Panic Industry

She might be known worldwide as the Material Girl, but there's more than a little of the small-town Michigan girl left in Madonna. The pop superstar arrived in this northern Michigan resort town Saturday to introduce her documentary, "I Am Because We Are," a highlight of the Traverse City Film Festival. The event was co-founded by filmmaker, author and fellow Michigan native Michael Moore.

Hundreds of fans cheered from behind barricades as Madonna, wearing a black dress, high heels and sunglasses, stepped out of a black sport utility vehicle that pulled up in front of the State Theatre. She hugged a waiting Moore, who sported an orange baseball cap, and posed for photos with him.
Madonna and Moore shared the stage at the theater before a screening of the movie, which deals with the orphans of Malawi, the African nation where she and husband Guy Ritchie adopted a son.

"It's great bringing my movie to a place that I feel familiar," Madonna told the audience. "Not like the Cannes Film Festival, where nobody's speaking English, or the Tribeca Film Festival, where no one sits down.

"There's something poetic about coming back to the place where I used to come for holidays - camping trips with my dad and stepmother and my very large family," said the 49-year-old singer, born to the southeast in Bay City and raised in the Detroit suburb of Rochester Hills.

A string of superstars have been enlisted to collaborate with super-producer Timbaland on his forthcoming album ‘Shock Value 2’. Madonna, Jay-Z, Beyonce, Rihanna and T-Pain will all collaborate with Timba on the release, which he likens to a ‘Now [That's What I Call Music!]’ compilation. According to MTV.com, Timbaland said "That's my goal for this-- not [to showcase] me as an artist. Of course I'll do my little part, introduce some people. It gives me room to go tour across the world. People request me. I put on a show. I put on a musical show." Timbaland worked with Madonna on her current ‘Hard Candy’ album and according to Pitchfork, the sought-after producer is set to produce Chris Cornell’s new solo album, and is lined-up to work on Jay-Z’s new record.

IT SEEMS to be happening to everyone at the moment: Prince, Michael Jackson, Sharon Stone and Paddington Bear are all turning 50 this year, with Madonna also blowing out her birthday cake candles next month. Indeed, the Material Girl appears to be making the most of breaching that not so fashionable threshold of 50 by kicking off a world tour.  But then, the birthday celebrations already appear to have been under way for the Michigan-born Queen of Pop, who started out life as Louise Veronica Ciccone with early ambitions to be a dancer and to find the fastest exit out of smalltown America. This year she parted company with her record company, Warner Brothers, to sign a ground-breaking deal with concert promoters Live Nation, her latest album, Hard Candy, hit the number one spot in 37 countries and she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Madonna has recently defended Britney Spears' less recent erratic behavior on a Radio interview. The two duetted on the 2003 track 'Me Against The Music', and famously shared a lingering kiss onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards that year, pictured here... Madonna also kissed Christina but she was not asking crazy so Madonna didn't talk about her...

Apparently Madonna said this referring to Britney; "She never was allowed to have a childhood, you know, she was a star when she was a child," and Madonna continued to say about Spears. "She didn’t get to grow up and make mistakes privately... she's been under a microscope since she was a teenager, which I think is really tough, it's hard to evolve that way."

Madonna Louise Ciccone Ritchie (born August 16, 1958), better known as Madonna, is an American pop singer-songwriter, dancer, record, film producer, actress and a fashion icon. She is a multiple Grammy and Golden Globe-award winner, known for her ambitious music videos, stage performances and use of political, sexual, and religious themes in her work. Madonna is sometimes referred to as "the Material Girl" or "Queen of Pop" in the media.

Since her debut in 1982, Madonna has released many chart-topping albums and singles, and has sold more than 200 million albums worldwide. Billboard reported that her 2006 Confessions Tour holds the record for the top-grossing concert tour by a female artist. According to both the 2007 Guinness Book of Records, and Billboard, she is the top earning female singer in the world with an estimated net worth of over $850 million. On September 27, 2007, she was nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2001, the Guinness Book of World Records listed Madonna as the "World’s Most-successful Female Musician"