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

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

^ That got into my head when I was drifting off to sleep last night!

Like PJ Harvey's better tbh.

Ballot sent

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.

Yes but with the genereal public there was definitely some backlash caused by the LAP video, the Pepsi commercial, and her sexual image. She was very controversial and I think although it made her even more famous (or infamous), it hurt her sales with some parts of the population, especially in the US.

Couldn't just a general industry slump in '89 account for Like a Prayer selling much less than True Blue? When I look at the year-by-year list of best-selling albums, in the mid-'80s you go from Thriller to Born in the U.S.A. to Whitney Houston to Slippery When Wet to Faith--they all sold 20-million+. In '89 it's Don't Be Cruel, which sold 5 million. Just a guess--I couldn't find total sales for every year.

She also spent 6 months in 1988 acting in a Broadway play, though "Open Your Heart" was on MTV 24-7 during that time.

so True Blue was the New Jersey all along. very clever, Madonna

A New Jersey with at least two of her all-time very tip-top greatest awesome tracks.

I dunno if Madge has a NJ besides I'm Breathless.

The Stardust mash-up reminds me that I once heard Daft Punk play this in a DJ set. It was, apparently, number one in 34 countries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LtYaCm5njY

I love that! I've got to get hold of that.

I'd never heard of that before! that is pretty great and hilarious yeah. also this bit from wikipedia is o_O:

Musically, the song is based on Madonna's 1983 hit "Holiday". What made it interesting for Producer Ben Liebrand was figuring out which instruments were used in the original and re-recording the music from scratch as opposed to sampling the original, with different lyrics and a new melodies[2]

I wouldn't have been able to tell otherwise.

yeah, but Live to Tell is another ace movie tie-in where the record company finally wised up and demanded that it be brought onto the record xxxxp

"If you wanna go - yo Sven!"

I bought this. I bought a lot of terrible singles.

"music" might be the most underrated madonna single. there's so much going on in it. that weird guitar motif, the electrofunk synth line towards the end, the deliberately funkless "uh. uh."s. the main synth riff contains one note. the way her voice is distorted is almost anti-pop in that it works against what few melodic hooks the song has, keeps disrupting the groove. one of those songs where you feel like just the recognition that it would work as a catchy single is a kind of genius in itself

The way she kicks that dude and goes "hiiii-yah!"

also it contains the line "music makes the bourgeoisie and the rebel" and PEOPLE STILL LISTENED TO IT

every time I look at or participate in a thread celebrating/laughing at New Order's terrible lyrics, so many Madonna lines pop into my head, and yet we've never really gone into how goofy some of her songs are that I can remember

tbh that's one of her BETTER post-2000 lyrics. like, it's just goofy and so kinda endearing to me rather than eye-rolly moralising

I'D LIKE TO EXPRESS MY EXTREME POINT OF VIEW
I'M NOT A CHRISTIAN AND I'M NOT A JEW

never 4get

For the most part she left her lyrics at a, to be kind, first draft level post-ROL, if I were to put her first-rate lyrics beside Bernard's it would be a dead heat, and she might even win.