Did it ever happen to you, when you were at a concert, that at the end, when the singer says thank you and goodbye, the audience does not start yelling, clapping and begging for a 2nd round of songs, but instead, ‘en masse”, turn their heads towards the exits and leave?

It happened to me last night, and I was completely astonished, turning to our (known and unknown) neighbors and saying ‘What was thát!!’, while staring at the people : yes, they were definitely all leaving the River Plate stadium, they all turned their back on Madonna. Thats when I realized I wasn’t the only one who thought the Madonna concert sucked.

First she made us wait more then 3 hours. Slowly, instead of doing the Mexican wave, the clapping, shouting and begging for the concert to begin, changed into boo-ing. People were mad and started talking about leaving. Which of course nobody did. This is really outraging. Deep inside we knew that as soon she would start her show, we would forget all our feelings of annoyance. But when, at 11.15pm she finally came on stage, the whole stadium started to shout ‘hija de puta, hija de puta, hija…’.

This definitely wasn’t a good start.

And the concert started with a long intro. It was indeed a great show. The images on the big screen behind the stage looked even more real then real. The lights, the dancing, the show. Everything seemed perfect. But was it?

She was performing, and we were watching, like a distance audience. As if we were sitting in our sofa watching a DVD, with he only difference that at home, we would probably fast-forward to the next song. Here we had to wait for the next song, hoping that finally the show would ‘really’ start. There was no interaction with the audience. She was there, we were here. People didn’t clap, didn’t shout.In the beginning she mainly played her latest album, with short parts of old songs reworked and absorbed by the new ones, almost unrecognizable. Later she switched to her older songs, most of them re-worked. With songs like ‘vogue’ and ‘candy store’ I thought ‘finally’, but then yet again the atmosphere twisted. For a second, when she sang ‘Don’t cry for me Argentina,’ I thought the audience might wake up from their sleep and start participating, but in vain. Only once, at 1 am with ‘Like a prayer’ she managed to get the people that hadn’t already left the stadium, stand up and dance. Only 15 minutes later she said ‘Thank you Buenos Aires’, and she left, without being asked to come back to sing a couple more songs.

The show was quite aggressive, there was way too much blood in ‘gang bang’ (I shot my lover), and one of the dancing groups were this kind of circus people that don’t seem to have bones and that can move their body in unnatural ways, movements which were accompanied by the noise of breaking bones. Some people might have been impressed, but I thought it was creepy. It was revolting. The general theme seemed to be the cross, and throughout the whole show she said and sang ‘I am a sinner’, ‘I have no regrets’, ‘I go to hell’, which was so exaggerated to me, that it sounded as if she is terminally ill and looking back at her life, full of regrets… She tried to add an exotic kind of atmosphere with the Basque music but it strangely did not seem to fit in with the rest of the music.

The whole show felt as if she was trying to impress the audience more then she did in her previous shows. Yet more spectacular, yet more shocking, yet more…?

The music wasn’t bad. I am a Madonna fan of the first hour. As she said, she has been in the business for 30 years (she definitely does not look her age). But this concert was weird. It was not the worst Madonna concert I have ever seen, it was my worst concert, ever. It was just weird. It was indescribable. We all said to each other, over and over again ‘What was thát!‘ But when, at 3 am, I finally got home and ready go go to sleep, I was just really pissed. Pissed because in only few hours I would have to wake up to start the new day, and it was definitely not worth being tired. I was pissed, thinking of the money I had spend on this -too expensive- concert. I was mad. I was annoyed, I was tired, but mainly, I was disappointed.

This was Madonna. The Queen of pop.