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

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

I think what it is is that she dominated attention so much, and for so long, that I'm amazed you can get through her decade on absolute top of the world in about five hours.

Maybe there are awesome b-side collections I haven't found yet, but she doesn't seem the type.

alternately, all the distinct Cure tracks I can find (excluding the random rarities included with the reissue series) culminates in a list of 159 tracks, 12 hours (this is missing a bunch of b-sides though)

you could say that MJ similarly dominated the '80s and his entire album output for the decade is 90 minutes -- maaaaybe could be 3 hours w/ Jacksons stuff and collaborations xp

the moral of the story is that unless you are playing classical discographies of massively prolific opera/cantata/symphony composers, any artists' discography is going to be shorter than you would otherwise imagine

entire zep studio catalog less than 7 hours

yeah i feel like most long-running artists are going to end up with 10-20 hours, you have to have like a Neil Young-level stretch of decades of constant activity to end up with much more than that xp

My expectations are possibly skewed by the fact that I'm still going through the 70-cd Miles Davis set I got for christmas; then have a separate 15-disc set to follow.

entire kp and envyi studio catalog less than fifteen minutes

What is all wrong is getting to these late records and some fucker is duetting or adding a guest rap. This is a Madonna record! You don't get to swan in and throw down, then have her come back in like a session pro.

I take it "Me Against The Music" isn't making your ballot, then

it's still so weird that The-Dream wrote that song

Lol Ismael, Rush's catalog would feel short next to Miles :)

entire kp and envyi studio catalog less than fifteen minutes

haha

I've got my 20 more or less finalized. Feel like posting the last 10 I cut, but that's bad form.

Act of Contrition - I think this works really well up until the last fifteen seconds. Why does it end so horribly? idgi.

Work is making me want to jump in the river and/or gouge my brains out, so for stress relief I'm going to do a ballot for this, even though it's just going to be a "rank the hits" exercise. Tonight or tomorrow probably.

entire kp and envyi studio catalog less than fifteen minutes
― balls, Tuesday, February 26, 2013 3:34 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

they have more than 1 song?

I'm nearly done, Johnny - just my top three to order, then deciding which runt gets the wooden spoon.

Done it.

Cool! We're at 21 ballots now. If you haven't received a confirmation reply, it's because I haven't entered your ballot into the spreadsheet yet (when I do, you will).