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

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.

Hung Up is so great. Plenty of top artists are still putting out top stuff twenty years into their career, but I can't think of anybody else coming up with such a total banger.

I voted for the Orbital remix of Bedtime Story - turns a decent record into a great one imo. "Let's get unconscious" is a good hook for a techno record.

The way she says "especially" in "Bedtime Story" sounds exactly like Bjork would say it.
Love the song though. I thought it was going to be her next "Into The Groove" or "Vogue". Didn't quite happen unfortunately.

it is a drop dead gorgeous song, i don't really care how much it sounds like a straight up imitation

let's get unconscious honey is an all time lyric tbh

3 days left, only 15 ballots cast. ;_;

Oh, make that 17. I just checked my email.

mine is guaranteed to come in at the last minute

Mine is getting there! I just realised I had left off "Vogue"!!

when i was in new york for the first time a couple of years ago i came across madonna's first album with a birthday gift dedication written on the sleeve, from sean with love christmas '92 or something and it filled me with all this unremembered nostalgia. this old town ain't never gonna be the same. i fucking love that album. i guess if this was an album poll that would win?

VOTED

just went with instinct at the lower end of the list

i think erotica is a shoe-in to win the albums

"I voted for the Orbital remix of Bedtime Story - turns a decent record into a great one imo."

man i don't get this at all. so not great to me. think the combo of nelleeee hooper and orbital is a timewarp i don't need to leap into.

My ballot is done but I have one more album to re-listen to just to check I haven't made any egregious omissions. You'll get it tomorrow hopefully.

I solved the 'getting down to 20 songs' problem by having no overlap between songs and videos.

a song I just thought of and listened to for the first time in maybe a decade and which sounded fantastic upon re-encounter: "Who's That Girl?"

I hadn't thought about that since maybe 1988? Great song. Might make it on my ballot.

I'm sure a lot of you already knew it, but "In This Life" is a nice interpolation of a Gershwin piano prelude.

I've nearly finished going through the catalogue and ... there's not that much of it? I'm guessing that, not counting remixes, it doesn't run to much more than twelve hours. Which is one thing for the Beatles, who only produced for seven years and didn't get beyond three minutes for half of them, but for some reason I expected Madonna to take a lot longer.

eh compared to pretty much every one of her contemporaries besides Prince she's been pretty prolific!

http://open.spotify.com/user/djperry1973/playlist/2S2vs563L51nG9dP85rmZo

as near as I can tell, every distinct Madonna song available on Spotify with maybe 3 alternate mixes: 182 songs, 14+ hours