On November 3 2005, Madonna opened the 2005 MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon, Portugal with her first live performance of Hung Up.
Less than three months after suffering several broken bones in a horse riding accident, Madonna’s performance was triumphantly received by fans and the press – not to mention the very enthusiastic audience who attended the show in Lisbon.
On November 2 1987, Madonna’s True Blue won International Album Of The Year at the 17th annual Juno Awards at the O’Keefe Centre in Toronto, Ontario.
On November 1 1992, Madonna’s Sex book hit #1 on the Washington Post non-fiction bestseller list.
Here’s a snippet of Zoe Heller’s article on the Sex book in The Independent:
It starts out black and white, S & M, down and dirty. In various urban crypts and dungeons, we see Madonna bound up by multi-pierced lesbians (they point knives at her throat and crotch); Madonna biting at a male arsehole; Madonna whipping a large PVC-clad woman. There is Madonna as Weimar-style decadent, cavorting with gay strippers, and as cutie schoolgirl, being raped by skinheads in a school gym. You get the picture.
As Sex proceeds, colour photography is introduced – a washed-out, Fifties sort of pastel – and Madonna emerges from subterranea to expose herself on roadsides and in pizza parlours. Interspersed throughout are scraps of Madonna-think: a tribute to her vagina (‘It smells like a baby to me, fresh and full of life’), a horrifyingly cutesy account of masturbating for the first time (‘honey poured from my 14-year-old gash and I wept’). You get the prose.
On November 30 1994, Madonna’s second music video release from Bedtime Stories, Take A Bow, was released. The award winning music video (Best Female Video at the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards) was directed by Michael Haussman in Ronda and Antequera, Spain.
The bullfighter in the video was played by real-life Spanish bullfighter Emilio Muñoz. Muñoz reprised his role with Madonna in the You’ll See music video, also directed by Haussman in 1995.
On November 29 1986, Billboard’s dance music editor Brian Chin reported on the postponed Madonna remix project, You Can Dance.
While a release the following spring would also come to pass, the accuracy of details regarding the album’s content would suggest it was already in the can a year ahead of its eventual release.
An early preview would be granted for one of the remixes, albeit in live form, when Madonna’s Who’s That Girl World Tour performance of Into The Groove the following summer would borrow heavily from Shep Pettibone’s remix for You Can Dance.
On November 28 2000, Madonna performed a mini-set at London’s Brixton Academy. The show was part of the Don’t Tell Me Promo Tour, which began only two months after the birth of her second child, Rocco, and consisted of a few small club dates as well as television performances and interviews to promote the second single from her Music album. Aside from the promotional aspect, Madonna also used the club shows as an opportunity to test the waters for performing live shows again following a seven-year hiatus from touring. The Brixton gig closely mirrored her set at New York’s Roseland Ballroom several weeks earlier, with one notable exception being the addition of Holiday to the UK set-list.
The full London set-list consisted of:
The Brixton Academy performance was streamed live across the internet to an estimated 9 million viewers.
On November 27 1990, the MTV network announced it had banned Madonna’s Justify My Love video due to extremely strong displays of sexuality.
“We respect her work as an artist and think she makes great videos,” said MTV executives in a statement about the clip. “This one is not for us.”
“When I did my Vogue video…I’m wearing a see-through dress and you can clearly see my breasts,” Madonna told ABC’s Nightline in 1990. “MTV told me that they wanted me to take that out, but I said I wouldn’t and they played it anyways. So I thought that once again I was going to be able to bend the rules a little bit.”
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