“A video seems…cheap,” Madonna told Anderson Cooper and a sold-out Beacon Theatre on Friday (June 5) night, shortly after the world premiere of Confessions II, a 13-minute visual project centered around her upcoming album Confessions II. The pop icon was explaining why her short film occupied the space between a mere music video and a full-length visual album (“Guy [Oseary, her manager] is always yelling at me to save money”) to a throng of diehards at Tribeca Festival. “It was good when it was just MTV and me,” she recalled of the music video’s golden era. “Those days are over.”
During a candid, freewheeling, no-phones chat with Cooper (who was subbing in for Jimmy Fallon, who dropped out of the event last-minute) and directors David Toro and Solomon Chase (TORSO) – whom Madonna described as “from another planet” – the Queen of Pop talked about everything from her early days in NYC to the previous evening’s Times Square pop-up performance to the many cameos in her Confessions II project.
The Confessions II film is centered around the first six tracks on Confessions II, her hotly anticipated July 3 album which reunites her with Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005) producer Stuart Price. As astute fans will know, that means this visual project offered approximately 2,800 folks the opportunity to hear four unreleased Confessions II songs: “Good for the Soul,” “One Step Away,” “Danceteria” and “Read My Lips.”
A wild visual project that features paparazzi SWAT teams, forest people with green lasers shooting out of their lower orifices (“I wanted to try it but apparently it gets quite hot” Madonna drily quipped), a car crash, aerial flips over a dancefloor and loads (ahem) of hot hookups in a public restroom while Benedict Cumberbatch dances outside the stalls, the film demands multiple viewings – and sure enough, the evening was book ended with screenings of Confessions II.
Aside from Cumberbatch, the visual features, among others: Sabrina Carpenter, who crawls and writhes around the dancefloor with Madonna during their duet “Bring Your Love”; Colombian singer Feid, who joins Madonna on the collaborative “Read My Lips”; Debi Mazar, who swings by “Danceteria” – a nod to their shared past, as pre-fame Mazar and Madonna hung out at the iconic, now defunct NYC club Danceteria and made out together “to attract boys” and help get the DJ to play Madonna’s cassette; Arca, who is credited on “I Feel So Free” with additional production; Honey Dijon, who produced a Billboard Dance Club Songs-topping remix of Madonna’s “I Don’t Search I Find” from her 2019 album Madame X; genre-pushing British artist Shygirl; actress Julie Garner, who pops up looking very much like Madonna circa 1987; and Madonna’s daughter, Lourdes Leon, who gets the final line of the film: “Cut, b-tch.”
Madonna shared that the project took about a month to film, while the album itself was the product of a year-and-a-half of work with Price while she waited for that long-gestating Netflix miniseries about her life to come to pass.
Only two songs from the film – “I Feel So Free” and Carpenter collab “Bring Your Love” – are officially released, and it’s not yet known if the four unreleased songs in the Confessions II film will hit DSPs prior to its official July 3 release. The Confessions II project will, however, debut on YouTube on Monday (June 8). The sublime “Love Sensation,” which came out Thursday (June 4) shortly after the Queen of Pop’s surprise pop-up performance for 50,000 fans in Times Square, is not featured in the visual project. Of that performance, Madonna told Cooper it felt like a beautiful full-circle moment for her, as she famously showed up to NYC in 1978 and headed straight to Times Square with nothing but ambition in her gut and $35 in her pocket.
She admitted to having some nerves, however, particularly when she swung her leg over the Plexiglas barrier that separates pop-out venue The Square from the Times Square traffic several stories below. “When I went to put my leg over the barrier I was like hmmm,” she mused with a smirk. “I don’t know if I love my fans that much.” Fair enough, particularly given that Madonna’s next stop after the Beacon Theatre was the Hamptons to see her 95-year-old father to celebrate his birthday: if she can be with us that long, there’s no sense in risking the Queen’s time on earth on a piece of Plexiglas.
Confessions II drops on July 3; on July 19, Madonna, BTS and Shakira will headline the first-ever halftime show for the World Cup at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
