Word: madonna
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Those years of repression, civil war and famine have blighted the world's image of Ethiopia and the musical life of Addis today is mired, according to Falceto, in poor imitations of Michael Jackson and Madonna. "They are very ambivalent to their own musical roots even now," he says, "it seems like it belongs to the past backwardness." His Ethiopiques project has been slowly building a following among western audiences. So far there have been 23 CDs as well as an award-winning Very Best of ... album while Jim Jarmusch used a couple of Mulatu Astatqé songs to great...
...release of Life with My Sister Madonna - the breathless tell-all from the Material Girl's brother, Christopher Ciccone, with writer Wendy Leigh - couldn't have been more fortuitously timed. As the book hits stores, the world's most famous Kabbalah practitioner is fending off rumors of a pending split from husband Guy Ritchie and of an alleged affair with New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez, whom she reputedly "brainwashed," causing the dissolution of his marriage. So bright is Madonna's star that this jumble of reheated anecdotes warranted an initial print run of 350,000 copies...
...What those readers will get is a narrative that reveals less about Madonna than about the brother condemned to living in her considerable shadow. Ciccone, an artist and interior decorator, served stints as Madonna's backup dancer, her "dresser" (a role in which his tasks included wiping sweat from her sometimes-naked body) and later as her designer. But mostly, by his telling, he functioned as her doormat. And, occasionally, her garbage can (one of his chores was allowing his sister to spit cough drops into his palm). "I find no excuse for Madonna's grossly unfair treatment...
...Madonna is 27 months older than Ciccone, and she snatched his innocence around the same time she was surrendering her own. She gives him his first joint, his first ecstasy pill, his first visit to a gay club. These events foreshadowed a peculiar sort of sibling bond. Consider: Both lost their virginity in the backseats of cars to guys named Russell. True to form, he notes, she "bests" him even here: her dalliance took place in a Cadillac, his in a Datsun. It was clear during her childhood in Michigan, Ciccone says, that Madonna wasn't shy about deploying...
...course, it's Madonna's love life that readers want the scoop on, and Ciccone is happy to pry open her bedroom door. He dishes on becoming Sean Penn's blood brother and Warren Beatty's habit of quizzing him about what it's like to be gay. Madonna bedded so many luminaries, it seems, that some notable members of this diverse group - John F. Kennedy Jr., graffiti pioneer Jean-Michel Basquiat, basketball star Dennis Rodman and steroid-user-turned-whistle-blower Jose Canseco - rate no better than a passing mention. Ciccone paints Ritchie in a particularly unflattering light, claiming...