See Madonna and Terrence Howard Dance as World Burns in ‘Ghosttown’ Clip
Madonna survives a nuclear explosion in the clip for “Ghosttown,” her second single off Rebel Heart.
The better part of the video is a mostly harrowing scene for the pop star. She wanders out of her studio apartment into a fire-razed, post-apocalyptic landscape in the clip. The only survivors appear to be a tarantula, a rat and what looks like a wolf, so she lives out a Last Man on Earth–type fantasy (wearing a top hat while wrecking a pile of chairs with a golf club) until she encounters another human: actor Terrence Howard, who is focusing the sight of an assault rifle on her. They make friends and the clip works its way toward a happy ending, including the discovery of one more human. Longtime Madonna video collaborator Jonas Åkerlund helmed the clip.
Ironically, Madonna and Howard recently duked it out on the charts in a weird way. In mid-March, the soundtrack to the actor’s TV show Empire earned the top spot on the Billboard 200, but it wouldn’t have before the trade mag changed its charts metrics to include album-equivalent track sales. That week, Rebel Heart had sold 121,000 units, of which 116,000 were traditional album sales; Empire achieved the top spot with 130,000 units sold, of which 110,000 copies were traditional albums.
In other Madonna music-industry news, the Material Girl recently united with a jaw-dropping number of music megastars, including Jay Z, Beyonce, Rihanna, Kanye West and others, as co-owners of the music-streaming platform Tidal. The artists all appeared together recently at an event in New York to state their intent.
“We come together before you on this day…with one voice in unity in the hopes that today will be a moment that will forever change the course of music history,” co-owner Alicia Keys told the crowd. “Our goal is simple: We want to create a better service and a better experience for both fans and artists, and that is our promise to the world.”