Forty-eight hours after America elected its first black president, Madonna brought her "Sticky & Sweet Tour" to Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles last Thursday for a night of triumph and defiance. One of pop's longest-lived provocateurs, Madonna always has had something to say -- even when she

Barack Obama's message of change is one that might've been custom-made for Madonna, who has maintained her place in the pop-star firmament not by hewing to a single vision but by regularly arriving at the future slightly ahead of her competitors. Although it's thematically tied to her current "Hard Candy” album, the "Sticky & Sweet" show, a two-hour multimedia juggernaut with no shortage of technology or textiles, is really designed, as is every Madonna production, to showcase the breadth of her titanic legacy.

As giant onstage video screens flashed iconic images from her past - bottle-blond material girl, New York City street kid, ravenhaired spiritual seeker — Madonna revelled in her reputation as a flip-flopper.

At the same time, she has spent much of her quarter-century in % eligh t .hamiperjr^away at one.central icfeA: the qiqhracc . kinds 'We have so mtich'rfc Celebrate," Madonna announced near the end of Thursday's show, the president-elect's face on the stadium screens eliciting huge cheers from the celebrity-studded audience, which included such boldfaced names as Jennifer Lopez, Drew Barrymore and Fergie. "There is one little disappointment, though. I'm sorry to hear that Proposition 8 passed. But we

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Madonna enacted that struggle onstage, both figuratively and literally. During "Die Another Day," two members of her rainbow-coalition dance crew sparred inside a boxing ring, while "She's Not Me" climaxed with Madonna attacking four impostors representing different phases of her

Anyone who has had anything

unRrnd to sJfy about the singer's® rather ropy physique lately should take into consideration the effects this marathon of physical exertion -- there is also ropejumping, break-dancing and a treadmill -- must have on a 50-year-old body. Frankly, it's amazing she doesn't look like a strip of beefjerky.

Far away from the political front, Madonna is also currently

engaged in a personal battle: her much-discussed divorce from filmmaker Guy Ritchie. Several times Thursday she seemed to allude to the situation, as in "Human Nature,” when she unloaded a long list of recriminations including, 'You punished me for telling you my fantasies.'

At the end of the song Madonna was joined by Britney Spears, one of the show's two surprise guests, who sang along with the headliner as she insisted, in slightly more colourful language, that she's nobody's victim.

Justin Timberlake also appeared for a somewhat perfunctory performance of '4 Minutes," "Hard Candy's" somewhat perfunctory lead single.

Later, Madonna revealed a more vulnerable side of the story during 'You Must Love Me," a song from her 1996 film "Evita.' Accompanied at the end of a long catwalk by an acoustic Gypsy-music combo, the singer gave her strongest vocal performance of the night.

Then she got back to the business of celebration, segueing from a jubilant, Middle Eastern-accented 'Like a Prayer" into an appealingly scrappy electro-punk

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Her closer was "Give It 2 Me." which on "Hard Candy" never gathers much steam but at Dodger Stadium pounded with both authority and abandon. "No one's gonna stop me,' Madonna sang, minimising the distance between a threat and a promise.

Source: Internet