not to repeat herself. To constantly mutate. To strive to keep impressing four decades later. Madonna is sixty-four years old and has the same desire to break new ground and scandalize as when she first set foot in Barcelona and was referred to in El País as "the oxygenated Italian-American." One only needs to take a look at her social media. Madonna does not look like Madonna and, although it may seem like a paradox, that is precisely what makes her authentically Madonna.