Dear Gossips,   

Over the last couple of days, Madonna fans have been refreshing their feeds every few minutes. A big announcement is imminent. Billboard reported on Friday that Madonna’s prepping for a massive world tour to celebrate the 40th anniversary of her career, as her first album, Madonna, was released July 27, 1983 after she’d dropped her debut single, “Everybody”, the year before. 

 

The songs off the Madonna tracklist are well-known: “Borderline”, “Lucky Star”, “Holiday”, “Burning Up”… for those of us from a certain generation and many from subsequent generations, those lyrics will never leave your brain. You’ll be able to sing along no matter where you are, no matter what you’re doing. 

This tour, then, is a retrospective – and since she’s never done a retrospective tour before, and the fact that she has such an extensive catalogue spanning four decades, the anticipation is understandable. I was nine when Madonna was released. By the time she dropped her second album, Like a Virgin, she’d taken over my life…because she’d taken over the entire culture. It’s hard to explain to people who weren’t around back then just what an impact Madonna made with “Material Girl” and “Like a Virgin” from 1984-1986-ish. There was euphoria and release and awakening. There was angst. Their was worry. People were mad and scared and excited and horny and rebellious and unsettled by this brash and outspoken popstar who seemed not to shirk from criticism but grow bolder in response to it. 

 

By the time True Blue came out in 1986, it was f-cking mayhem. Madonna followed up “Like a Virgin” with “Papa Don’t Preach” and just as people were starting to recover from Madonna putting teen pregnancy on the radio, three years later she was burning crosses with Like a Prayer. 

That run of albums is why she was able to put out The Immaculate Collection in 1990, just seven years after her debut. Like, this tour that we’re waiting to hear about could just be The Immaculate Collection and we’d lose our minds. And that’s before Erotica, with one of my all-time favourite songs, “Rain”, and Bedtime Stories, and Ray of Light. 

The point is… we’ve been waiting for this set list for a long time. But for a long, Madonna resisted looking back. Even when she did perform her previous hits live, she’d mess with the arrangements, defiantly refusing to do it the way she did originally. Until now. All signs point to a revival. 

 

Just this morning Madonna confirmed it. And she had company: 

 

It’s not the celebrities that I’m jacked about. It’s the presentation. This is a throwback to Truth or Dare which you can’t separate from the Blond Ambition World Tour, widely considered to be one of the greatest world tours of all time, the tour that Billboard says “changed pop concerts forever”. 

She knows what she’s teasing. She knows the thirst for it. And she appears to be saying that she’s ready to deliver it. In a statement released along with the announcement of the tour dates, Madonna said that: 

“I am excited to explore as many songs as possible in hopes to give my fans the show they have been waiting for.”

Bitch, you know what we’ve been waiting for!

So the fight for tickets begins on Friday. Good luck to all. 

And remember…Beyoncé has yet to make her announcement. Word is that’s coming in February. 

Yours in gossip,

Lainey