Madonna Review: MDNA Has a Great Beat and You Can Pay Alimony To It.
If Madonna were a corporation instead of calling all her own shots, then whichever VP was in charge of picking her singles would be in a serious woodshed right now.
Despite its Super Bowl ubiquity and star cameos, Give Me All Your Luvin’ didn’t set her fan base on fire. But that was nothing compared to the unpopularity of Girl Gone Wild, which debuted outside of the Billboard 100 and, as of this writing, sits at No. 127 on the iTunes chart.
Girl Gone Wild may be the worst single she’s ever released — and maybe as bad as anything anyone else could or will release this year — but it’s no bellwether. Because who could have guessed from that ghastly teaser that MDNA would turn out to be Madonna’s best album since the Material Matron was still in her 30s?
Granted, getting through the entire 17-track deluxe edition requires an imperviousness to joltingly vapid rhymes, and not just on numbers that take inspiration from Joe Francis. But if you can put on your lyric blinders, MDNA is mostly good, unpretentious, highly danceable fun that makes willful middle-aged regression seem like a perfectly sound idea.
Initial reports may have left you unclear whether it’s a disco record or a divorce album, so rest assured that it’s both, although not necessarily in equal measure. She saves the confessionals for the latter stretch of MDNA, and even then puts a dance-floor thump on a couple of them, so the transition from Lucky Star updates to complaining about how Guy Ritchie took her money isn’t quite as jarring as it could be.
The divorce stuff does provide a vestige of Madonna’s “mature” middle period, which began with Oh Father in 1989 and ended when the American Life album bombed in 2003. But she doesn’t overdo the serious stuff here. Listening to her sing “Bang bang, shot you dead, shot my lover in the head… Die, bitch!,” you know you’re not hearing the same Madonna who was self-importantly covering Imagine in the early 2000s.
In spirit, if not genre, MDMA continues along the same lines as 2008’s Hard Candy, which unabashedly harked back to her earliest, most carefree early days. If that last album didn’t turn out to be the return to chart domination that was intended, it may have been because its combination of ‘80s synth fluff and ‘00s hip-hop didn’t quite gel, and because the literally sticky sexual innuendos seemed over-the-top. In contrast, the dirty stuff is way toned down here, and she’s paired herself with producers who do nothing if not make contemporary dance music feel effortless.
The list of songs that would have left a far more anticipatory taste in listeners’ mouths than the two already out there runs at least five potential singles deep, starting with the nearly sublime electro-pop of I’m Addicted, Turn Up Your Radio, Superstar, and Some Girls, a declaration of superiority that features the producer super-team of William Orbit (her primary electronic collaborator since Ray of Light) and Robyn’s brilliant aide de camp, Klas Ahlund.
Source: The Wrap
