Calling all material girls and boys! Get “Into the Groove” and “Express Yourself” with a live tribute to the Queen of Pop. Featuring members of Oakland-bred indie-dance duo The Lovemakers and El Elle—Lisa Light’s solo follow-up to her turn fronting The Lovemakers. Supporting acts include L.A. Girlfriend, the alt-electro brainchild of Sydney Banta, which leans heavily on ’80s synth-pop textures. Banta is currently pushing her latest effort, the five-track REX EP. DJ Scotty Fox kicks off the night mixing things up on the ones and twos.

Material Girl
Thu, 8pm, $10
The Ritz, San Jose

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the title character retains eternal youth because a painting absorbs all the negative affects of his aging. Madonna must have one of those locked away in a Calabasas Kabbalah Center. She’s nothing short of a demi-god. And last night, during her appearance at the SAP Center, every single walk of life came to worship at her phallic altar.

Attendees of this stop on her Rebel Heart Tour included: Thots in hitched-up one-pieces, three generations of selfie-snappers, wholesome nuclear families, Duck Dynasty look-alikes, Russian/Vietnamese/Spanish-speakers, leather lovers, trim cougars in slinky dresses, Material girls (and women), and tons and tons of well-groomed men.

EDM-er Michael Diamond opened for Madonna, composing an hour and a half of chest filling deep house laced with disembodied hip-hop samples. The demure cotton-topped couple next to me endured him politely with a game of Words with Friends.

The trendy opener reflected Madonna’s constant reinvention, tracked by fan-worn tour T-shirts ranging from the curvy, bushy-browed beauty of yore to the polished avatar of sex that she is now. She refuses to stagnate, refuses to fade. She only ever adds new dimensions to her dodecahedron self. She incorporates whatever the kids are doing and makes it her own. And does it just as well, if not better. Miley Cyrus copies Madonna. But Madonna also copies Miley Cyrus.

The Queen of Pop opened with a monologue about having tits and an ass and an insatiable desire to be noticed. Then she led a tightly choreographed rebellion against an army of templars that seemed like they had been plucked from a dystopian novel where Ancient China and Egypt had been smushed together.

Her eyeliner flared at the corner. Her high cheekbones absorbed golden light. Her arms rippled with muscle. Her dirty blonde hair flowed long in a wild mane. Her smoky blue eyes radiated a persistent sexuality. Her maraschino cherry red lips pouted. Her diminutive height disappeared above Dikembe-Mutombo-middle-finger-sized stilettos. Her forehead flushed, but didn’t leak one bead of sweat down her angular marble-smooth face.

She stood astride a pole-swirling stripper like a surfboard and spanked a dancer 15 times for dropping a maraca. She forcefully groped and got groped back, drew attention to how “penisy” the heart-shaped tip of her thrust stage looked, humped any surface offered to her, and presided over a simulated man-on-man sex scene, a gyrating topless transwoman, and an androgyne clad half in a tuxedo and half in a shimmery flapper dress.

She said the word “fuck,” a lot.

Skipping about the stage, she flung her hair into a messy mane during “Like A Virgin,” and thumb-strummed a ukulele alone, while crooning “La Vie en Rose.” She flung tuxedoed suitors down a raked platform during a futurized rendition of “Material Girl.” During “Burning Up,” she whipped out a Flying-V guitar, dropped to her knees and shredded. She moved from channeling Mariachi’s mojo in “Who’s that Girl,” to twerking cat-walking and sneering to “Bitch, I’m Madonna.” She warbled over military drums for “Heartbreak City,” then draped herself in an American flag for her encore, “Holiday.”

Finally, she ascended into the sky because where else could she go?

Despite the unblinking admiration of the jam-packed SAP Center, Madonna exists on an unreachable, astral plane—far removed from our mundane reality. She is an alien-envisioned ideal of a popstar. Hillary Clinton frequently came to mind.

But I think that’s the point. Madonna isn’t supposed to be like us. She doesn’t age, she merely levels up—reincarnates without dying. And this is why legions worship her. Because unlike all other things that wither, she preserves. She’s a constant in a world of relentless flux. She’s a beacon of immortality. Bitch, she’s Madonna.

The first time I paid attention to Lady Gaga (really paid attention: watched her; mused on her; dissected her willingly) was when she killed herself. It was her breakthrough live performance at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, where she performed “Paparazzi,” a song that equates the bloodthirsty hounding of her lover-to-be to the relentless lens of the paparazzi.

Ever the extremist, Gaga made sure the metaphor worked twice over, by famously ending the set with her own death, hanging bloodied, surrounded by dancers-turned-pariahs with theatrical bulbs flashing—a victim of the fame.

This was, of course, only shortly after her first album had been released, and its artistic statement was muddied by the fact that Lady Gaga had only recently achieved even a semblance of the fame she claimed to be falling victim to. Here, Gaga was giving us the dramatic finale to her entire mythology as a pop artist—all before we’d even gotten a chance to fully digest her.

Has there ever been a more postmodern performance in mainstream media than that of the Icon as Martyr, before even being established as either? It was clear that a performer with a true knack for zeitgeisty self-promotion had been born.

And just in time, too. With the official death of monoculture (Walter Cronkite, Johnny Carson, Michael Jackson, most of the Beatles), the state of pop culture had been in a heady tailspin for the better part of a decade, making it almost impossible to imagine a time where a single person could dominate more than just momentary conversation. Multiple sources are to blame: declining revenue in a time where the culture is expected to be free; the speed of the Internet and the faster rate of overturn and backlash; Warhol’s retort that “everybody will be famous for 15 minutes” proving to be alarmingly prophetic.

So when Lady Gaga entered the scene in 2008, and when she commanded the scene in 2009, and when she became the scene in 2010, it felt like we had collectively found the icon that had eluded us for most of the aughts. Finally, someone understood the culture’s scope and could take the shift and embrace it wholly as part of her identity, both mockingly and self-serious.

Lady Gaga, who performs Jan. 17 at HP Pavilion, is the first pop superstar to be born during the decade of hysterical celebrity culture.

Madonna used the then-growing paparazzi syndicate to her advantage, creating a shock-and-awe campaign everywhere she went; Britney was a victim of the lens, proving once and for all that the act of observation will inevitably change that which is being observed. But it’s Gaga who is the true byproduct of the 24-hour news cycle, where celebrity news has become both personal and political; where tabloids are read as religious texts; where fame and infamy are no long mutually exclusive.

Her influence is undeniable. Lady Gaga has morphed the state of music and the state of pop culture as it exists now. She has, of course, been aided by this era’s refusal to build anything particularly new, rehashing a series of images with some semblance of history, recycling it until it can vaguely be recognized as both something familiar and something radical. Gaga has been aided by this, and has cleverly referred to her body of work as an extension of pop art, which is, by its very nature, about recycling the familiar until we find something new in it.

There Is No Center

Here’s the most important thing to realize as a citizen of contemporary culture: there is no longer a center. Think of the culture, as it exists now, as a dance circle. Various people take turns jumping in the middle, doing a combination of moves and riling up the crowd, only to then gradually fade back into the surroundings, waiting for another to jump in and test out their moves.

Gaga’s sheer theatricality is her move. And it is in fact the same thing that has kept her personal life at arm’s length, allowing her to maintain a private life that would make other stars of her stature salivate. Her persona as a pop artist who values presentation and the grandiose makes her life beyond the stage less and less interesting—an irony considering that her big picture mythology is that of a star forever in conflict with the notion of “fame.”

Her impact has been rather immediate, and her influence on pop—a genre which has already bled into a variety of others that were once impossible to infiltrate, including indie rock and hip-hop—is undeniable. Just as Kanye West’s emphasis on confessional and vulnerable lyricism served as the perfect breath of fresh air in the early 2000s, during a time when crunk and Southern rap had taken on a horrible life of their own, Gaga has similarly made theatricality an undeniable tenant of the modern pop star.

With bright colors and costumes fit for a drag show, she led the way for an undeniable camp factor that allows stars like Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj to sing with their tongue planted firmly in cheek. These elements have entered the pop visual lexicon as if they’ve been lived in for decades.

She’s made an artist’s fan base part of their personal brand, with her Little Monsters giving way to such niches as Nicki Minaj’s Barbies or, less popularly, Rihanna’s NAVY (a title chosen conveniently close to the release of the singer’s first film appearance in last summer’s Battleship).

All of this is to say that much the same way that pop culture once existed in a post-Michael Jackson era, much of the 2000s’ second decade will be defined as entirely post-Gaga. The question is whether she herself will last.

Hard to say: Gaga herself doesn’t seem to be completely immune to a culture that expects more and expects it more often. Her ticket sales (largely considered to be the only way for a musical artist to make money anymore, aside from endorsement deals) have gone down tremendously, with some tickets selling for over 50 percent less than face value. Her last album had one of the biggest first-week sales in Soundscan history, only to then see an 84 percent sales drop the following week.

This is, for lack of a better term, bad news. But what makes Gaga such a product of her time is that her work and her evolution as an artist has become so self-referential so quickly, harking back to her own iconography and showing us the end path of a star still in her infancy. In that way, it doesn’t quite matter if Gaga the performer maintains her status—whether she is still kicking on stage or hanging bloodied off of it. It’s always been the idea of Gaga that’s persisted most. Why else would we have seen the end so close to the beginning?

Lady Gaga
HP Pavilion
San Jose
Jan. 17 7:30pm
$52.50 and up

Critics have been carping for literally decades about Madonna being too old, too out of touch, too fake and too lightweight. Time and again, they fail to understand her continued success.

Madonna’s strength is not in her consistency, or her perceived hipness in any given year. She is, instead, the world’s leading exporter of Madonnaness. Through smash hits or Shanghai surprises, she never lets up. To paraphrase The Terminator, she can’t be bargained with. She can’t be reasoned with. She doesn’t feel pity, remorse or fear. And she absolutely will not stop, ever, until she is dead.

PHOTO GALLERY: Crowd and concert photos from Madonna’s concert at HP Pavilion.

What’s strange is that Madonna herself seemed to have forgotten how she got where she is through the entire first half hour of her show at HP Pavilion Saturday night.

As she kicked off almost entirely with songs from her new album, MDNA, she proceeded to give the audience absolutely everything they didn’t want from a Madonna show.

Attempting to do for violence what she did for sex, she squandered her stage time with the world’s most poorly timed gun show (and I’m not referring to her arms). Blood and tissue were splattered across the video screens as she pretended to shoot dancers in the head and kept pointing her fake gun at the audience like it was a nervous tic.

VIDEO: Madonna’s Five Most Outrageous Moments.

Considering that Madonna’s subversiveness was always in her message of self-acceptance and positivism, guess how this went over? The energy in the building, already taxed by the show’s late start, was sucked out entirely, even from her adoring hardcore fan base. It all seemed forced and desperate, a poorly thought out rip off of MIA’s warmongering shtick and Lady Gaga’s own dark take on Madonnaness.

The irony was upped when Madonna finally cut the hardboiled crap and came out to a pretty impressive staging of “Express Yourself,” in which she poked fun at Lady Gaga by demonstrating how effortlessly “Born This Way” fit into the melody of her own song (she has, of course, accused Gaga of stealing it before). As drum majorettes marches through the air above the stage and cheerleaders twirled, she took her first step toward reclaiming the territory she actually owns.

Madonna at HP Pavilion. // Photo by Aron Cooperman.

By the time she’d gotten to “Vogue” and “Candy Shop,” she was slinking through stylish black-and-white tableaux, lesbian bars and vintage cool. That’s the Madonna concert people want to see, because that blend of sophistication, sexuality and pop camp is what Madonna does better than anyone else.

COLUMN: Why Madonna Still Matters

She worked her way through the hits, but the night’s best moment may have been when she acknowledged that it was the 30th anniversary of the release of her first single, “Everybody.” On a stage uncluttered by her big-budget sets or eye-popping stunts (and the stunts were ridiculously good all night, it should be noted), she made an actual connection with the audience as she enlisted their help singing it, having claimed to have possibly forgotten the words. It was fun, it was unexpected, and it showed that Madonna still knows how to surprise her audience in a good way.

Did you make it to the show? Share your thoughts in our comments section.

Madonna IS, for better or worse, regarded (both high and low) as the Queen of Pop, and, contrary to popular belief, the title does mimic the sound her veiny arms make when stuffed in cheerleading garb, flailing left to right. One gets the very real sense when looking at Madonna in 2k12 that we have in every way reached the endpoint of the 1980s. Where once one was speechless looking at ol’ Madge, a single phrase comes to mind when seeing her now: “It has literally come to this.”

She is, however, still Madonna, and she’s still coming to San Jose for a two-night stand at HP Pavilion, Oct. 6-7, and in the same way that parental advice may not hold the same weight it once did but nevertheless remains at least peripherally relevant, Madonna endures, cementing her place as pop-culture’s slightly enjoyable mosquito bite.

In honor of the queen’s arrival, a moment must be spared (just one) to truly digest what exactly it is that Madonna represents in the vacuum of contemporary culture. Because, as you’re likely to be reminded—often by Madonna herself—she has opened doors for many young people with vaginas and a desire to sing.

The door is also often left ajar for spores of the sincere flattery of imitation (valid or not—here’s looking at you, Lady Gaga, also coming to San Jose, on Jan. 17), but any comparisons seem moot: There will never be a “new Madonna,” because there will never again be a moment like the one when Madonna came into prominence. She is so purely the byproduct of her era that discussions of originality are almost wholly aimless.

For instance, believe it or not, Gen Zers, there was a time in which the ironic appropriation of religious imagery was actually a big deal. As in people actually cared. As in affiliates of the Catholic Church actually protested. Now it’s just this side of yawn-inducing (at least in the West), with everyone flipping a cross upside-down as a way of making a statement.

Even Madonna is still beating her own sacrificed horse to death; her current MDNA Tour features cathedral set design and some holy cooing that may be more the result of bad acoustics than aesthetic intention. Either way, Madonna (whose own name stands as a sort of self-fulfilled prophecy) was one of the first to really push the buttons of all who love that Birkenstock-wearing-long-haired hippie.

True, she wasn’t alone. The 1980s was the time when scorned Catholic kids grew up and started putting their religious resentment in their art (Bruce Springsteen completely; the Cure maybe in part). But Madonna did it first, did it best and literally won’t stop doing it, so some sort of praise must be given as a way of shutting her up.

She’s elsewhere too, namely any heinous “’80s-themed” party that a friend made you attend. Walk in and feast your eyes on the striking binary: vague neon for the men; eclectic mixing for the women. The whole “throw-and-see-what-sticks” fashion style—which ended up turning into “throw-and-everything-sticks”—was at least partially constructed by the pop star.

I’d like to say also that the word “star” in the previous sentence was autocorrected to “store,” and if that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the current state and inherent nature of pop and music and culture, then I don’t know what does.

Madonna has long since earned her title as the Queen of Pop, with an enduring legacy marked by constant reinvention and an uncanny ability to stay relevant—even in a music world that finds itself increasingly indefinable.

But she’s not without her fair share of controversy, often purposefully ignited by the singer’s conscious envelope-pushing antics. Below are the Top 5 most outrageous Madonna moments, culled from across the singer’s three decade-plus career, starting with her first television appearance to as recent as this past September. Madonna performs at HP Pavilion on Oct. 6 and Oct. 7

1. “Like A Virgin” First VMA Broadcast, 1984
Arguable the most iconic Madonna moment in the superstar’s entire oeuvre, the performance of “Like A Virgin” served as more than just an exciting opening for MTV’s first VMA Broadcast (ever), but a symbolic first example of the sort of button pushing she’d come to be known for. This wouldn’t be the last time we’d see the singer in a wedding dress, performing the song and causing a stir on MTV.

Good news for Little Monsters, Lady Gaga announced today that she will stop in San Jose on her Born This Way Ball World Tour.

The perpetually touring pop star will stop in San Jose on January 17 at HP Pavilion. The tour, which will hit 25 North American cities starting January 11, has already sold out numerous dates in Europe, Australia and Asia. It is expected to be the Lady Gaga will likely only sit behind her pop diva rival Madonna for top-grossing tour by a female artist this year. Madonna stops in San Jose on her MDNA tour at HP Pavilion on Oct. 6-7.

At Lady Gaga’s show, fans can expect an “electro-metal pop-opera; the tale of the Beginning, the genesis of the Kingdom of Fame. How we were birthed and how we will die celebrating,” according to a a statement from Gaga today.

In addition to a live performance giant, Lady Gag is a powerhouse in Silicon Valley with 2.2 billion combined views of her online videos, 53 million likes on Facebook and 30 million Twitter followers (one report claims she makes +$30 million on twitter). She also recently launched her own social media network.

Tickets for the HP Pavilion show go on sale Friday, September 21.

Silicon Valley hosts a strong lineup of fall concerts with some of the biggest names in pop, indie rock and electronic music and the debut of SVSX.

Wobbleland
Aug. 31, 7pm; San Jose Civic; $50-$70. Some fans of Wobbleland have expressed disappointment that this year’s lineup isn’t loaded with the same dubstep star power as one that took San Francisco by storm in 2011. But they’re missing the point—nobody on that bill was famous yet outside of the electronic underground. Wobbleland is an underground party designed to let thousands of scantily clad fans get their spines rocked by these artists before they become phenoms. This year’s rave will pump untold decibels of bass into the San Jose Civic courtesy of headliner Flux Pavilion. Flux is best known for his Bassnectar-type dubstep anthem “Bass Cannon,” but fans of Kanye and Jay-Z are more likely to recognize his track “I Can’t Stop,” which was sampled on their “Who Gon Stop Me” album last year. The rest of the Wobbleland roster, aside from maybe Cypress Hill’s DJ Muggs, comes straight from the underground: Zomboy, Barenoize, Bare, Grizzly, NastyNasty, Megalodon and more.

VivaFest!
Sept. 8-16; downtown San Jose; Sept. 16 HP Pavilion show, 7pm, $30 and up. Creative director of VivaFest!, Dan Guerrero, has brought an epic vision and a flair for spectacle to what started out a couple of decades ago as a folksy tribute to the well-known but poorly understood Mexican mariachi tradition. Guerrero is the kind of producer who believes that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing bigger, so it’s no surprise that the centerpiece of his show this year has Gigante in the title. I mean, the organizers of any festival celebrating Mexican culture would be beside themselves to have Latin music star Lila Downs; Chicano Cali favorites Ozomatli; Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan, which was responsible for popularizing mariachi internationally in the 1980s; and legendary cantina chanteuse Paquita la del Barrio. But Guerrero has wrapped all four of them into one show at HP Pavilion on Sept. 16, “Domingo Gigante: A Night of Stars.” The festival will also feature their yearly free Outdoor Feria del Mariachi the same day on HP’s arena green. Besides the Super Sunday extravaganza, there will be a film series, historical walks, mariachi and dance workshops, and more.

SVSX
Sept. 22; downtown San Jose
The South Bay music scene thrives off the intersection of underground culture and high-tech empire. It’s no surprise that in the land of start-ups, the music revolution of the last few years has been born in the garages and on the laptops of a new generation of talent. The Silicon Valley Sound eXperience—SVSX—is a showcase for that revolution, supporting the local music scene with stages on which to make the next advance. This debut year will feature the first SVSX music awards and a club crawl brimming with the best and brightest on the South Bay scene. Artists like Will Sprott, whose unique songwriting and arrangements with the Mumlers opened the floodgates to the wave of eclectic and sometimes unclassifiable bands that have risen up here in the last few years. Like Anya and the Get Down, whose mash-up of rock, reggae and dubstep threatens to break big at any moment. Like Careless Hearts, the Shitkickers and the other bands scheduled to perform. They are all the sound of the Silicon Valley experience.

Harmony by the Bay
Sept. 29, 2pm; Shoreline, Mountain View; $49.50-$79. The Harmony Festival in Santa Rosa was known for a weird mix of performers; last year’s bill featured the Flaming Lips, Primus and breakbeat master Chango B, along with bluegrass and Afrobeat. In March, organizers announced that, after 33 years, money woes had done in the three-day festival, at least for the time being—and then surprised everyone with the debut of this South Bay spin-off festival, a joint venture among Harmony’s organizers, KFOG and Live Nation. Pared down to a one-day, two-stage setup, HBTB attempts to carry over the eclecticism of its namesake, with alt headliners Kimbra, the Shins, Tegan and Sara, plus reggae-rockers the Dirty Heads, bluegrass fixture Alison Krauss, electro-tribal strangesters Beats Antique and reggae legend Jimmy Cliff.

Promoters are preparing for a high turnout for Madonna’s just-announced world tour. A second concert at HP Pavilion was announced today.

Madonna will perform October 6 and October 7 at HP Pavilion. Tickets for both shows go on sale Monday, February 13. The first concert was announced Tuesday amid controversy from M.I.A.’s middle-finger incident during Madonna’s Super Bowl Halftime show.

More from Live Nation:

“Madonna’s track record as a world class entertainer and touring artist speaks for itself. Her artistry, talent and creative productions get bigger and better with each tour and Madonna 2012 will be no exception. We are thrilled to have her back on the road and know her fans feel the same,” commented Arthur Fogel, CEO Live Nation Entertainment Global Touring and Madonna tour promoter.

Madonna’s previous tour, the phenomenally successful “Sticky & Sweet” Tour reaffirmed her status as one of the most successful touring artists of all time. The historic tour included such incredible touring feats as a 70,000 seat sell-out in Werchter, Belgium, an 85,000 sell-out in Helsinki (the largest show ever in the Nordic countries by a solo artist), a 40,000 ticket sell-out in Oslo, Norway, and 72,000 tickets sold out in one day in Tallinn Estonia. Other record breaking ticket sales around the globe include 650,000 tickets sold in her series of South American dates, 72,000 tickets at Zurich’s Dübendorf Airfield – the largest audience ever assembled for a show in Switzerland, 75,000 tickets in London and four sell outs in New York’s Madison Square Garden (60,364 tickets).

The controversy over M.I.A.’s middle-finger salute at the Super Bowl may not have been exactly the publicity Madonna was looking for when she signed on for the halftime show. But if there’s one thing we know about Madge, it’s that she’ll take publicity any way she can get it, especially with the nicely-timed new announcement of her 2012 World Tour, which will arrive at HP Pavilion in San Jose on October 6.

The tour will start in Tel Aviv, Israel on May 29, hitting South America, Australia and 26 European cities including Paris, London and Berlin. The North American leg of the tour opens on Aug. 28, with tickets for the San Jose show and all other North American dates going on sale Feb. 13.

Her performance in Indianapolis got mixed reviews—Piers Morgan likened it to “watching your mad drunken aunt at Christmas,” but others gave it raves. The highlight (or lowlight, depending on your point of view) came during the performance of her new single “Give Me All Your Luvin,” when guest singer M.I.A. flipped the bird after singing her part.

Despite the fact that Super Bowl self-censoring is supposedly all the rage since Janet Jackson’s nipple incident eight years ago, NBC tape-delayers were asleep at the wheel, blurring the screen a couple of seconds after M.I.A. gave the finger. NBC apologized after the game; M.I.A., perhaps unsurprisingly for a lady who blows up Irish kids in her videos, did not. Ratings confirmed the Super Bowl ws watched by well over 100 million people, with more people tuning into the halftime show than any other part of the game.

Madonna’s new album, MDNA, comes out March 26.