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

og "hollywood" is really bad BUT the jacques lu cont remix is total silk purse/sow's ear shit (as was his thing back then). basically gets rid of her lame sarcasm and turns it into a 4 real ode to glamour. which is kind of what he does across confessions too. i wonder if she noticed.

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

also "me against the music" is alright, a solid enough 7/10 effort that got slated because everyone was expecting 10/10

"iirc she said her fav single is "live to tell"

madonnaotm!

prolego, thanks so much for finding the Justin gif (I couldn't)

best thing about live to tell is the sheer amount of reverb on everything

it's so hazy it's like the truth, never clear

so I whipped out MDNA, my first listen since last April. Should I?

nothing from it is going on my ballot, but i enjoyed it more than i expected to.

i'm pretty sure it would take sunday night blues to a whole new level Alfred

I'd sooner prescribe deep root cleaning

"Some Girls" doesn't sound as third-rate as I remember, especially the chorus.

should we call 911 just in case

i feel like yes

*dialing*

is that "darling" in madonna's fake british accent?

haha

i don't think a song has ever gone down so badly in a club as "give me all your luvin'". thankfully i only had to go through that severe case of public second hand embarrassment twice.

and that song STILL topped the Hot Dance Club Songs chart (her 41st song to do so)

would love to finally read a piece explaining the actual methodology behind the dance chart - obv doesn't match ra or groove which fair enough even if their sample sources were primarily non-american but it doesn't even seem to match up predictably w/ yr standard squares dance clubs or gay dance clubs or hipster or black or latin or linedancing or anything, i not only have a hard time what a typical club that plays something strongly resembling the dance chart would be i have a hard time identifying like five types of club that could blend together to yield those results.

there's something kinda lol but mostly sad about her having this really well-timed new album when America is finally caring about the EDM stuff that's been her focus for ages, and she does the record with that guy who the US only knows for that foofy "I just want to say hello" song and the whole thing sinks like a stone.

It is compiled by Billboard exclusively from playlists submitted by nightclub disc jockeys who must apply and meet certain criteria to become "Billboard-reporting DJs."

yeah the inclusions/exclusions on that list of DJs would probably be pretty suspect if it were public

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

― r|t|c, Sunday, 24 February 2013 2:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, this really chimes in with the queer subtext for me, the way the song navigates this course of submission as both defiance and memory of past instruction (mama's wisdom versus father's restrictions), then kind of penetrates its own narrative into a place of agency ("this feeling inside / I can't explain / but my love is alive / and I'm NEVER GONNA HIDE IT AGAIN!" - later echoed in "never gonna hide it again! / never gonna have to pretend!") - and then on the other side of this realisation Madonna is basically owning that she's going there just b/c she wants to.

yeah, i'm aware of the anti-madonna queer activist argument, roughly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiXS-snOA6I
but (as a straight man, w/ admittedly nothing invested in gay culture beyond being a consumer, and a moderate, integrationist, populist impulse generally) i do think she deserves a great deal of credit for being so visibly pro-gay at a time when that was a fairly radical stance (more political than any gestures by bruce or prince or michael at the time and much more in yr face and likely to offend her base than anything by u2), esp coming immediately after the reagan era when homophobia was the default position in so much of the culture (esp in politics, and not just on the right).

There's probably something to that. Prince was perhaps more quietly radical, but Madonna was more visible.

so I whipped out MDNA, my first listen since last April. Should I?

I've made a point of relistening to all of the records (plus Immaculate Collection and Something to Remember) before submitting my ballot, but I skipped this one. Still fresh enough in my mind for me to know that it sucks (unlike American Life, where I apparently had to be reminded that it sucks)

I always forget how fantastic the lp version of "What It Feels Like..." is, because the video remix is the version I always think of first. Damn, though! It's REALLY strong in its original form.

― Johnny Fever, Saturday, February 23, 2013 2:34 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

before this post i didn't know the video version wasn't the same as the album version, and wow the album version is a million times better, definitely going on my ballot

BTW, this poll and the forthcoming disco one are postponing my annual "I quit ILX" feign.

we conspired behind the scenes to make it thus :)

so MDNA isn't terrible. "I Don't Give A," "Some Girls," "Gang Bang" work, the first two singles don't, and "Falling Free" is well sung and has a pretty arrangement.

38. Motown Singles - a hoy hoy
39. Stax - seandalai
40. Disco - Tuomas

is going to kill.

a hoy hoy's been a stranger of late. I hope he's back to run that one.

the best (or least worst depending on how you look at it) song on MDNA is on the bonus edition: "beautiful killer".

i've narrowed my list down to 25 songs and cannot. cut. it. down any. further.
and i still have to rank them ;_;

I realize this may be the case for many of people planning to vote ^

However, there are only four days left and the current count is 13 ballots. Vote!

Hey Johnny Fever, for some reason I keep confusing this poll and the Heart Heavy Krautrock Poll or whatever and I thought this ended on march 8th. Maybe you should get the poll closing date put in the thread title.

Any song make all 13 ballots?

Nope, the unanimous streak stopped at 11.

LOL, OK then the pressure to keep it off my ballot is lessened.

i think this will be easy enough actually. madonna has definite peaks for me. i might just do it now.

that Guccione/SPIN interview that Alfred linked upthread was really interesting.

I wonder if she'd ever write a book. I really hope so. I don't care so much about dirt or tell-all, but just to see what that whole crazy life was like from her side, inside. The inner life is what I'm really interested in with her, religion, love, success, loss.

That interview hints at so much, I get a little bummed thinking that we might never get that kind of introspection again.

I heard on the radio today that Madonna and Springsteen were the two biggest money-makers on tour last year...Madonna and Springsteen polls up at the same time...worlds colliding, or something. (Van Halen was fourth on that list--I assume it was a big year for Rockwell and Night Ranger, too.)

at a beachfront bar in asbury park, hometown boy shep pettibone is toasting that news with a beer in one hand and a kabbalah water in the other.

When singing Cherish, I prefer to substitutethe Ramones lyric "like Romeo and Juliet/You two made a pact of death".

how do you guys feel about "Bedtime Story"? feels like a unique song in Madonna's catalog in that instead of just working with an ascendant dance producer she had another female artist straight up write her a song, but it really just sounds like Madonna singing over a Bjork scratch vocal in the most obvious way. not bad, but don't really love it.

it works well enough, i enjoy it when i listen to it (and it's sequenced well in album context) even if i don't crave it that much. it didn't seem as obvious at the time - it's a very soothing, murmuring track and vocal delivery, at the time i thought of björk as way spikier - wouldn't have been able to imagine her doing that song at all, even if some of the lyrical idiosyncrasies couldn't have been written by anyone else. now, esp in light of vespertine etc, it seems much more of a björk song.

Does anyone else think of the "double middle eight" - a middle eight-ish bit that occurs more than once in the song - as a distinct hallmark of 80s Madonna songs? It's a good one! Three examples...
True Blue - "No, no more sadness..."
Who's That Girl - "Light up my life..."
Into The Groove - "Live out your fantasy..."

I like "Bedtime Story" more than I did in '95 when I was a huge Bjork fan and, yeah, it sounded like a scratch vocal. I'm a sucker for her lower register though.

I'm a sucker for her lower register though.

Yes.

how do you guys feel about "Bedtime Story"? feels like a unique song in Madonna's catalog in that instead of just working with an ascendant dance producer she had another female artist straight up write her a song, but it really just sounds like Madonna singing over a Bjork scratch vocal in the most obvious way. not bad, but don't really love it.

― luaka boppa flame (some dude), Tuesday, February 26, 2013 11:29 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The fact that Bjork's own version of the song ("Sweet Intuition") sounds like a totally different song suggests this is not really the case.

i will carpet bomb some madonna remixes later but for now i trust everyone will be voting for this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ejjk1mdF2U

I just can't.