Music video: Madonna - Living for love

Madonna's latest visual see's her taming her demons, literally. The visuals match the message of the song, but could equally be a nod to the chronic leaking of her upcoming album Rebel heart, most of which is already online and has been for the past 2 months despite it's March 6th release date.

Madonna has always been about the visuals, and "Living for love" sees her maintain this. I'm not sure entirely what I expected from this video, but I know I was expecting something bigger. Something that hit with more of a bang. But the more I watch the video, the more I quite like that she didn't try to do the most and kept things simple, whilst throwing some (intentional?) references to "Take a bow" and "La island bonita".

It was also refreshing to see Madonna not try to be hip or feign sex in a video. You could read into the dancers outfits resembling BDSM gear, along with Madonna's preferred method of killing her demons being strangulation. But there were no moments in the video that would make her children cringe and deny that the woman pelvic thrusting with her legs wide open and shoving her tongue down some 20 year olds' throat is their mother.

I would have thought Madonna would have relished in the matador setup to show off her moves as she did in her "Sorry" video, but here Madonna barely did anything aside from a couple of tricks on a set of stunt wires. Madonna's getting older, so I guess we can't expect her to stick her leg behind her head and do the splits in every video. The editing seemed to be done purposely to take the attention from Madonna's moves (or lack thereof), all the while highlighting her dancers. This seems strange given that her Grammy performance of "Living for love" saw her moving around the stage with energy, getting low and being thrown around like a rag doll; delivering choreography which trumped that of the video. But I guess that's Madonna, she saves it all for her live performances.

Madonna has a bad habit of neglecting her music videos after the second single drops. Given the epidemic of her album leak, the importance of a good visual in this day and age of music, and her album featuring 2 discs worth of material, it would be nice to see Madonna deliver a solid set of music videos for both her singles and a couple of album tracks.