Prior to the release of 21, the most recently-released album to go Diamond was Usher's Confessions, which dropped in 2004. Among the very few artists with recent Diamond albums: Britney Spears (Oops!... I Did It Again), Eminem (The Marshall Mathers LP and The Eminem Show) and Norah Jones (Come Away With Me). That last album's similar success was tied, as was Adele's, to fans among older music-buyers: though present-day versions of young Eminem and young Brit haven't been able to move records, mom and dad don't know how to torrent music.

Simpler times: Madonna in 1984.

Even as Madonna brings her world tour to Yankee Stadium for shows on September 6 and 8, longtime fans will have a sneaking suspicion that she’s already sung her swan song.

It happened in 2001, at the opening of the Grammy Awards. Performing a recent single, the unimaginatively named “Music,” the long-reigning Queen of Pop writhed on top of a car while a screen behind her projected legitimately iconic images from her career thus far—more writhing, in a wedding gown at the Video Music Awards; aping Marilyn in the “Material Girl” video; that whole Sex period. By the time she stripped off her black leather jacket to reveal a T-shirt printed with “Material Girl,” the game was up. It was the end of history for Madonna. Having stolen from New York’s drag queens, the nation of Argentina, Björk and the infinitely patient Camille Paglia, there was no one left to rob but herself. The snake had found its own tail and wasn’t letting go. “Music” was her last number-one single in America.

The subsequent 11 years have been no kinder to a pop singer who made untold profits by scandalizing the entire population all at once. In 2003, for instance, Madonna restaged the notorious VMAs “Like a Virgin” performance in which she’d mimed masturbation; it was such a sensational act back in 1984 that a worthy callback required the additional services of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, both of whom planted kisses on Mama. The stunt got ink, but felt a little derivative, unworthy.

We haven’t even gotten to the Super Bowl performance, this year, during which the chanteuse came out in a gilded barge, like Cleopatra, to intone “Vogue,” then almost fell off a set of bleachers while performing, once again, “Music.” Madonna duetted with of-the-moment hip-hop act LMFAO, gave airtime to Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. (who stole the show with a raised middle finger—proving she had learned from the best), and ceded the entire finale to reality-show judge Cee Lo Green, who belted out “Like a Prayer” while the ostensible star sang backup. Nothing here was new—not the reliance on the energy of younger pop stars (Madonna has, in the past 10 years, collaborated with everyone from Missy Elliott to Justin Timberlake and Kanye West), not the ostensibly new song she debuted (a retread of flimsy early material like “Burning Up”), and not the dopey “political” edge (her song ended with a plea for #Worldpeace).

Madonna’s ongoing world tour, following the halftime show that most of us were inclined to view charitably, has been marred by endless grabs for attention; the well-chronicled political mishmash has featured the comparison of a French politician to Hitler, the onstage brandishing of pistols, a merited-or-not mockery of Lady Gaga, and Madonna’s own fans booing her. And then there was Elton John, who declared, “Her career is over, I can tell you that” and compared her to “a fairground stripper.”

Which isn’t to say that Mr. John is the most relevant pop star of the moment, either, but he has a point.

Past Madonna tours were controversial; recall how natural she seemed in her 1991 tour documentary Truth or Dare, still discovering her power to provoke. Back in the day, the attention felt somehow earned, if often strenuously so—the Jean Paul Gaultier cone bra said a mouthful, for instance; “Papa Don’t Preach” still carries a frisson; and the apostasy of the Catholic-baiting “Like a Prayer” made up for the relative thinness of the music. It was an equal exchange—she gave us something to talk about, we bought her albums and got up to dance (for inspiration), whenever she commanded.

By comparison, Madonna’s bids for controversy these days come off as desperate, the Newsweek cover stories of Top 40 radio.

Or was it always a little troll-y? It’s possible that no public act has ever been more calculated than Madonna’s repeated cursing on Letterman—rewatching the 1994 segment today, you can see there is no spontaneity whatsoever. Madonna dropped the f-bomb because she had determined it was time to prove that she could be naughtier than we even believed possible. Her Erotica album doesn’t really sound like the work of someone who’s actually ever had sex (much less cruised the Lower East Side in a limo, hunting for hookups, or partnered with Warren Beatty, Sean Penn, JFK Jr., et al.). The Vanity Fair spread with her newborn daughter invented the current tabloid vogue for baby photos, but the earth-mother shtick felt like as much of a pose as the Hindi-inflected look she threw on at awards ceremonies around the period, or the British accent she would soon pick up. In retrospect, the British accent was when the pose overwhelmed the artist. Until then, it was easy enough to go along with Madonna’s act. Certainly it was more interesting on a semiotic level than just marveling, yet again, at the dully marvelous vocal power of contemporaries like Mariah Carey and Toni Braxton.

And yet Madonna seemed to grow rageful at the limits of the concord she’d struck with her audience. Her mid-career albums Ray of Light (1998) and Music (2000) got the first legitimately respectful reviews of her oeuvre—and the first Grammy wins aside from a 1992 music-video prize. Having proven herself as an artist and not merely a provocateur, Madonna released, in 2003, a musically interesting, politically moronic album called American Life. A video depicted her tossing a bomb at George W. Bush. This was the album on which she rapped about how dissatisfied she was with her household staff and her “soy latte” with a “double shot-té.” Rightly or wrongly, her discovery of Jewish mysticism—remember “Esther”?—came off as yet another pose, if an expensive one.

Her 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor marked a retrenchment; the music was well-regarded precisely because it so closely mimed the spirit of the disco tunes that had initially made Madonna famous (with a bit of international house music mixed in). On tour in support of the album, Madonna ascended a glittering disco cross and wore a crown of thorns, to which the world replied with a mass eye-roll. What, precisely, was she even trying to say about the Catholic Church, 15 years after Like a Prayer? What was there left to communicate? The confessions weren’t forthcoming on Dance Floor, an album about having fun and waiting for boys to call and vaguely pushing oneself toward some undefined goal. (It’s worth noting that Confessions on a Dance Floor sold well, and that Madonna will always be able to count on an avid, if graying, fan base—in particular among gay men between 25 and 55 who grew up with her act.)

After a warmed-over hip-hop-ish album in 2008 came this year’s MDNA—a not-so-clever mash-up of her own name and the active ingredient in Ecstasy. One song features a rap bashing ex-husband Guy Ritchie; another bashes “some girls” who don’t have Madonna’s particular je ne sais quoi. There’s “Masterpiece,” a weak ballad from the Wallis Simpson bio-pic she directed. There’s a tune called “Gang Bang,” and a remix of the leadoff single “Give Me All Your Luvin’” produced by LMFAO. None of this has aged well, and the album came out in the spring.

Given Madonna’s undisciplined message, her buckshot approach to baiting controversy—if you throw every signifier out into the world, one is bound to hit—it’s perhaps no surprise that her lunch has been eaten by a crop of pop stars who absorbed her best moves and subtracted the air of breathless doggedness. Katy Perry has nailed the faux-naïf “Why are you paying attention to me?” quality. Rihanna captures the air of the profane. Nicki Minaj does the whole rapid-cycling-through-personae thing, albeit in fast-motion. And Lady Gaga, whose own popularity waxes and wanes in a Madonnavian manner, has adopted the sense of unashamed artifice, mixing in a bit more humor and perhaps a bit more heart, daring us, as Madonna once did, not to talk about her.

While Madonna performs old material and prematurely stale material and waves guns and twirls batons and invokes Godwin’s Law at Yankee Stadium, the world’s top pop acts will be in Los Angeles, at the MTV Video Music Awards. While the deal-makers who paid Madonna a reported $120 million over 10 years can count on strong attendance this one last go-round—she’s still Madonna, after all—the Madge business isn’t a growth industry. The last time Madonna performed at the VMAs was to reprise her past material and kiss Britney.

It turns out that Madonna’s 1987 album Who’s That Girl is the most appropriately titled of her career (certainly more so than Music). Some 30 years on, we’re no closer to finding out what makes this girl tick, what interests her beyond the glitter and flash of a camera. At this point, it may be time for her to take her own advice from one of her number-one singles, “Take a Bow.” “The show is over,” Madonna sang, back when the future seemed bright, or at least more full of possibility. “Say goodbye.”

One is given to understand that much of the population has been wiped out (an almost subliminally-brief image of arrows flashes across a world map--nuclear war? Pandemic?) and that Beyoncé has assumed the role of heroine set to lead her acolytes through this Cormac McCarthyesque landscape. By the clip's end, she's mounted a rearing white horse, a veritable horsewoman of the apocalypse. 

Music videos are an art form without much currency these days--MTV, their stalwart patron in the "Thriller" era, has abandoned them for a ceaseless glucose drip of reality TV, and YouTube's democratic flattening places the glossy "Single Ladies" on equal footing with a lip sync by a Florida 14-year-old. Little surprise, then, that videos have entered their decadent phase: while no one was paying attention, their production values have skyrocketed, their themes grown sinister. 

As a song, "Run the World (Girls)" is a clattering mess. Its message--that girls, which is to say women, are powerful and deserve respect from men--is roughly the same one found in an any innocuous Taylor Swift single. Beyoncé is not, in her lyrics at least, advocating anything resembling a global takeover. And yet the video world her girls would run is a ravaged one. 

Ditto the setting of Britney Spears's "Till the World Ends." She wants to dance "till the world ends," a metaphor, one might think, for the club lights coming on at evening's end. No such luck for those who prefer rapture to The Rapture: the video opens with a clip of meteors exploding and the chyron "December 21st, 2012." Ms. Spears rides out the Mayan-calendar end times by grinding on guys in a grimy club. Explosions light the sky outside. 

Online, theories abound for these pop stars' recent fascination with apocalyptic imagery. Some exegeses are ludicrous, others serviceably plausible (say, what is Lady Gaga's fascination with the Illuminati symbol of Baphomet?). But what these videos are fundamentally about is control. Rihanna's 2010 pleading that her man make her feel "like the only girl in the world" sounds like a workaday come-on, but the song's video reveals that every other girl in the world has quite literally disappeared, and our heroine strides through a toxic-looking red desert.  

Rihanna is no stranger to taking command-or to overtly martial imagery. In her 2009 "Hard" video, she appeared in military drag, straddling a tank and commanding a battalion of soldiers; in 2010's "Rockstar 101," video clips of mushroom clouds illustrated her character's fantasy star power. She was that special thing: a girl who ran the world, even if her reign meant mass destruction.

Singers may be bystanders to the apocalypse (Ms. Spears), or its instigators (Rihanna), or rebel priestesses (Beyoncé). They may even play God-Lady Gaga gives birth to a new race at the beginning of her "Born This Way" video and leads a climactic battle against evil at its conclusion. But, whether annihilators or saviors, these ladies are always the center of attention. In Beyoncé and Lady Gaga's collaborative video from 2010, "Telephone," the two singers kill every customer in a restaurant, and then dance among the corpses. Both singers went on to make videos ("Run the World," from the former, "Born This Way," the latter) in which they lead their respective armies in the name of good. Join us if you want to live, their art confidently proclaims. 

In a time when the pop singer's ability to monetize her skills has plummeted and exploded like a 2012 meteorite, this must seem a terrifically attractive proposition. The singer advances her soldiers into battle onscreen, even as her real-life power among the sort of listeners who used to buy albums dwindles. 

The videos promise that if the listener joins Gaga's race or Rihanna or Beyoncé's ranks or Britney's Thunderdome, he or she will be protected from history's vicissitudes by a conquering diva. For all their sinister themes, these violent videos' assumption that pop singers can ride out a real-life apocalypse in 2012 or beyond, when they have barely managed to justify their existence relative to their counterparts of the early 2000's, is quaint and, harking back as it does to the onetime power of pop, strangely touching. It is even, dare we say it, optimistic.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Charlie Sheen's tour has less in common with past successful speaking tours, like Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain schtick, than with quick-burning train-wrecks--Britney Spears disappears for two-year chunks, just long enough to stoke sufficient interest in her next staggering dance across America. (Will there be a single unironic fan in any given stadium?) Snooki gets paid more than Toni Morrison to speak at Rutgers--unsurprising, given the rich legacy of MTV burnouts who'll speak about "issues" at your university. As mass media has made the speaking tour effectively irrelevant (could a Hal Holbrook act, without a healthy local-theater circuit, thrive today?), one wonders what a Charlie Sheen hopes to get out of a speaking tour. Ms. Spears and Snooki seem to need the money (and may as well milk their notoriety while they can)--but Mr. Sheen's case is more opaque (he has earned millions on Two and a Half Men, but clearly is not a conservative spender).

One is reminded of a second film, 2007's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, in which, after the titular assassination, Mr. Ford re-enacts his one notable act onstage. There's money for him in it, but also the frisson of having done something that people will praise, something that he knows was wrong. Mr. Sheen's self-knowledge is in doubt, but in that film depicting a pre-mass media era, interest in Robert Ford's glamorous misdeeds and "bad boy" image dwindled quickly. The tour grinds on.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Lady Gaga can thank the team at Think Tank Marketing for her seizure of the Twitter crown from Britney Spears this week. Meanwhile, back on earth, Think Tank will take 1,700 square feet in the fashion district.

The digital marketing company's Web site says "in the digital age too many brands struggle to find their way through new terrain." At 250 West 39th Street, the firm will, however, be on some more traditional terrain, surrounded by clothing designers and image consultants.

The New York Post first had news of the deal.

Alas, this doesn't mean the fashion district will now be flooded with Web-curious celebs in need of guidance. According to the Post, "They tried to get the Lady to go gaga over the space on July 5, her one day off the Monster Ball in the tri-state area, but the logistics didn't work out."

The firm will move from 1030 Sixth Avenue.

The asking rent was $39 a square foot. Christopher Okada of Okada & Company represented the tenant. Catherine O'Toole of Tarter Stats O'Toole represented the building ownership.

lkusisto@observer.com

People StyleWatch describes the photos thus:

Each photographer brought out very different sides of the performer, with Leibovitz opting for an industrial backdrop, and Richardson working on a plain white set, while Seliger created two elaborate scenarios: one involving a custom-made pink Harley-Davidson motorcycle on lush green grass, and the other inspired by a French burlesque performer's dressing room.

Spears said in a release:

"Annie, Mark and Terry are three of the biggest photographers in the world, I am honored to be working with them for my Candie's Only at Kohl's ads. It was an amazing shoot and I know my fans are going to love the cool images."

Candie's is best known for brightly colored ads in teen magazines.

Britney Spears is best known for being the Ugg-booted incarnation of celebrity culture run amok.

Annie Leibovitz, Women's Wear Daily helpfully notes, is "best known for portraits in such glossy titles as Vanity Fair and Vogue."

Also, she is totally broke.

Britney Spears hasn’t exactly been everywhere lately. But in the universe of OK! magazine, the pop star rules. Her face is plastered all over OK!’s glossy pages and on their Web site: Britney returns from her European tour! She films an ad! She’s on a boat! None of these headlines were of great moment, but the Transom was surprised to discover that Ms. Spears had been given the honor of #1 Beach Bod in a recent issue, beating out slightly more hewn forms, like Halle Berry, Megan Fox and Kristen Stewart. What gives?

Ms. Spears, 28, was deemed a “habitual, frequent and continuous” user of alcohol and controlled substances by the judge deciding her 2007 custody battle with ex-husband Kevin Federline. A mother of two who has strugged with the baby weight in the past, she hardly seems the likeliest candidate for beach bod numero uno.

Of course Ms. Spears is promoting a new single from her most recent album, aptly titled Circus, and stepping out as the new face of Candie’s Only at Kohl’s. A little good press never hurt at the time like this, barely two years after Ms. Spears admitted on her Web site that she “truly hit rock bottom” prior to her 2007 rehab stint. 

OK! editorial director Sarah Ivens gave it to us straight. “Britney’s never been that skinny-skinny girl, she’s always had a bum or a belly,” she said. “We like that.”

But the number one position on the beach bod list? “She only deserves to be included!” said Ms. Ivens, who was pleased that her oft-troubled subject “hasn’t been doing too much in tabloid terms, she’s been heaving herself on tour. If we cover her when she’s going a bit mad, it’s good to cover her when she’s on her way back up.”

Plus, Ms. Spears may not be too far off from her younger and svelter fellow Hollywood starlets. “She’s dancing her ass off three hours a day,” Ms. Ivens pointed out, a bit indignantly.

So there’s no OK!/Spears special alliance? Admitted the editorial director: “We are a bit Brit-obsessed at OK!”

8 p.m. "The Music of R.E.M. Music Education Programs for Underprivileged Youth Benefit Concert" will feature the stylings of Patti Smith, Kimya Dawson, Tommy James and the Shondells, Rachel Yamagata and many, many more.  At Carnegie Hall, 154 West 57th Streets. Tickets range from $38-$125.

8 p.m. Spike Hill Tavern hosts an Open Mic night at 184 Bedford Avenue at North Seventh Street. Registration starts at 7 pm, admission is free.

8 p.m. Britney Spears performs songs from her new album Circus with special guests: The Pussycat Dolls, at Nassau Coliseum, 1255 Hempstead Turnpike, Uniondale. Ticket prices are: $36,$66 and $150.

8 p.m. "Comedy 2.0: Video Series on the Web" is a discussion and clip show featuring Web-series creators from Burg, Barely Political, College Humor, BestWeekEver.Tv and Cat News. At 92YTribeca, 200 Hudson Street, between Watts and Desbrosses Streets. Admission is $10.

Cyclist Lance Armstrong and girlfriend Anna Hansen are expecting their first child together. [People]

Britney Spears's father, Jamie, will be paid an additional $6,000 per month (on top of the $10,000 he was already getting) for the court-ordered supervision of his daughter. [Us Weekly]

The Nobu Hotel, which was supposed to be financed by Lehman Brothers, is not happening. [Down By The Hipster]

Marisa Tomei is now dating OC actor Logan Marshall-Green, who she met while performing in the play The Investigation of Solitude. [P6]

Philadelphia Eagles player Stewart Bradley hopes to be the next athlete to work at a fashion magazine: "I mean, it's not like I wear women's clothing, but I’d like to work for a women’s magazine because they’ve got a wider readership than most men's magazines." [Gatecrasher]