MADONNA - MDNA (2012)

like, i don't think the song would be amazing if it was sung by someone with a trace of excitement in their voice but madonna just kills it stone dead

I'm glad Tim set up Get Together as a comparison, because it only emphasizes how tossed off and uninvigorated this piece of crap is.

this sounds like a demo...

It is kind of amazing how completely bored she sounds

Someone who didn't know English and had to sing it phonetically would probably still do a better job

That doesn't just sound like a demo, it sounds like a Ke$ha demo.

No way, Kesha is far more into what she's singing at any given point.

I said demo.

Ke$ha wouldn't blow her million dollar pipes on a demo.

This sounds "effortless" in the most literal and worst possible way. Not to mention the lyrics! Just awful!

http://cdn.complex.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/seanprice.gif

Shit, this song gives me serious bad flashbacks to this one time I did E and then my friend bailed on me and I had to go sleep at a bathhouse. But seriously, no Madonna lyrics will ever be as bad as:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkr3xtBRcKI

I Love New York's lyrics are at least buoyed by resting atop a pretty great piece of music. Girl Gone Wild is just garbage from beginning to end.

totally otm

Smart enough to let Azari & III open for her but not produce some songs? She lost me.

I'm half-tempted to start a fb campaign urging her not to release this album in an effort to preserve her legacy. A hollow gesture, of course, because the label has already sunk a ton of money into it, but a gesture from the heart nonetheless.

"I feel like all the records on the radio right now have a homogenized quality to them. I've made a huge effort to try and not sound like everybody else,"

You're Madonna...you shouldn't have to try!

where oh where is the dave q madonna thread?

some fabulous artwork this year

http://edge0.viagogo.net/images/categoryimages/concerts/madonna/madonnaemail2012_c1.jpg?v=2119

oh stop, she's down

I've made a huge effort to try and not sound like everybod-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBMiYJ7kzbI

where oh where is the dave q madonna thread?

hyurr! Madonna deserves her own thread(s), and here's mine...

a treasure of an opening post

i think madonna may have finally reached jay-z status with me, where i actually think of the artist in their prime as an entirely separate person to the current artist, and there is no overlap at all in my mind

otm, though for me she reached that point years ago

even "music" was like basically a difft artist in my mind

I am baffled by people who prefer new Madonna to "classic" Madonna.

there are people who think that?! surely not

There's quite a sizeable number who think Ray of Light and Confessions are her best work, but I kind of put that down to an age thing, and maybe people disliking 80s production. For me "classic" Madonna (where she could do really no wrong) ended with the Evita vocal lessons which sucked all the warmth and life and the use of her lower register out of her voice, and now that the mannered imperiousness has vanished (which was the whole point of the lessons), we're just left with this lifeless catastrophe. The song is dire but she probably could have done something with it two decades ago.

I'd want to give this song to the Madonna of "Burning Up" or "Open Your Heart" and see what she'd do with it, but she'd probably she'd just look at it and what she'd become with complete derision.

i agree that the vocal lessons were on balance a bad thing but her post-evita voice didn't become an actual hindrance until confessions imo - it suits RoL completely, then on music andamerican life it didn't matter because those albums (at their best) were all about how she electronically manipulated and distorted her voice. on confessions the music is so dazzling that she gets away with it.

i only think of the current incarnation of madonna as starting post-2005, whatever you think of the 1998-2005 period vis-à-vis her 80s or early 90s stuff, it's far closer to that than to the shit she's coming out with now.

Well, to my ears Confessions marked the only time her new voice worked on a whole album, thanks in large part to it being a dance record. The slower stuff on ROL and Music (e.g. "I Deserve It," "Mer Girl") is dreadful; even "Drowned World" boasts a couple of pompous moments, like when, to quote Rob Sheffield, she says "I had so many lah-VERS" as if she's never had one in her life.

What about What It Feels Like For a Girl? A great late slow song imo.

It works. I'd argue that's a ballad conceived as a dance track (the sonics, the way her voice sounds like it's looped).

Re: Madonna's late voice & dance music, it's telling that both Hung Up and Sorry find her scolding somebody - not the whole album but the two big singles, and then Jump is hard-nosed self-help. The open-armed joy she could tap into on Into the Groove or Deeper and Deeper seems inaccessible to her now. Just a thought - there may be exceptions I'm forgetting.

"Deeper and Deeper" doesn't feel joyful at all (and that's part of what makes it so great)! But yeah I agree.

that rings true - confessions marked the first time i felt M's voice thudded somewhat and felt flat. for a dance record it's curiously lacking in uninhibited joy. but yeah, that's pretty bang on about why "hung up", "sorry", "jump" and "push" work (and it's why i've felt that unlike those, "get together" works despite madonna rather than due to her).

xp Ah OK, I find Deeper and Deeper pretty joyful, unlike most of Erotica. Ear of the beholder.

"deeper and deeper" = numbing trauma with hedonism, finding a kind of liberation in that anyway. it's complicated

I'm half-tempted to start a fb campaign urging her not to release this album in an effort to preserve her legacy. A hollow gesture, of course, because the label has already sunk a ton of money into it, but a gesture from the heart nonetheless.

― Johnny Fever, Tuesday, February 28, 2012 12:52 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

because American Life and Hard Candy were so great that this is a shock

I want to lock Madonna in a room with just her guitar and see what she comes up with, because she needs a serious reboot.

I'm sure that will work.

Was Ray of Light the last really "unique" thing she did? I mean obviously it too heavily drew from several sources but most of them iirc were sort of more out of the mainstream than, say, disco (re: Confessions).

I'm sure that will work.

Grasping at straws.

Was Ray of Light the last really "unique" thing she did?

"die another day"!

you guys, this new song isn't amazing by any stretch of the imagination but it's a hell of a lot better than "Give Me All Your Luvin'"

also some dude OTM even though I loved American Life

Not to get all rockisty or anything, I think part of the problem is that in Madonna's prime the radio still played standard ... songs, for lack of a better word. Things that could be played on piano or guitar. But the last few years the pop music pendulum has swung over to clubby anonymity, which is fine ... for the clubs. But on the radio there's not a lot of room for songs without a 4/4 stomp and a stupid hook. It's a shame Madonna is buying into that, but I don't see what choice she has, if she wants to get played. Ray of Light and Music were sort of a transitional hybrids allowed by the advent of "OMG dance music electronics!" (see also: Moby, Prodigy, anything with OMG electronics!). But now we're on the other side of that. Just hypothesizing, but top 40 has never seemed more ... digital disco.

you realize it's kind of silly to say music driven by MIDI synths can't be played on a piano, right

it is a shame that the woman behind "burning up" and "holiday" has been reduced to digital disco

At this point in her career, better this than jazz standards.

More the case that her most comfortable sound is now pop's default setting and instead of accentuating the differences the new single merges with everything else, which makes her sound like one of many. Stuart Price's Confessions production is "digital disco" but it doesn't sound like David Guetta and this one does.