I'm burning up, burning up for your VOTES! — ILM Artist Poll #31 is Madonna

imagine Shock Value as a Timbo/Madonna collaboration

Imagine all the people refusing to buy Madonna's album.

Imagine there's no heaven

Madonna's biggest problem of the last decade plus is working with producers who aren't songwriters. There's a grace to even the most anonymous songs on Bedtime Stories which is absent from her post ray of light work. Even the great material on Confessions is more like monolithic groove plus earworm hook rather than decent song.

Yeah I was thinking the same thing. It's all hat and no cowboy, to coin one of my favorite phrases :)

which is what drives me crazy. she could work with ANYBODY. for real. anybody. if she pays them enough. makes no sense. the woman makes no sense.

money can't buy cowboy

max martin madonna album would slay all foes.

has anyone talked about EVITA yet?
what about the man who plays guitar in the video for "la isla bonita"?

but madonna's ability to be truly great does not correlate to the established greatness of her collaborators.

in the past i think this was true. i don't know about now. she could use a boost of someone else's greatness.

yes i just called max martin great.

Not established greatness, no. But I think her greatness collaborators had a songwriting sensibility even if they were formally producers - undeniably, people like shep coaxed certain songs out of her. These days there's much more of a sense of the song and the arrangement being prepared in separate rooms.

Certain KINDS of song, I mean.

unrelated: When I was a kid I thought when she sang 'I'm gonna keep my baby' in Papa Don't Preach that she was singing about her boyfriend, ie I love u baby etc. Did not catch on for years that ohhhhhhhhh she's pregnant, lol

I recall being a fan of solo William orbit in another life. Strange cargo, was that him? some connection to eno, Gabriel, Lanois...

madonna as delilah to her producers' samson is a known pattern.

i used to wonder if madonna sat at a desk doing her bookkeeping while her co-writers and producers did all the writing and producing and music-making. and then maybe she poisoned their orange juice after she was done with then. but then i listened to some of the other stuff her collaborators had done, like, for example, patrick leonard's own band, toy matinee. i have no memory whatsoever of that album, which is the nicest thing i can say about it. then it occurred to me that, through all the years and all the singles and all the styles and all the beats, the one consistent name in the credits of all those amazing songs was, duh, madonna. i don't think she her producers' downfall. i think she was the very thing that made them great, and i think it may well have been they, and not she, who benefited most from the collaboration.

which is another way of saying that this...

but madonna's ability to be truly great does not correlate to the established greatness of her collaborators.

...is extremely otm.

i just want to lock her in a room with patrick leonard again for several months

i think though that she's just exhausted everything she's had to say - she has really gone through just about every topic imaginable for a pop star - there's nothing left for her to do now but coast on her laurels and get the $$$. there's nothing for her to express anymore

fact checking cuz completely otm

madonna's biggest flaw right now, even more than the perfunctory relationship between song and arrangement, is her completely charmless delivery - it's like her voice has ossified into this stone instrument incapable of bringing ANY song to life

Yeah my point was that I think previously producers pushed her or helped her to push herself to be great. But I sounds like these days even the big name people she works with (when she does) are kept in their box.

like, even on mdna, several times i felt like - ok this isn't a great song but it could be totally fine if it was sung breezily or insouciantly or just winningly. madonna just thuds didactically these days.

(this is actually true of confessions as well, but to his great credit, JLC masks it with the unstoppable riffs)

Also led otm. It makes me miss the opera period!

Lex. iPhone probs.

madonna's biggest flaw right now, even more than the perfunctory relationship between song and arrangement, is her completely charmless delivery - it's like her voice has ossified into this stone instrument incapable of bringing ANY song to life

which is even more tragic considering her early voice did the exact opposite - i can't think of many vocals ever that sound more hungry or alive than on "open your heart" or "burning up" or "into the groove".

even on ROL through American Life, her voice obviously changed, became less hungry and more precise, but even then she could bend it to what the material demanded (or craft material that suited it)

its all that working out.

Yeah. I'm listening to 'White Heat' / True Blue right now and her voice is so vibrant, she was ~emoting~ all over the place back in the day

Yeah my point was that I think previously producers pushed her or helped her to push herself to be great. But I sounds like these days even the big name people she works with (when she does) are kept in their box.

this was rather famously not the case when she worked with Pharrell

I think the real problem is that her songs tend to really, really suck nowadays

i think madonna's voice is seriously one of her most underrated qualities, not just how truly great an instrument it was in the 80s but how chameleonic in the 90s it proved to be - she switches up her vox on every one of her 90s albums to fit the style she was working in - the powerful brassiness on i'm breathless, the ragged slightly claustrophobic half-spoken nasalness on erotica, the mature sultiness on bedtime stories, the didatic aloofness of ray of light (even if i dislike her opera lessons i can't imagine this album being sung any other way).

*sultriness

madonna's biggest flaw right now, even more than the perfunctory relationship between song and arrangement, is her completely charmless delivery - it's like her voice has ossified into this stone instrument incapable of bringing ANY song to life
--lex pretend

tho lol forever at her exchange in dick tracy

'look everyone, Dick made a record!
...what you can't sing?
- well neither can I, and look how far I've gotten...'

A few points:

(1) When she dies -- it won't happen when she's alive -- we'll finally read The Definitive Stories of M's compositional habits. Does she bring demos to the studio these days? Does she work from scratch? Does she play guitar on those demos? One of the early Paul Zollo books of songwriter interviews provides one of the few clues; it dates from 1989 and described her methods with Patrick Leonard, which consisted of working from his finished demos or she occasionally bringing a melodic idea to which he'd attach chords and a rhythm.

(2) She def thrives with songwriter-producers like Patrick Leonard, Stephen Bray, and Rick Nowels. But Shep Pettibone isn't really a songwriter -- he was mostly a remixer in '92! Somehow she formed songs around what he gave her.

(3) I actually admire her picking the likes of Mirwais. French house/techno background? Sure! Why not? The results were mixed but no one can accuse her of not keeping an ear open.

I think she and JLC probably had another great batch of songs in them, but she hasn't really repeated herself since Erotica and it just wasn't going to happen. Unfortunately, the result of that was Hard Candy.

I guess Hard Candy was the first time she used producers (Timbaland/The Neptunes) that everybody had used before her. Like she was desperate to have a hit again in the US, although the rest of the world still treated her like The Queen.
I'm so glad she hasn't gone to Max or Luke or RedOne yet. That would be the worse. She might do it on her next album though...

well, "Hung Up" was a hit -- just not MASSIVE.

speaking of "Hung Up," there's an example of working with songwriters, i.e. Benny-Bjorn. No wonder it was massive.

Alfred otm re the whole when she dies thing. I wonder about her creative process!

I bet it's not that different than that of other pop singer/producer collaborations. Producer brings songs/beats/whatever, Madonna picks the ones she likes best, and then they develop them together. Don't know if she writes her own melodies or not, though clearly she writes all or most of her own lyrics. Are there any songs of hers credited exclusively to "Madonna?"

By the way, at the drug store today the old woman in front of me was named Madonna!

a chunk of the Madonna songs ("Lucky Star" and "Burning Up" fer instance) plus one on "Like a Virgin" plus "Sidewalk Talk" and "Gambler" are solo credits.

Skimming the early stuff at least, it looks like a mix of stuff where Madonna is either not credited at all, or credited as a co-writer. But a song like "Lucky Star" is a solo Madonna credit, which begs the question: does that mean she wrote the song herself? I wonder if she writes like Stevie Nicks, who supposedly brings in these not quite song-like sketches which are in turn polished into songs. But I'm not sure Madonna can write on an instrument, though maybe she can!

Nicks has always written on piano despite not knowing chords.

Madonna admitted in the Zollo interview from '89 that she wrote on keyboards and guitar. Like I said upthread, I like how she explained the disappearance of solo songwriting credits with "I got lazy." It demystifies the whole thing.

Wasn't it a big deal when she was taking guitar lessons c. 2004 or whatever, when she would play the (very simple) Burning Up chords live on her black Les Paul? I'm not sure she's sophisticated enough of a musician to come up with a lot of the heavy lifting stuff. Phil Collins is a better example of a non-keyboardist plinking his way to hits, but his solo stuff is a lot more remedial than hers.

Looks like there aren't any other solo "Madonna" credits after the first few albums, though she obviously worked closely with a lot of her producers/writers, esp. Leonard, who I forgot co-wrote a hunk of "Ray of Light."

maybe she needs to get UNlazy again

well, "Hung Up" was a hit -- just not MASSIVE.

I think it was a Top 10 hit due to sales, not radio play. "Hung Up" went to #1 everywhere but only to #7 in the States. "Sorry" only made it to #58 on Billboard whereas it went Top 5 pretty much everywhere else. Confessions was HUGE around the world. The album sold 12 million, compared to American Life's 4 million.

I really think she was trying to break the US again with Hard Candy, and she did go higher with "4 Minutes" (#3), but the album ended selling much less than the previous one.

I think it's fascinating how these big budget hit records are made. That New Yorker profile or whatever was very telling, with the producer guys having a stack of songs, and discarding all but what they consider the hits. You can see that in the Jay-Z doc, too, where he goes through a trove of beats with Timbaland until he hits "Dirt Off Your Shoulders" and lights up. Timbaland, iirc, like a lot of producers, prices his beats differently based on how big he thinks they might get.

Madonna is a little different, I guess, since she often works in close collaboration with one guy, but I bet someone like JLC came to his audition prepared with a pile of demos and ideas.

like plax said a couple hours ago, I don't doubt JLC and Shep do, but they're remixers-producers instead of songwriters, so I give Madonna a lion's share of the credit for giving these songs melody and hooks.

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

Confessions Tour is on youtube. I've never gotten around to watching it before, but it's amazing so far.