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

yeah "paradise (not for me)" is the one deep cut I return to, i like how she flits between being an old woman, a robot and singing in French, pretty rad.

music was seriously overrated by critics at the time (i guess due to a hold over of good will from ROL) - it's her highest placing album on pazz & jop!

Christgau was weird about Madge. He loved Erotica but gave A's to I'm Breathless and Music. To wit:

Anybody who denies that Madonna made great singles in the '80s is a boob. Run all together on The Immaculate Collection, they constitute the greatest album of her mortal life. But except for the debut, the albums per se from that period strove for schlock when they didn't stoop to filler. In the early '90s, she essayed great longforms--an ambition that presupposes good songs while cultivating consistency and flow. Then she got scared and discovered God, two not unrelated experiences that rendered her great singles and good songs more middlebrow. So rejoice that from Vocoder to cowgirl suit, she's got her sass back. Pretending to be cheap, she sometimes--as on my favorite moment, the processed-munchkin hook of the perfectly entitled "Nobody's Perfect"--really is cheap, which is essential to the illusion. All the songs are good, all chintzy. Which combo provides just the right consistency and flow.

Listening to the Something To Remember comp now. "You'll See" def sounds like she's auditioning for Broadway.

'you'll see' is pretty good but i mostly remember for its video being the sequel to the video for 'take a bow' right?

if i vote, #1 is borderline. such a great track. not sure where i'd rank the others, but probs 'take a bow', 'erotica', 'secret', 'bedtime stories', 'ray of light', 'beautiful stranger' would be up there. i'm really not much into her like a virgin/prayer run in the '80s, some singles aside. i think she really re-emerged w/erotica.

i really feel like virtually everything she released in the'90s was pretty unassailable (from what i know, i'm breathless isn't one i've heard.

)

I've got I'm Breathless on just now. I quite like it, the staginess of it and all, but it's a strange listen; more like a cast recording than a single artist, which speaks to some decent adaptability (assuming it's her on all tracks, a lot don't really sound like her at all).

Christgau largely otm about her earlier albums being largely shlock and filler btw - the debut is indeed excellent, but you can tell where the hard work's gone on the subsequent records. I guess this is as much about the filler's being overshadowed by some genuinely stunning pieces, as opposed to the filler being rubbish - most of it is perfectly serviceable - but it's hard to give much time to e.g. 'Pretender' when you've just had 'Material Girl' fill your ears.

The thing for me that's hard to get over is, I think, that for a dozen or so singles she's operating on such a high plane that even fantastic songs (e.g. 'Borderline') can lack that touch of genius, and pale in comparison. Whereas for most other artists it'd be a no.1 contender.

"He's a Man" works, I think.

Yup, that's the standout

I think that's pretty standard for a lot of acts with great singles. I mean, I love the first Clash album, but some of its tracks ("White Man," "Complete Control," "I Fought the Law") just jump out at you.

lol wth is Vogue doing on here

Just occurred to me that AC/DC and Rush are two hard rock acts with a similar dismissal to acceptance to praise career arc. And in the case of the former, AC/DC did it without changing a lick.

well...if you don't count replacing their lead singer as 'not changing a lick'

In this case, I'll let it slide. But certainly it wasn't changing singers that earned them cred. If anything, they got belated begrudging respect despite the switch!

lol wth is Vogue doing on here

I don't know why I love "I'm Breathless" so much and have listened to it as much as other favourites "Bedtime Stories" and "Erotica", maybe it was the time? but I love forever the grab-bagginess of that album, it's disarming and consistently inspired, there's never any Madge-On-Autopilot moments or the feeling that she's Building Her Career, just "Madonna @ Work" and it works for me

Well now I feel like an idjit for being 15 years late to Ray of Light. I like this a lot.

Just occurred to me listening to I'm Breathless this morning that its a definite precursor to Xtina's (vastly inferior) Back to Basics.

(then again, Xtina is a vastly inferior Madonna)

i was thinking I'm Breathless is more like Outkast's Idlewild

did Under The Cherry Moon take place in the '30s too? superstar recording acts sure do love doing movies about the '30s with companion soundtrack albums.

breathless is an interesting curio but not much more, comparison for me is batman soundtrack - artist gets to indulge in some quick tossed off digressions, awkward duets, torch ballads, and playing in someone else's backyard (sondheim for madonna, todd terry for prince). both albums more successful than artist could've imagined and spawn #1 hits but by and large are written out of artists' histories.

1986; we were quite a couple.

http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t427/sayhey1/madonna_zpsf3b668b5.jpg

xp i disagree insofar as i think it reveals the cabaret side of madonna that is easy to forget yet seems fully natural on her. and sometimes i just really wanna hear i'm going bananas.

like that was part of her training.

clemenza that is great

you two were meant to be

strange she never actually did broadway outside of speed-the-plow. also a little lol (if understandable - 2, 3 songs vs an entire musical) that she didn't take voice lessons to sing sondheim but she did to sing fucking andrew lloyd webber. thank god she didn't mind you.

Thanks, VG. The photographer went on to better things; he shot Obama last month.

nice!

he shot Obama last month.

Weird way to phrase that.

lol

Morbs will be happy

Love how "Deeper & Deeper" uses the repetitive engine of house to create a 'room with many doors' - the way it bursts almost directly into the chorus, then with percussive verses and bridges that are if anything catchier then the choruses, then two amazing back to back middle eights, with the stabbing string riffs in the second, then the cliff, then the spanish guitar section, then a bridge and chorus again to remind you how good they are, then that rising seems-like-an-outro, then the Vogue quote, then a second totally new outro ending on an out of nowhere "I can't keep from falling in love with you / there's nothing better that I'd like to do..." - it's as if the song is a vortex just sucking in more and more ideas as it advances remorselessly.

You're good at this

Yeah, start prepping yr Erotica book now, please.

Agree with the comparison of I'm Breathless to Batman re: where they sit in the artists' respective catalogues and how they're now largely written off as strange detours that happened to spawn hits (Vogue feels tacked onto IB, but it is thematically consistent with the rest of the record, what with its name checking of golden age movie stars). My own perspective is skewed by the fact that I was at the exact age when Batman and then Dick Tracy came out for them to be huge deals to me, and while I already owned (or in the case of Prince, was well aware of) music by each artist, the soundtracks became, at least for a few years, maybe THE definitive part of their catalogues for me.

Crucial difference: Batman momentarily stopped Prince's sales slide (which restarted with Graffiti Bridge before D&P became his best seller since ATWIAD) while I'm Breathless was released at Madonna's peak.

very true, also (related) breathless a hit pretty solely off of madonna while batman obv had a lot of kids buying it cuz it was another piece of merchandise. also fwiw, w/ the exception of 'vogue' everything on batman smokes everything on breathless (well, i'm not sure what when between 'arms of orion' and 'now i'm following you').

would also read tim erotica book

Love how "Deeper & Deeper" uses the repetitive engine of house to create a 'room with many doors' - the way it bursts almost directly into the chorus, then with percussive verses and bridges that are if anything catchier then the choruses, then two amazing back to back middle eights, with the stabbing string riffs in the second, then the cliff, then the spanish guitar section, then a bridge and chorus again to remind you how good they are, then that rising seems-like-an-outro, then the Vogue quote, then a second totally new outro ending on an out of nowhere "I can't keep from falling in love with you / there's nothing better that I'd like to do..." - it's as if the song is a vortex just sucking in more and more ideas as it advances remorselessly.

― Tim F, dimanche 24 février 2013 07:34 (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's amazing. Should've been the first single off Erotica. It would've gone to #1 easily and today would be recognized for the classic that it is. I also think it would've prevented all that backlash. It might have even ended the Bosnian war.

I would love to hear a Prince version of "Hanky Panky."

best things to come from i'm breathless: 1) vogue

2) this performance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s15GTGdUuvM

vogue recontextualisation as d&d unstoppably crests is probably one of the triumphant moments in music period

"there's nothing better that i'd like to do" is such an interesting bravura finish though - after a whole epic trapped on the dramatic coils of longing, that seems to have already reached emancipatory release and resolution, then comes that one final line hitting this strange (and strangely satisfying) queasy lighter note of, idk.... preference? but commingled with a sudden resignation almost. sorta placid yet stinging

it fascinates me that two non-gays (Bernard Sumner and Madonna) helped created two of the best realizations of the AIDS-era Dance of Death ("Perfect Kiss" and "Deeper and Deeper").

singing the vogue line at the end of deeper & deeper is amazing because like what else can there be better to do immediately after coming out than going to a club getting drunk and vogueing it up. like nothing.

3) http://www.wotyougot.com/pictures/madonna-michael-jackson-people-magazine-friendship-twenty-years-ago.jpeg

she's RAUNCH-CHAAYYY
she's made of WOOD

Oh yes - just running through Erotica now; Deeper & Deeper is absolutely epic in this proper context, one of those pieces like A Day In The Life that captures and concludes everything that's gone before, and then takes it somewhere strange & new.

Funny having it at track 4, it's such an obvious closer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-JPjmUOiRQ

i guess i should save tim the trouble of mentioning this by-the-by

Just discovered this poll and there's no way on earth I'm going to read the >1,000 posts already on here. I'm going to try to fire off a ballot in the next half hour. I don't think I've bought anything by Madonna since I was 12 (I got the Like A Virgin album and Get Into The Groove) so my ballots going to be extremely singles heavy.

Just remembered I bought La Isla Bonita too.