Madonna's Family, Who Were 'Preparing for the Worst' Once Already, Beg Star to Change as VMA Disaster Grows
Attention, fans: Madonna has left the building. In spirit, at least.
Perhaps there are still acolytes who want to see the Queen of Pop disintegrate on stage. I’ve always thought her career was the triumph of style over substance, an artist whose only truly great album was mostly the result of a producer (“Ray of Light,” mostly the work of the recently deceased William Orbit) but who generated sales and buzz through her public image.
However, the idea that someone less than two years shy of 70 should be a sex symbol and pop-music icon is foolish; she’s more Granny Robinson than Mrs. Robinson, at this point.
If you need more proof, see her performance at Sunday’s disastrous MTV Video Music Awards, where she quite obviously lip-synced one of her performances — poorly — and then gave a rambling speech accepting an award in which she openly admitted she had no idea what award she was accepting.
Madonna singing without moving her mouth!?? 😭😭 #VMAS pic.twitter.com/uKVHB8P6GZ
— Nick | ❤️❤️ (@EnjoyMissJanet) September 28, 2026
Her speech, delivered in an outfit best described as “goth prostitute couture,” began with her saying she needed to pull a cord out of her posterior and doing it, with no small amount of effort, on stage. She was either doing a very good impersonation of an inebriated person or was indeed very inebriated.
And yet, her performance was considered the best of the night by several outfits, which was more an indictment of the VMAs as opposed to just Madonna.
But make no mistake, Madonna is a mess — and, as the U.K.’s Daily Mail reported, members of her inner circle who were “preparing for the worst” after her hospitalization a few years ago are saying that the “chaotic night at this year’s VMAs was just another worrying incident that signals how the notorious control freak just won’t — or can’t — slow down.”
“She is having everyone around her tell her to actually slow down. She says she has more energy than ever, but her family and friends are saying, ‘Take it easy,'” one source told the Daily Mail.
This comes after her hospitalization, which was worse than just a case of exhaustion:
Concern for the pop icon’s health has grown in recent years, especially after she revealed last year in a podcast interview with Jay Shetty that she was hospitalized in 2023 for sepsis, a harrowing experience that left her unconscious for four days, on a ventilator and placed in an ‘induced coma for 48 hours.’
At the time, her longtime manager Guy Oseary issued a statement that she was ‘rushed to hospital and intubated after being found unresponsive.’
While he said a full recovery was expected, many feared for the singer who had a 40th anniversary tour planned.
Advertisement - story continues belowMadonna’s condition was so serious that her relatives were ‘preparing for the worst,’ a family member told the Daily Mail in the days after her hospitalization.
And now, they’re apparently in the process of negotiating another tour and figuring out whether or not a biopic of her directed by her (a fact that really belies parody, given her career of navel-gazing ridiculousness) will go forward.
As for the tour, “There’s a big debate between her and her team as to how the format of the show will be,” the source said.
“She wants to do something big but knows the reality that she can’t do the more extensive tours that she’s done in the past, probably because in some of her more recent concerts, it was too taxing for her. I think she wants to scale it down, but the people around her are probably not wanting her to do anything at all other than a very small and limited run with no more than ten shows in ten cities.”
Again, I’ll go on the record as having no investment here, but I remember seeing Bob Dylan in concert in 2009 — at exactly the same age as Madonna is, it turns out. I also remember him basically standing there and trying his best to work his way through a setlist. I gave him credit for trying, at least.
Granted, Dylan has endured more self-abuse than most of us have, but nobody has ever accused Madonna of being a teetotaler, and while plastic surgery can make her look a great deal younger than her 68 years, you can’t do a facelift on your joints or muscles or larynx or lungs. Considering it’s skeevy enough looking at her trying to imitate a 24-year-old Amsterdam sex worker in her attire, it’ll be more pitiful looking at her trying to ape the same thing she pulled off 30 years ago.
What’s more galling is the fact she wants to push through everything to do this despite the fact she’s just three years removed from a near-death illness. Is this how she wants to be remembered? As a woman who lived out the final desperate years of Mae West, only on stage? That will somehow end happily for her? Sure, Jan.
Just slightly less pathetic is the idea that she’ll direct a biopic about herself instead; that project was also scrapped the same year as her illness, reportedly over budget, although a new studio has “revived interest in it” based on her recent album being slightly less ignored than most of her 21st-century output.
So we’re clear, this is a woman who has limited directorial experience — including a wretched film about King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson’s romance — helming a project about herself where she isn’t shy about how grandiose it will be. “I’ve had an extraordinary life. I’ve had a huge life, so I needed a big budget … they couldn’t get their heads around it,” she said about getting dropped by her prior studio.
Reality has intervened in the life of Madonna about as often as chastity or Christian propriety has — but eventually all three get imposed on us in some way or another, whether in this life or the hereafter. Madonna could start by watching the embarrassment she endured on Sunday and at least agree to accept the first of those three things, lest the bad press impose it on her instead.
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