Bay City is a city in and the county seat of Bay County, Michigan, United States. The population was 32,661 as of the 2020 census. The city is located just upriver from the Saginaw Bay on the Saginaw River. It is the principal city of the Bay City metropolitan area, which is coterminous with Bay County as part of the larger Greater Tri-Cities region of Central Michigan. Several historic bridges cross the Saginaw River in Bay City, including Liberty Bridge, Veterans Memorial Bridge, Independence Bridge, and Lafayette Avenue Bridge.
Madonna Louise Ciccone is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, and actress. Regarded as the "Queen of Pop", she has been recognized for her continual reinvention and versatility in music production, songwriting and visual presentation. Madonna's works, which incorporate social, political, sexual, and religious themes, have generated both controversy and critical acclaim. A cultural icon spanning both the 20th and 21st centuries, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame called her one of the most "well-documented figures of the modern age" in 2008. Various scholarly reviews, literature, and art works have been created about her along with an academic mini subdiscipline devoted to her called Madonna studies.
Nina Simone was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, composer, arranger, and civil rights activist. Her music spanned styles including classical, folk, gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, and pop. Her piano playing was strongly influenced by baroque and classical music, especially Johann Sebastian Bach, and accompanied expressive, jazz-like singing in her contralto voice.
"Drowned World/Substitute for Love" is a song recorded by American singer Madonna for her seventh studio album, Ray of Light (1998). It was written and produced by Madonna and William Orbit, with additional songwriters including Rod McKuen, Anita Kerr and David Collins. McKuen and Kerr received the credits due to the usage of a sample from one of their songs, "Why I Follow the Tigers". "Drowned World/Substitute for Love" is an ambient pop song which lyrically describes Madonna's spiritual transformation to seek authentic love over superficial alliances.
A Madonna wannabe, or Madonnabe, is a person who dresses or acts like American singer Madonna. When she emerged into stardom in the mid-1980s, an unusually high number of women, particularly young women and girls, began to dress and do their hair and makeup in the style that Madonna displayed in public. The term was popularized by writer John Skow in a May 1985 Time cover story on the singer. Numerous sociologists and other academics commented on the Madonna influence in her wannabes.
Madonna: Truth or Dare is a 1991 American documentary film by director Alek Keshishian chronicling the life of entertainer Madonna during her 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour. Madonna approached Keshishian to do an HBO special on the tour after watching his Harvard senior project. Initially planned to be a traditional concert film, Keshishian was so impressed with the backstage life that he persuaded Madonna to make it the focus of the film. Madonna funded the project and served as executive producer. The film was edited to be in black-and-white, in order to emulate cinéma vérité, while the performance scenes are in color.
The English Roses is a children's picture book written by American entertainer Madonna, released on September 15, 2003, by Callaway Arts & Entertainment. Jeffrey Fulvimari illustrated the book with line drawings. A moral tale, it tells the story of four friends who are jealous of a girl called Binah. However, they come to know that Binah's life is not easy and decide to include her in their group.
Madonna studies refers to the study of the work and life of American singer-songwriter Madonna using an interdisciplinary approach incorporating cultural studies and media studies. In a general sense, it could refer to any academic studies devoted to her. After Madonna's debut in 1983, the discipline did not take long to start up and the field appeared in the mid-1980s, achieving its peak in the next decade. By this time, educator David Buckingham deemed her presence in academic circles as "a meteoric rise to academic canonisation". The rhetoric academic view of that time, majority in the sense of postmodernism, generally considered her as "the most significant artist of the late twentieth century" according to The Nation, thus she was understood variously and as a vehicle to open up issues. Into the 21st century, Madonna continued to receive academic attention. At the height of its developments, authors of these academic writings were sometimes called "Madonna scholars" or "Madonnologists", and both E. Ann Kaplan and John Fiske were classified as precursors.
Madonna: An Intimate Biography is a book by American author J. Randy Taraborrelli, chronicling the life of American singer Madonna. The book was released in April 2001 by Sidgwick & Jackson in the United Kingdom, and in the United States by Simon & Schuster in August 2001. Taraborrelli first considered writing the book in 1990, but, realizing the project might be premature in respect to Madonna's fledgling career, set it aside. He began writing the book in 1996, when Madonna gave birth to her daughter Lourdes.
Madonna: Like an Icon is a biography by English author Lucy O'Brien, chronicling the life of American singer Madonna. The book was released on 27 August 2007, by Bantam Press in the United Kingdom, and on 18 October 2007, by HarperCollins in the United States. Madonna: Like an Icon chronicles the life of the singer from her birth, up to the release of her eleventh studio album, Hard Candy, in 2008. Initially critical of her work, O'Brien had become a fan of Madonna after seeing her perform on television for The Virgin Tour in 1985. From that point of time, the author followed Madonna's career closely, attending her concerts, and collecting interviews, magazines, and albums.
Alina Simone is an American musician and writer. She is best known for her original songwriting, her album of cover songs by Russian punk poet Yanka Dyagileva, and her collection of autobiographical essays You Must Go And Win. She also blogs for The New York Times.
American entertainer Madonna has produced five fashion brands, beginning with a clothing range for fashion store H&M in March 2007. She later created an enterprise, MG Icon LLC, a joint venture with her manager Guy Oseary and Iconix Brand Group which produces her lifestyle brands Material Girl and Truth or Dare by Madonna. She also collaborated with Dolce & Gabbana on a range of sunglasses which marked the first co-branded collaboration that the design duo has ever undertaken.
"Holy Water" is a song recorded by American singer and songwriter Madonna for her thirteenth studio album, Rebel Heart (2015). The song was written by Madonna, Martin Kierszenbaum, Natalia Keery-Fisher, Mike Dean, Kanye West and Tommy Brown. It was produced by Madonna, Dean and West, with Charlie Heat serving as co-producer. The demo of "Holy Water" leaked on to the internet in late December 2014 and the final version leaked in February 2015, a month prior to the album's release. "Holy Water" is an electronica and technopop song, and it features minimalist bass stutter, ricocheting synths and "martial beats" in its instrumentation.
This is a list containing the different written works about Madonna, including biographies and other literary forms. Many authors have written more than one book about Madonna and these have been published in multiple languages other than English, including German, French, Dutch, Spanish and Italian. The releases have sometimes become bestsellers and have faced varied reception from critics and academics. The staff of Xtra Magazine commented that "she has inspired a mini publishing industry all her own". Maura Johnston said that "the appetite for books on Madonna is large, and the variety of approaches writers, editors, and photographers have taken to craft their portraits is a testament to how her career has both inspired and provoked". On the report of Eric Weisbard "only Madonna books proliferated" compared to her other contemporary fellows from the 1980s. Evelyn Briceno from La Tercera described her as a character worthy of biographies, photo books and various analyses.
Life with My Sister Madonna is an autobiography by American artist, designer and interior decorator Christopher Ciccone and author Wendy Leigh. The book is a memoir and tell-all book about Ciccone's life, with heavy focus on his relationship with his sister, the American singer-songwriter and actress Madonna, and was released on July 14, 2008, by Simon Spotlight Entertainment. It details Ciccone's life spent with Madonna, as well as unknown aspects of the singer's life. The relationship between Ciccone and his sister had deteriorated over the years following the singer's refusal to employ him as her tour director. Writing the book was considered "cathartic" for Ciccone, and he contacted Leigh, a biographer, for help and advice. Together they developed the project secretly and offered it to Simon Spotlight Entertainment for publication.
Madonna is an American singer whose socio-cultural impact has been noted by popular press and scholars from different fields, throughout the late-twentieth and early twenty-one centuries, and attested outside of the music sphere to an international scale.
Madonna fandom refers to the fan community of American singer-songwriter Madonna. She attained cult status amongst different audiences according to professor Sheila Jeffreys. Unlike other fandoms, her fan base does not have an official moniker, although "Madonna wannabe" became a popular media label to talk about her fans over years. The fanaticism surrounding the singer, and also called Madonnamania initiated no later than 1985. She produced consecutive successful singles in various major music markets, established numerous international records and impacted the fashion industry. Thousands of her female fans were dressing like Madonna around the world and the term "Madonna wannabe" was born. Author and scholar Lisa Lewis believes she is "one of the first women to attract the kind of devotion of young female fans normally associated with male rock stars".
The contributions and influence of American artist Madonna in the landscape of underground and contemporary arts have been documented by a variety of sources such as art publications, scholars and art critics. As her footprints in the arts are lesser-known compared to her other roles, this led a contributor from W to conclude that both her impact and influence in the art world have been "made almost entirely behind the scenes". She is noted for taking inspiration from various painters in her career. Once called a "continuous multi-media art project" by Jon Pareles in 1990, art critics and academics have noted she condenses fashion, dance, photography, sculpture, cinema, music, video and painting in her own artwork.
American singer-songwriter Madonna has been considered a sexual icon. Many have considered Madonna's sexuality as one of the focal points of her career. The Oxford Dictionary of English (2010) even credited her image as a sex symbol as a source of her international stardom. Her sexual displays have drawn numerous analyses by scholars, sexologists, feminists, and other authors. Due to her constant usage of explicit sexual content, she faced censorship for her videos, stage performances and other projects.
Madonna is a name from the 16th century, originally used as a respectful form of address to an Italian woman. It comes from Old Italian phrase ma donna which means "my lady". It was adopted as one of the titles for Mary, mother of Jesus in Roman Catholic tradition in the 17th century. Its usage has been present in Western Christian art and literature.
