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

too pristine.

and chose the wrong producer

I've wondered whether she could have matched or surpassed Orbit just working with Patrick Leonard and Rick Nowels; and my brain reels at the thought that Wendy Melvoin co-wrote "Candy Perfume Girl." Garbage-gy guitar pop in '98 done by Madonna might have worked.

material girl is kinda terrible - sort of dead-inside, plodding

La Isla Bonita is awesome I will FITE you horseshoe

― set the controls for the heart of the sun (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, 21 February 2013 22:12 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol otm

and I will fite you too, Scott Seward. True Blue is THEBEST.

material girl is really pretty shite. so damn ungainly and awkward. i remember hearing a thing about how awkward her costuming was in the shot where she flips her head back and is being held with her feet above her head and that description rhymes so well with how i feel about this clunky thing. its a really terrible cyndi lauper song actually. like silly in that way but without all the things that cyndi does to make up for it. its so boring the extend to which its a song that needs her mythology and it always puzzles me looking at her chronology that she was that big already.

also who wrote that pretty line upthread about holiday. how slowly it works on you, turning from optimism to something much more bittersweet. it would be so nice. what a killer. its also her best actual disco song. the end of the summer, forcing everything unfolded into a rucksack. just so much is contained in that line "if we took a holiday." and this is the other charm of her first album, the small and the big dreams intertwined, blonde ambition and scraping a living in the city.

true blue isn't the best anything! i like la isla bonita fine though. always have. true blue is just gahhhhhh. gag me with a spoon.

"true blue" is kind of a pointless pastiche yep

scott, scott. trust me, once you act out all the words in dance sign-langugae it all makes sense. IT'S SO GREAT

true blue would have been like the 8th best debbie gibson song on deb's debut.

btw how do you guys feel about the anti-climactic Madonna/Prince duet "Love Song" -- i kind of dig it so much i'm tempted to vote for it

you're a pointless pastiche xxpost >:(

even the production is just so...farty. sounds like a big fart. maybe cyndi lauper could have made it work.

I like "Love Song" too but I doubt it'll nudge its way onto my ballot.

true blue is a p pointless song but the album is great. la isla is a great song but i only realised this when somebody played me some lesbian cumbia punk band doing a cover of it.

i totally voted for "love song" it's so weird SO WEIRD i love it hooray

you're a pointless pastiche xxpost >:(

fav description of me bc it's so true

please don't get me wrong. i am definitely talking about the song and not the album.

i'm not really a fan of Lovesexy/Batman era Prince so i'm always surprised by how much i love it xp

"Love Song" sounds exactly what it is: a transcontinental collaboation (Madonna wrote one bit on synth, FedExed it to Prince, who stapled guitar and odd bits). But wow -- to me it's got the frisson. Best moment: "Embrasse-moi." "WHAT?"

Embarrass-Moi

WHAT?

my favourite LAP deep cut for so very long was "act of contrition"; as a jewish kid i was enthralled and mystified by all the strange catholic liturgical muttering, and i love the image of madonna rejected at the gates of heaven, screaming at god, expecting entrance based solely on her namesake.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT'S NOT IN THE COMPUTER?!?!

Prince on guitar too.

i could at least identify with her chutzpa tho <3

Yeah, that "I have a reservation... I *have* a *reservation*... WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT'S NOT IN THE COMPUTER???" transition is amazing and circa 8 year old me thought very clever as well.

it never struck me until recently how joyous and unpretentious those singles from the first album are. a large part of Madonna's success obviously has to do with how adaptive she has been and how readily she embraces change, but if i look at her career as a whole, it kind of sits uncomfortably with me; the uncompromising desire to keep her brand relevant and up to the minute every step of the way strikes me as symptomatic of an overall confused identity rather than a depth and variety that i can tap into for endless spoils. i think at some point i was intrigued by Madonna because there were so many sides of her, but only because of that, and not because i ever thought the songs consistently held up. the pure expressions of the very early stuff are thankfully there for me to enjoy, but her departures and evolution from that point leave me cold basically, save a few excellent singles along the way. look forward to voting in this, regardless :)

i suppose it's partly because we're living in a pop world she helped create, but it's weird to even think of Madonna as being someone who chases trends and covets relevance, when compared to the way so many contemporary stars now jump bandwagons constantly Madonna seems pretty dignified and self-possessed

even something like Hard Candy, while i can knock who she chose to work with and when and the underwhelming results, it seems like she did it on her terms, because she felt like it

Until the last six or seven years, I never thought of Madonna chasing trends. Like Bowie, she spotted something cool burbling just enough under the surface to explore it, or was prescient enough to see where pop would go for a couple years.

The closest approximation to a Low in her career is Erotica.

well, it's true that the climate was different back then and she was chasing or establishing trends over a longer and more gradual span of time. these days, i think it's almost aggressive; there is a general sense among popular artists that to stay relevant they need to change their image and approach or embrace variety in sounds from single to single, from public appearance to public appearance. responses are very impulsive and short-term in this day and age with the public more likely to be demanding and dictate terms than sit back and observe a phenomenon unfold at its own speed.

never listened to Hard Candy, but assumed that it may well have been a belated response to what was current in the charts at the time. if it was just something she genuinely felt like doing, power to her. gotta respect that.

"true blue" would've been fourth best on out of the blue

Debbie Gibson would not have done awesome dance sign-language in the video and she would have worn that stupid hat and she would have been all earnest and made it SUCK.

She has NOT sailed a thousand ships or kissed a thousand lips.

In the end, Madonna wanted the middle of the song to have a flamenco guitar strumming big-time."

oh so M was entirely responsible for the greatest pop moment in my lifetime, good 2 know

(tim and prolego otm)

haha lex otm. i remember reading shep telling that story a few years ago (only in that telling he says he argued strongly against the guitar) and thinking 'thank you madonna'. and then when the strings come back in, o man.

sang 'borderline' at karaoke tonight

Huge fan of "Borderline." It starts out sounding the epitome of piffle, but it builds to much more.

"Did You Do It" seems the obv choice for the most dispensable song on Erotica.

"Borderline" is a great, great song that only suffers because of its proximity to a bunch of greater songs

^^^obviously wrong

The coolest thing abt this poll may be that I genuinely have no idea ow the results are gonna go.

from the v first note borderline is obviously just from another planet

I can only presume "Like a Prayer" wins, but yeah, I could just as easily see it outside the top 5.

xp: That is true of every single from her first album

yea pretty much

my boyfriend was in a cab the other night and thought a cathedral was pretty, so he says to the cabby, that's a pretty church. and the cabby goes, you think that's a pretty church? and blasts Like a Prayer thru the streets of Brooklyn

out of everything on her first album "everybody" is mad underrated - that bassline! o_O

I think the underrated song on her first album is "Physical Attraction"