Fresh off her premiere of the filmed version of the MDNA Tour, Madonna inched her way back into the spotlight in stunning Marlene-Dietrich-like form. I am so digging the top hat and bow tie look here. No woman does androgyny better, and no one ever will. (Okay, that’s easily disputable, but it sounded good.) While I gear up for the next special installment of the Madonna Timeline (the song and memory of which actually inspired the whole Madonna Timeline itself, and at #94 it’s taken a while to come around on the iPod…) I’m giving a quick look at some summer highlights of previous entries that may have gone undetected by your radar. (By the way, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page and check out the ‘Search’ box, you can type in a Madonna song and see if it’s already been covered.)
Before the summer is the spring, and the spring of 1998 was marked by ‘Little Star’, and a residual melancholy from winter, and a decade and a half before. It still haunts me.
1990 marked the summer of ‘Dick Tracy’ and Madonna’s incendiary performance as Breathless Mahoney. That sexy chanteuse sang ‘Sooner or Later’ with the determination of a vixen hell-bent on getting her man. It was an inspiration.
The summer of 2009 was a high-flying good time, with some highlights in Boston and lowlights in Ithaca, and as the last summer of my official single-hood, it was a time of ‘Celebration’.
Last summer was capped by the deceptively upbeat and desperately escapist ‘Turn Up the Radio’ – one of the only times that a current Madonna single coincided with this relatively new Madonna Timeline. It’s one of my favorite entries, because it juxtaposes such a happy song with such a bummer of a summer.
The summer of 1998 was all about ‘Ray of Light’ – the album and the single – and this song dominated a turning point in my previously-angst-ridden existence. It marked Madonna’s ultimate comeback, and remains the best album of her career (thus far).
Memories of my father from 1986 came back with her ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ single from the summer of ‘True Blue‘. The follow-up to the scorching ‘Live To Tell’, it marked another familial milestone, the beginning of a long line of Madonna-related family moments.
For the next timeline (which goes all the way back to 1985, making it one of the earliest Madonna memories) we’ll return to the very earliest of spring, a time when the first pangs of adolescence began to prick my youthful heart, and things were about to go, well… Crazy.
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