Madonna for Rolling Stone the Interview
How does an idea for "Illuminati" come together when you're working with Kanye West?
"Illuminati " was a song I'd written back in March or April. People are always using the word Illuminati but they're always referencing it in an incorrect way.
People often accuse me of being a member of the Illuminati and I think in today's pop culture the Illuminati is perceived as a group of powerful, successful people who are working behind the scenes to control the universe. Not people with consciousness, not people who are enlightened. So people were accusing me of being a member of the Illuminati, and I kept going, wait – so first I had to figure out what that meant.
Do you Google these things, because it's quite amusing.
Yeah. But the thing is, I know who the real Illuminati are, and I know where that word comes from.
The real Illuminati were a group of scientists, artists, philosophers, writers, who came about in what is referred to as the Age of Enlightenment, after the Dark Ages, when there was no writing and no art and no creativity and no spirituality, and life was really at a standstill. And right after that, everything flourished. So we had people like Shakespeare and Leonardo Da Vinci and Michaelangelo and Isaac Newton, and all these great minds and great thinkers, and they were called Illuminati.
source:
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/fe...0141221?page=3
