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

the ROL wiki is so stupid, it has big pictures of britney and xtina with the caption

Ray of Light has been hailed as bold and refreshing in contemporary music of the late 1990s, which was dominated by teen pop artists such as Britney Spears (left) and Christina Aguilera (right).

yes, the album was a breath of fresh air compared to two artists that nobody heard of until roughly a year after the album came out!

Yeah, Madonna's stiffest competition on the pop front at that point was Third Eye Blind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PgY5GVSUMk

she sure showed xtina what's what

well xina had that hit from the mulan soundtrack which was that summer and britney blew up on the box late summer so it's not inconceivable that 'the power of goodbye' would've been heard after that mulan song on some ac station or the vid would've popped up after 'baby one more time' on the box, but yeah that context is misleading at best.

ray of light really has become the gold-standard for grown-up mature ~deep~ records in the pop world tho, i've heard so many times fans of other female pop artists (including of britney & xtina) hoping for their ray of light.

the pop context rol entered was 'the boy is mine' and 'are you that somebody' and 'torn'. i'm not sure what on the radio in 98 would've been an obv counterpart to 'frozen'. well, other than maybe this, which was still getting played a ton on radio in early 98:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eBZqmL8ehg

also wondering about the extent she turned to late sixties trippy rock ('ray of light' obv pretty much a curtiss maldoon cover, 'beautiful stranger' owing some debt to love - was her kabbalah instructor a hippie? her au pair?), then her guitar fetish for a little while after that. obv impossible w/ her temperament and her responsibilities to her label/marketplace but a beardo disco album from madonna might've been an interesting way for her to approach her fifties.

I meant to vote for "Hung Up" and it completely slipped my mind; if you notice this post, JF, you can add that to my ballot in place of "Give Me All Your Luvin'" (and if you don't, no big deal).

― clemenza, Wednesday, 20 February 2013 23:37 (Yesterday) Permalink

JF it might be more convenient/efficient to build in a script that turns all votes for "Give Me All Your Lovin" into votes for "Hung Up".

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.

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 20 February 2013 23:25 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wait what did i say???

i guess i just completely ignored the 'her most personal' album nonsense at the time (it was her first post-baby album so ppl were chomping at the bit for new, mature, no more dita madonna), she'd been plenty personal before - 'til death do us part', 'human nature', 'oh father', 'promise to try', half of true blue being having the subtext of 'omg i'm so in love w/ sean guys'.

Britney and Xtina kinda brought about the end of the long era were Madonna had no real competition as far as white female pop stars, which is easy forget now in the deluge of Gaga/Katy/etc. i guess early on Cyndi Lauper and a few others were contemporaries, don't even know who you could say for most of the 90s -- Shania? Celine? xpost

xpost not to mention:

"Bad Girl", "In This Life", "Secret Garden", "Love Tried To Welcome Me".

and "Into The Groove."

wait what did i say???

― plax (ico), Wednesday, February 20, 2013

sorry! It was fact checking cuz (whom I needed here lol)

I can't imagine anything more personal than writing a song about a hot Puerto Rican boy. Not even the Pet Shop Boys pulled that of.

*off

it all seemed like

yeah there were white chicks in a similar vein but madonna had established herself as icon megastar by virgin, her peers then prince, bruce, and michael, someone like stacey q as a challenge would've been laughable. the best i can come up w/ is janet (and that's only cuz i was thinking about starting a velvet rope vs erotica poll), and that's still a pretty poor 'rival', not even as true as prince/bruce, nevermind beatles/stones.

I think moreover the hype around Ray Of Light was indicative of a very narrow and IMO shallow conception of the "personal" (not Madonna's, but that of the critical reception).

e.g. per prolego's comments upthread I find Erotica to offer up a very consistent and compelling persona that feels totally true of a certain part of Madonna's life up to and at that time - this was Madonna's actual "confessions on a dancefloor" album, capturing pretty truthfully for me the pleasures and pitfalls of hedonism (this is something that became clearer to me later on even though my initial infatuation with the album was at about age 15).

One of the most inadvertently sad lyrics in Madonna's work is this line in "Thief Of Hearts": "Here she comes, Little Miss Thinks-she-can-have-his-child, well anybody can do it..."

i wonder if the looking for mr goodbar theme for the 'bad girl' vid was madonna's idea or fincher's or just the obv way to go w/ that song.

the best i can come up w/ is janet

I don't like Mariah Carey nearly as much, but my guess is she had a better chart run through most of the '90s (if you mean commercial rival).

I seem to remember a derisive comment or two about Mariah Carey from Madonna at the time, as if she a) was aware of a chart rivalry of sorts, and b) considered the competition vastly inferior.

yeah i can't imagine either ever regarding the other at the 'competition' or considering the other when making any decisions.

it's part of Madonna's savvy that in 1994 she saw the future in R%B-influenced balladry, of which Carey was its main practioner.

yeah madonna said she'd kill herself if she was mariah or something and mariah zinged her back

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mvgB44H1eA

A Spin interview from '96:

I was talking to k.d. lang about it last night. I don’t want to get into slagging off other artists, but we were talking about her record versus someone like Mariah Carey’s — and I think she’s a very talented singer — but we have to realize that the same country that acquitted O.J. is the same country that makes a complete piece of shit movie No.1, that buys Marian Carey records. It’s this homogeneity. But it’s got nothing to do with art.

Just rambling on in an interview, I know, and rather pompously, too--she sounds like Peter Bogdanovich. But I don't think she was much of a fan. (Not that she'd ever actually slag Mariah Carey, no chance...)

By the way, I was talking to k.d. lang about this just the other night.

That era where every female artist working in the field of popular music claimed to have a crush on k.d. lang.

lol those gals

That Mariah clip is an amazingly dry putdown--Randy Newman couldn't do any better.

is that the Bob Guccione cover story?

The same country that acquitted OJ turned flannel into fashion.

oddly enough, I never considered Madonna, Bruce, Michael, and prince peers. I chalk that up to a rare confluence of uniquely all powerful performers and their overlapping Imperial phases.

(xpost) Yes--here's the full thing:

http://allaboutmadonna.com/madonna-interviews-articles/spin-january-1996

great thread! no, really, i mean it. i've been reading it.

all those guys were kinda lumped together back then. pop-culturally. people would dress up like michael and bruce and madonna and prince for halloween.

they were totally lumped in together. but it was like each 1 had his or her own planet to devour.

I wonder if four friends ever dressed up like Madonna, Michael, Bruce, and Prince. Best Trick or Treat Posse ever, since Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman, and mummy.

But shared fans xpost

I wonder if four friends ever dressed up like Madonna, Michael, Bruce, and Prince

when this happens they're referred to as "fanta girls" fyi

Boy George, Cyndi Lauper, Annie Lennox, George Micheal, Tina Turner, Robert Smith, Billy Idol. The 80's pop scene were the best for Halloween costumes!

One of the most inadvertently sad lyrics in Madonna's work is this line in "Thief Of Hearts": "Here she comes, Little Miss Thinks-she-can-have-his-child, well anybody can do it..."

yeah absolutely, especially once taken with "secret garden". iirc she was chasing after antonio banderas hard in 1991 because she really wanted to have his child (hear-say at the time), but she got rebuffed, something i doubt she was that used to.

also thought i'd drag up a really great post from the ilx archives on the topic of erotica being a deeply personal work which I think is OTM:

Yes, Erotica can be called her ultimate moment in self-objectification or depersonalization, what she was only attempting to do in Sex, but in MY opinion, the key to the album is that you can take it both ways: it may be her most impersonal album, but strangely also her most personal as well. Before this you could always differentiate between two Madonnas: the character she was playing, and the "real person" that she was, or rather, wanted you to believe that she was, at the moment - her "personaizing moments," you could call them: "Promise to Try" = I'm a sad little girl whose mom died, "Keep it Together," = I'm the hard-working yet loving sister, "Til Death Do us Part," = Sean Penn is a shithead abuser who I lurved etc. Yet now, evreything is conflated since there are two many levels of self-consciousness, so many, in fact, that the revalations are almost unconscious: she is revealing glimpses into her personality almost in spite of herself, unintentionally as she keeps trying to chug along the album's Grand Theme. "Dita," the alter-ego she invented for herself during the Sex era, keeps revealing things Madonna wouldn't: in "Secret Garden," she almost nonchalantly mentions how she wants to be pregnant, in "In This Life" she briefly gushes forth about her dead mentor, who was taken from her by AIDS, on "Words," she lashes out at the media lying about her.

And most tellingly, in "Bad Girl" she lays bare, if only for a second, one of her true selves: the cold, selfish, romantic, lustful, unfaithful, self-loathing, well-meaning bitch who wants to have it both ways and knows its wrong, a very, very lonely person at the end of it all. It remains her most honest moment. Ever - not that authenticity is all that anyway, mind you, especially when discussing her - but for a woman who prides herself on inventing innumerable masks, it is quite significant to expose herself as a wounded, helpless demoness in an unconscious matter (as opposed to the "this is the real Me" trollop of Truth or Dare which was so strikingly staged). I still think "Bad Girl" is her best-written song, okay, ballad, topping "Live to Tell," but its very close.

― Vic (Vic), Tuesday, February 4, 2003 8:40 AM (10 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I dressed up as a guy from the Beat Farmers one year, but no one really noticed.

My Erotica essay for Stylus, published years ago: http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/on_second_thought/madonna-erotica.htm

Vic on "Bad Girl" is OTM but I would add or emphasise that she exposes herself by "putting on a mask", in a weird reversal of something like "Till Death To Us Part" where she creates distance from her real life by turning it into pop (brilliantly).

i.e. "Bad Girl" is more revealing because formally she's playing the part of a third person.

oh yeah -- Erotica is her most Bowiesque in the give-me-mask-and-I'll-tell-you-the-truth way.

^^^^^^

i think i've seen Truth Or Dare more times than any other movie.

my all time fave

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bg-hw-_QeE

another fave; the 'unmixed' DJ issue version of Into The Groove from You Can Dance

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

I'm a big fan of "Get Together" too.

I wonder had Madonna continued in the path of using relatively unknown electronic producers who she could have used after Orbit, Mirwais, and JLC ?
I would've liked to hear what she could have done with Hercules & Love Affair, Azari & III, or even Lindstrøm.

"Get Together" and "Jump" will probably end up knocking "Hung Up" off my ballot.

also her only AOTY grammy nom.

I'm not a huge fan of Like a Prayer on the whole, but ... um, this line-up:

Nick of Time, Bonnie Raitt
The End of the Innocence, Don Henley
The Raw and the Cooked, Fine Young Cannibals
Full Moon Fever, Tom Petty
Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1, Traveling Wilburys