This Rebel Heart is bleeding. Madonna got emotional onstage during her concert in Stockholm, Sweden, on Saturday, Nov. 14, when she paused her performance to pay tribute to the victims of the Paris attacks.
“Obviously, this whole show is about celebrating life and standing up for your rights, fighting for what you believe in,” she began her speech to a packed house, setting her guitar aside. “It’s been very hard for me to get through the show up to this point, and not forget about what happened last night.”
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The iconic pop singer then explained that she had felt “torn” about performing just one day after several terrorist shootings and suicide bombings shook the French capital on Friday, Nov. 13.
“In many ways I feel torn, because it’s like, why am I up here dancing and having fun when people are crying over the loss of their loved ones?” the 57-year-old singer shared. “However, that is exactly what these people want to do. They want to shut us up. They want to silence us, and we won’t let them. We will never let them.”
The singer, dressed in a colorful form-fitting outfit for the performance, added that she decided against canceling her show when she realized the magnitude of what it would have meant to do so.
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"I was gonna cancel my show tonight but then I thought to myself, 'Why should I give that to them? Why should I allow them to stop me and to stop us from enjoying freedom?'" she said. “All of the places where people were killed were places where people were having fun, people were enjoying themselves, eating in restaurants, dancing, singing, watching a soccer match. These are freedoms that we take for granted of course and we must not but they're freedoms that we deserve, we work hard and we deserve to have fun and there is no one in this world that should have the right to stop us from doing what we love!"
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The Queen of Pop then proceeded to launch into a tribute to the City of Light with an emotional rendition of her 1989 hit “Like a Prayer.”
Watch the moving moment in the video clip above!
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