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

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.

oh no i forgot to vote for "papa don't preach" :(

lol lex, that entire rap is amazing

one of the most hilarious things ever, and yet it still works

insert a "but" in my last post

insert "butt" in every Madonna lyric

i unreservedly love the whole of "american life" including 99% of the rap but the way its DEEP THOUGHTS pay-off is THAT STUPID still makes me physically flinch

and i just realised
nothing is what it
seeeeeeeeeeeems

*slow hand clap madge*

It's a surprisingly good song and I considered throwing it a vote, but that lyric ... it'd be like ordering a nice bottle of wine despite the shit in the bottom.

"Do I have to change my name? Will it get me far?" why are you asking this in the 21st century after you've become a multimillionaire

American Life was the revelation when I returned to her albums last weekend. It's uneven as hell but not a failure or embarrassment like Hard Candy.

same. i really love "x-static process"

american life is like her 808s & heartbreak - when it doesn't work it's horrible and it's wildly uneven and the ratio of great to awful is not what it should be, BUT when they pulls off what they're going for it can be pretty amazing AND they get major points for ambition, for trying to do something completely unobvious and genuinely bizarre-sounding

oh yeah – it's an ambitious record

It is definitely an underrated album

Listening to Music again this morning. My god "Nobody's Perfect" is gruesome.

"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

I totally agree and I put it high on my ballot!

Last week I said "Paradise (Not For Me)" was my (re)discovery. I was wrong: I meant "Gone."

"Gone" is a great closer and so is "Easy Ride" from American Life.

OTM

i mean i do kind of go back and forth over "easy ride", the lyrics are definitely tell too much instead of show (though no way near as bad as gets later on with something like "give it 2 me"), but when she has this kind of revelation in the middle when she sings "what I want is to live forever..." it feels so piercingly true for her (for someone that's always fought against mortality) that I'm impressed she's just come out and said it with such honesty that it always takes me back a bit and even at times makes me quite emotional. plus i love the production especially the strings and the way at the end the beat stutters and gets stuck and has this false ending cos look she goes round and round in this endless bind of life

She achieves a comparable effect on "Gone" imo.