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

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).

Ok voted!!!

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

I get this, and was thinking along the same lines: I came into an awareness of pop music and MTV right around the time that the Prayer singles were cycling through--Express Yourself, Cherish, Oh Father, and then not long afterward, Vogue which was one of the first cassingles I ever owned--and, I mean, she was just everywhere. It was basically the peak of her cultural dominance. Anyways, having been thumbing through her discography the last week or so, it does kind of blow my mind that that sort of omnipresence was achieved p much over the course of three albums, and just how much bigger a part of her career has been the sort of long and gradual decline since then (not to dismiss Erotica or Bedtime Stories)

Will votes for remixes in the top 20 tracks count as individual entries or will they be folded in with the original? Important wrt/Stuart Price remixes of later-day stuff, heh.

xp I'm often struck by how short imperial phases are: two massive albums, three at a push. There's a poignant quote from Prince where he says one reason he couldn't enjoy Purple Rain's success was because he knew it was unrepeatable.

In Madonna's case the sales are surprising in that it felt (to me anyway) like she was the centre of the pop universe circa Like a Prayer and Blond Ambition but LAP sold 10m less worldwide than True Blue and about the same as Ray of Light and Music.

Was some of that attributable to backlash? I'm guessing her star was arguably higher c. LAP but at that point so was her opposition.

ballot sent!

mine too

fuck, I forgot to include "The Goonies 'R' Good Enough"! Johnny fever, can you add that in somewhere? Scratch out "Borderline" or something, I don't give a shit.

Um

haha i couldn't figure out if that was an oblique joke or not

that's cyndi lauper fwiw, how's life

xxxp @DL Not backlash at all, I don't think. LAP seemed like a mature comeback album at the time. Contrast that with the previous two, which in my experience were owned by almost every teenager. "bought mostly by adults" vs "bought by most kids"

Sorry, @Eric H, I mean.

xxp: Borderline's my #1, btw.

ballot sent

or #2

Was some of that attributable to backlash? I'm guessing her star was arguably higher c. LAP but at that point so was her opposition.

from its contemporaneous reviews, quite the opposite: she finally won over the Rolling Stone bloc.

Will votes for remixes in the top 20 tracks count as individual entries or will they be folded in with the original? Important wrt/Stuart Price remixes of later-day stuff, heh.

Remixes are a sub poll. Any votes for a remix in the standard part of a ballot will just be folded into its parent track.

Up to 27 ballots now. Keep them coming!

Have not quite finished reading this thread, just wanted to put this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXsrM9pk5HY

^^vv important part of my adolescence