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

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.

They're good posts.

My two or the other thousand or so?

You've taken the thread to a new level

But my mediocre posts dragged the thread back to its original level.

Heh. I'm sprinting through everything on spotify - working my way through True Blue at the moment. To be honest, it all sounds very dated at the moment and is giving me flashbacks of youth club discos.

which sounds awesome!

It's August 1990. I'm 17. I'm on holiday with my family staying in a cottage at a farm in some Welsh village somewhere in the middle of nowhere. We go to a pub one lunchtime so me and my brother can have a game of pool. There are about ten people in there, all well-known to the publican. We don't exactly blend in. After ten minutes or so of silence (broken by the clack of pool balls) my dad decides to liven things up by putting some money in the jukebox. He attempts to get down with the kids with his selections. To my horror, as I go to take a shot, I realise what he has picked. "You better like hanky panky...nothing like a good spanky...my bottom hurts just thinking about it." A world of embarrassment.

i finished my deep cuts playlist, spotify link within: http://narrowcast.blogspot.com/2013/02/deep-album-cuts-vol-3-madonna.html

Great list though the choice of "Don't Stop" is weird esp. when I realized the "Forbidden Love" you'd chosen was the other one.

haha somehow i never clocked that she has completely different songs on different albums called "Forbidden Love," wtf Madonna

but yeah i kinda split the difference between conventional wisdom/this thread's emerging favorites and my own personal gut reactions

I actually like "Don't Stop" more than most but the second half of that album is deep cut central.

Love that story xps, though iirc if you're 17 your dad could lead off with Groove Is In The Heart and you'd still want to curl up and die

yeah apparently madonna forbids herself a lot of love

i can relate tbh

"Can't Stop"!!!

"The Look of Love" was the discovery. I think I'd heard it just once (never released as an American single). It's the last of the Leonardified "La Isla Bonita"-"True Blue" sound but with a poignant melody. Not a classic, but worth checking out.

haha somehow i never clocked that she has completely different songs on different albums called "Forbidden Love," wtf Madonna

i think this is literally the most annoying thing madonna has ever done

like DOES SHE NOT CONSIDER MY METADATA WHEN NAMING HER SONGS WTF

It turns out loads of artists do that! These polls are an education.

WHY would you do that? why why whyyyyyyyyyyyy

things like that make me wonder if Madonna is even a 'singles artist' to herself -- like anything that wasn't big enough to stay in her stage show past the initial album cycle, could she hum it now?