Madonna and Charli XCX together: listen to "Danceteria Afterhours"

Madonna and Charli XCX together under the banner of club culture. “Danceteria Afterhours” has just been released, a new version of “Danceteria”, the track featured on the American popstar's latest album, “Confessions II“. The single brings together two different generations of pop music on common ground: the dancefloor as a place of formation, freedom and constant reinvention.

Produced by Madonna alongside Andrew Watt, Cirkut and Stuart Price, “Danceteria Afterhours” draws on the future Material Girl's New York nights and the club that gives the song its title. The Danceteria was one of the nerve centers of Manhattan's downtown scene in the early Eighties, frequented by artists, musicians and figures from the underground culture. In the track, Madonna evokes that world, name-checking, among others, Fab 5 Freddy, Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Rock Steady Crew.
Onto Madonna's memories of New York is layered Charli XCX's own recollection, as she retraces her own nocturnal education. The British singer goes back to age 15, when she performed in London clubs wearing, as she recounts in the song, “a weird dress”, before jumping ideally many years ahead, to the Los Angeles she shared with A. G. Cook and Sophie, amid DJs, excess and electronic experimentation. “Danceteria Afterhours” thus becomes a kind of dialogue between two eras of club culture, from early-Eighties New York to the hyperpop scene of the new millennium.

The collaboration had been teased in the past few days by a short video posted on social media, in which Madonna and Charli danced inside a completely white studio. “You wanna talk about Madonna and Charli?”, Madonna asked her colleague, before repeating their names and singing a line from “Danceteria”: “Everyone here is a work of art”. “Let's take it to the East side baby…”, read the post's caption.
“Danceteria Afterhours” follows another Madonna collaboration, the one with Kylie Minogue on “Love Sensation (Afterhours Mix)“, and further fuels speculation about the possible release of a full remix project built around “Confessions II”. An operation that would closely echo the one carried out by Charli XCX herself with “Brat” and its subsequent reinterpretation, “Brat and it's completely different but also still brat”, built through numerous collaborations.

The duet also definitively puts to rest the small controversy that arose a few months ago around the relationship between the two artists. On “Rock Music”, Charli XCX sang “the dancefloor is dead”, a line tied to her wish to close the book on the “Brat” era and look for new directions. Madonna had responded on social media: “If your dance floor feels dead, maybe you're playing the wrong music”, immediately sparking speculation about a possible rift. Charli, however, had clarified that the line was in no way meant as an attack on dance music. Rumors of rivalry then dissolved over the summer, when Madonna and Charli XCX were photographed together in Paris, first at the Saint Laurent show and later dancing at an afterparty. Charli had said she'd spent a sort of “mini-break” with Madonna, though at the time she denied that a musical collaboration was already in the works.
That time together also allowed Charli to deepen her connection with an artist who, by her own admission, hadn't been among her main points of reference during her teenage years. Her rediscovery of Madonna came later, above all through the way she wove together music, image and the construction of pop identity; among the tracks Charli has cited as particularly significant is “Hollywood”.

Now that personal connection is translating into music too. With “Danceteria Afterhours”, Madonna and Charli XCX link two distant eras of club culture, turning the dancefloor into a thread running through more than forty years of pop. And the single might not be an isolated episode, but another piece of the parallel project that seems to be taking shape around “Confessions II”.
Meanwhile, Charli XCX is busy with the North American leg of the “Music, Fashion, Film Tour”, which kicked off on September 11 in Philadelphia, while Madonna is expected on Sunday, September 27 at the MTV Video Music Awards: it will be her first appearance at the show in 23 years. The singer arrives at the event with 11 nominations, many of them tied to the short film made for “Confessions II”, which is also up for Video of the Year.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google