There’s more important things than hearing you speak…
February 9th, 2006
…Such as reading what I write! As if I needed another reason to love Madonna: last night, during her performance of “Hung Up” at the Grammys, she wore the exact type of outfit (some sort of cargo leotard featuring a corset and possibly a bulletproof vest) that she wears in her second Confessions on a Dance Floor video, “Sorry,” which premiered at AOL Music hours later on the same night.
Just watch the video. “Hung Up” was amazing in its own right, I but already think “Sorry” is even better. The woman’s a creative genius, and I’m sick of people not really getting this at all… or maybe they do get it but they refuse to admit it in hopes of keeping up their streed cred. These people need to get over themselves.
(Now I’m just going to talk about the video. If you didn’t just watch it like I convincingly demanded, please move on to the next cool page on your bookmarks bar.)
Presumably after walking out of the nightclub from “Hung Up,” Madonna and her gal pals decide to hop into some random van… except it’s not random! It’s driven by the awesome fat lady who danced in the train during “Hung Up”! She’s a recurring character! The ladies ditch their guys and go cruising for new ones, all of whom they pick up off the street and proceed to torture with sensuous lip-syncing and Madonna’s sinewy, evil, platform-booted legs.
Interspersed among the more plot-driven scenes are cuts to Madonna by herself against a neon-dotted background that looks exactly like my absolute favorite 1980s toy, the Lite-Brite. My favorite parts of these: the one where Madonna slowly feels down the curves of a hypothetical person (presumably “His Humps”) and when she flicks her thumb against the bottom edge of her top teeth — you know, just to do it. Why not?
[Crash!] Now we’re at the part of the video where Madonna’s decided to face off in some sort of deathmatch cage fight. Fans/onlookers/possible villains are crawling up the chain-link fences like scary insects at high speed. It’s incredible. And right at what I think sounds like a “crash,” or the turning point in the song (2:43) at which things mildly slow down and Madonna gets to take a breather and speak foreign languages again, in the video she and the women just stare down the men in the cage, like “Just try and fuck with us. Really, try it.” Look at her fucking outfit. Look at any of her outits lately. It’s a gas, gas, gas.
Holy crap. She’s writhing all over the floor, pulling her leg over her head and performing scissor kicks… and literally fighting each of the guys off with her ridiculous dance moves! Without ever actually touching a male dancer, she just kicked the shit out of maybe 15 of them.
What makes the kung fu shit-kicking sequence even more enjoyable is that it all starts right after she says “Forgive me” directly into the camera while removing an apparently cumbersome white sparkly jacket. In the single, she speaks three “Forgive mes,” but in the video only the last one gets mouth time. It’s a welcome dramatic difference.
Suddenly there’s a random person roller skating through the cage, and… poof! Everyone’s in a roller rink, line dancing. It’s like what they do in the disco in Boogie Nights, when Roller Girl is actually on roller skates. Because she’s Roller Girl. Get it? The best parts of this scene are when Madonna swings through the guy’s legs at the beginning and does a sweeping disco point (left), and the fact that during this scene and the cage fight, she’s wearing volleyball-esque knee pads!
At one point during the roller-rink sequence when she’s getting spun around by a partner, you get the impression that it is at this exact point (right) that Madonna has gone completely insane. But seriously, who cares? The entire endeavor is hilarious.
The final shots of the colorful boom box hanging out alone on the street and Madonna’s silhouette dancing against the Lite-Brite background should provide a good starting point for the video for “Jump.” I can see her actually making a video for all 13 songs on the album and releasing them as a collector’s DVD. The songs would obviously all blend into each other like they do on the CD, though it’s unclear to me whether she’d then rearrange the videos to show in the original album order or leave them in the order the videos were released. I’m betting the latter, with all new between-songs transitions. Either way, something like that would be huge for music videos as a genre. Or maybe just for Madonna.
Hmm. As an aside, you’d have to be an obsessive fiend to appreciate this (Dr. K I’m talking to you) but I really like the cut between shots of her posing-then-singing. The exact seconds in the song are from 0:59 to 1:00, in between the words “care” and “of.” Posing! Now, singing! Yesssss.
What do you think? Do I need to get a more interesting life? Because I’m kind of liking this one.

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