LOL! I did a Cyndi Lauper search on Youtube, and this came up. It made me laugh so much I just had to share it.

Atleast she went for the note.

But in the first clip shes just telling the crowd what to sing.

OfftheWall said:

And she sounds terrible even doing that. Like an old lollipop lady telling kids to cross the street in time.

You are so cold midninghtmover! The Madonna rats are going to come after you!

I'm not defending poor singing - after all an artist who gets up on stage to perform should be up to scratch, no question - but in the heat of an energetic performance, at the kind of sound levels we are talking about here, it's not always going to be a perfect-pitch performance.

I remember a band talking about their then-upcoming live album and saying they had left it as it was recorded - every slightly mis-hit snare stab, a muffled vocal line, a guitar string caught by accident etc etc - and surely even the best bands have these things happen?

OK a band should work on minimising the anomalies but hey, everyone's human and at concert volume no-one notices these things. It's only in the glare of an unproduced live bootleg or whatnot that we get to hear the glitches.


Having said that, Madonna is surely an average singer at best? I appreciate some see her as representing something important, or saying something that needs to be said (I disagree on both, but hey) but she'll never be held up as a hugely talented singer, will she...?

my favorite Madonna performances are the BAT shows where she couldn't sing most of the songs and you can hear live Madonna singing over canned Madonna. after that are the Girlie Show performaces with the best band she's ever toured with and Donna and Niki all over the place.

She's definitively not te best singer. Even her fans (like me) would admit that. But her voice has improved.
I think her lowest point was the Blond Ambition tour in 1990. But I really don't care because the SHOW and her IMAGE was sooo strong!
her voice has really gotten better (technical) and please keep in mind how long and wild she dances on stage! And again her age.
It's fantastic what she does.
But yeah, her voice is not that good. But usually she hits the notes, and she sings better than Britney anyway!!

midnightmover said:

Madonna can sellout worldwide tours so she can't be that bad can she.

I think she's a very bad singer, as I have said before Paris is much much better than her and she's getting worse. I liked her voice around 1994.

paper said:

You often hear fans say she "got better", and it's absolute nonsense. For instance her vocals on the Virgin tour in '85 were way better than on the Drowned World Tour in '01. Even the studio versions of her newest tracks feature cringe-worthy vocals.

midnightmover said:

and I think it goes hand in hand with the whole British accent thing. Maybe it was Evita that ruined her.

She was never great, but at least she didn't try to do opera or sing "proper." She just sang the best she could and sounded like Madonna.

midnightmover said:

OMG THAT WAS GREAT!!!!!

paper said:

I'm a fan and I agree with you that her voice has gotten worse. When I see her perform, she seems to strain a lot during some songs, like Ray of Light.

NDRU said:

I totally agree with you on that.

Everyone has a bad day...

Ray Of Light at Live 8 was actually great! Apart from the scream.
If u want truly bad u should check Ray Of Light at the VMA's
pure comedy.

But I hate her fucking training 4 Evita it did nothing 4 her
mid-range which has an odd tone at times..She seems
2 focus on her head voice & pseudo operatic shit only.

NDRU said:

I thought that myself too. After Evita she didn't just start talking posh (or trying to), she started singing posh too. I think age must be a factor as well. In that clip when she's shouting "Time goes by so slowly" she sounds like an old school teacher trying to control a group of rowdy kids. Not funky at all.

midnightmover said:

Personally I prefer her Virgin Tour voice as well but on a technical level her voice actually is better now. After Evita though her voice lost some it's personality. It's so funny if you read reviews from Virgin Tour and they complain about her voice. One critic said: "Madonna... simply didn't sing very well. Her intonation was atrocious; she sang sharp and she sang flat, and the combination of her unsure pitch and thin, quavery vocal timbre made the held notes at the end of her phrases sound like they were crawling off somewhere to die." She FINALLY learns to sing technically "better" and everybody says "I miss the old Madonna voice". Just like with her controversies. Everybody thought she was a vile, immoral, slut in the 80's and early 90's. NOW everybody wants her to be as over the top as she was then because she is "boring".

I bet she screams like that when she's fuc*ing

Amusing, anyway

Also I don't think she was trying to be technically perfect with that note in Ray Of Light that was posted in the first post. It was meant to be the way it was, she wasn't even singing really, more screaming. However in her VMA '98 Ray Of Light performance she WAS trying to sing the right way and...lol...well....that didn't work out so well.

JoeTyler said:

I could care less what she sounds like fucking, shes too old to fuck

I actually have an immense amount of respect for Madonna recognizing she's not a really good singer and trying to improve upon it, which she clearly has over the years, in order to bring a better product. Mad mad respect for that

SupaFunkyOrgangrinderSexy said:

IMO she actually sounds worse

horatio said:

Well she's going for something more than the easy teeny bop shit. That's more what I meant. Could you picture her singing frozen in the holiday years?

horatio said:

False

JoeTyler said:

True

horatio said:

Why?

JoeTyler said:

fucking is for people less than 50

over 50, well I don't know what they do but they don't fuck

horatio said:

Good thing she's not 50 huh??