When in doubt, take Madonna at face value. Since the beginning of her career she has telegraphed her intentions and labeled herself more efficiently than any observer. She has titled albums “Music,” “Erotica” and, in 2005, “Confessions on a Dance Floor” for a collection that mingled personal and biblical reflections with club grooves. Flaunting her ever-changing image, she named one tour “Who's That Girl?,” another “Re-Invention.”
She's just as blunt on her 11th studio album, “Hard Candy,”. There's no question that this album aims to please – and it does. See which flavor you like and I'll have it for you, she promises as the album starts with “Candy Shop,” and she follows through: Come on into my store / I got candy galore.
That's a come-on, of course, but it's also a statement of purpose. “Hard Candy” is devoted to the instant gratification of a musical sweet tooth – it's candy, not tofu – and, equally important, to the continuing commercial potency of “my store.”
Madonna turns 50 this summer. The onetime club-hopping Boy Toy is now a married mother of three who's making a midlife job change. She's leaving behind her career-long major-label contract for a deal with the concert promotion giant Live Nation that will keep her on the road and making albums over the next decade.
“Hard Candy” is Madonna's last album of new material for Warner Brothers Records, which says she has sold more than 200 million albums worldwide (via the Sire label and later her own Maverick) since her career began in 1982. It doesn't burn bridges with her major label – just the opposite. It's the kind of album a record company longs for in the current embattled market: a set of catchy, easily digestible, mass-appeal songs by a star who's not taking chances.
Madonna sets aside her avant-pop and do-gooder impulses on “Hard Candy.” Instead of introducing little-known dance-world producers into the mainstream, she is working with thoroughly established hit makers. Instead of arty provocations, she's polishing the basics of verse-chorus-verse. And instead of another full-scale reinvention, she's looking back, deliberately echoing the sound of her early years, with a ProTools face-lift.
When she's not urging a listener to dance or undress me, Madonna uses “Hard Candy” to renew her brand and defy skeptics, yet again. Sometimes she gets defensive, and her best defense, as always, is a sleek dance beat. “Hard Candy,” despite some filler, has plenty of them.
Alongside whatever she has offered her audience through the years – sex, glamour, dancing, defiance, blasphemy, spirituality – Madonna has never pretended to be anything but diligent. She's disciplined, hard-working and determined to sell. For Madonna as a pop archetype, the truest pleasure isn't momentary physical ecstasy or divine rapture but success. She labeled that impulse too in an early tour: “Blonde Ambition.”
Presenting herself not only as an object of desire but as a material girl with her eye on the profits was one of the many smart moves she made from the beginning. By flaunting her control and her triumphs, Madonna gave fans a stake in her long-term prospects, something that loyalists should be able to appreciate as her sex appeal inevitably fades – although Madonna is still svelte, toned and dressing in lingerie as often as she pleases. On another of the new album's little manifestoes, “Give It 2 Me,” she insists, Don't need to catch my breath / I can go on and on and on.
Madonna's financial future is by no means precarious now that she's on her own. In a so-called “360 deal” reportedly worth as much as $120 million, Live Nation will handle her entire output, encompassing albums, ticket sales, licensing and merchandising. I'll be your one-stop candy shop / Everything that I got, she sings, appropriately.
Well, not everything. Madonna was getting mighty serious on her 21st-century albums “American Life” and “Confessions on a Dance Floor.” It's something that happens to songwriters in their 40s. Their perspective changes as they settle into home life, raise families and start worrying about the news. During last year's “Confessions” tour, Madonna melded her longtime hobby of Christianity baiting with her newer charitable cause. She sang “Live to Tell” from a crucifix with disco-ball mirrors, wearing a crown of thorns, while video images of suffering Africans were shown. Last year at the Live Earth concert she introduced a would-be environmental anthem, “Hey You,” that tried and failed to be her equivalent of John Lennon's “Imagine.” The song came and went, raising some corporate donations, but does not appear on the new album.
For “Hard Candy” Madonna is more compartmentalized. The album arrives quite separately from, although simultaneous with, a documentary Madonna worked on and narrates: “I Am Because We Are,” about orphans and AIDS in Malawi, where she adopted her son David. Meanwhile, the closest the album gets to social consciousness is “4 Minutes,” which has a clock ticking and Justin Timberlake singing, We only got four minutes to save the world! in his best Michael Jackson imitation. But the rest of the song's lyrics just make those four minutes sound like they're time for a quickie, or perhaps the length of a pop hit.
More than ever, 21st-century pop performers live by the popularity of one four-minute song at a time, to be quickly exploited as a single before listeners move on. Madonna clearly intends to stay competitive, and her talents suit an era when staccato, electronic pop makes perfect ring tones.
The lyrics on “Hard Candy” keep things simple and poppy, and the music stays almost skeletal, the better to reveal its hooks. As on “Confessions,” the sound reaches back to Madonna's early 1980s days as a New York City club regular. Now, cannily, she combines those pumping synthesizer chords with hip-hop's digital stutters and a precise, computerized veneer. Madonna wrote the songs on “Hard Candy” with Timberlake and with Pharrell Williams of the Neptunes, and the producer Timbaland adds his touches; Kanye West drops by to rap on “Beat Goes On.” They're all established hit-makers, as well as some of the most clever hook-makers alive.
Choosing those collaborators is a change of strategy for Madonna, who apparently isn't visiting clubs quite as often. In past albums, she used her cool-hunting radar to seek out lesser-known figures – Jellybean Benitez and Patrick Leonard in the 1980s, Mirwais Ahmadzai and Stuart David Price (aka Jacques Lu Cont) in the 2000s – who could ride her pop instincts into the mainstream. Williams, Timberlake and Timbaland don't need discovering. They're pop-chart regulars who have, separately, collaborated with Nelly Furtado, Ashlee Simpson and the Pussycat Dolls, all of whom owe more than a little to Madonna.
Madonna might be singing to all her wannabes through the decades in “She's Not Me,” a branding statement – She doesn't have my name – couched as a warning to a lover. It's about a girl who tries to steal a man by copying everything from the singer's perfume to her reading list. As if to remind the guy that he and the singer have a shared past, the track reaches way back to revive disco – scrubbing guitar, canned hand claps, brief touches of (synthetic) strings – while Madonna sings, She'll never have what I have / It won't be the same.
Which is true. No one since Madonna (including the Neptunes' client Britney Spears, whom Madonna once smooched as an equal) has come close to achieving the same alchemy of flirtation, pop proficiency, concert spectacle and self-guided tenacity. But she still has to watch her back.
Although choosing familiar producers is a defensive move, Madonna rarely sounds like a producer's puppet. In most of the songs the collaborators apply their timing and technology to spiff up the Madonna brand: the spirit of the bangle-wearing MTV fixture of the 1980s.
The sound of “Hard Candy” is partly the sound of an era when New York dance clubs were an experiment in improbable social interactions – gays, socialites, breakdancers, artists – that became a pipeline to pop radio. Pulling such mixed audiences onto the dance floor was a good pretest for wider pop appeal. Like Moby on his new album, “Last Night,” Madonna can't help looking back fondly on her younger days.
Yet along with the nostalgia that won't alienate older fans – and who else can afford golden-circle tickets for arena tours? – “Hard Candy” also taps into exactly the sounds that current hip-hop reclaims from the disco era: electro keyboard riffs, filtered voices and bits of Latin percussion. “Hard Candy” has echoes of songs like Rick James' “Super Freak” (in “Give It 2 Me”) and Madonna's own “Everybody” (in “Heartbeat,” where she sings, It may be old to you but to me it feels new).
The most structurally unconventional song on “Hard Candy” is “Incredible.” Madonna sings, once again, about happy memories – I wanna go back to then / gotta figure out how gotta remember when – in a production that's close to what Williams does in his other Neptunes songs: voices interrupting one another and switching in and out of double time, sudden key changes and style shifts from electro to rock to stark percussion, from declaiming to crooning to chanting as new bits of melody keep appearing. And right at the peak of the song Madonna sings the word “incredible” to the same hook as “material” in “Material Girl” – a happy memory in four indelible notes. Soon she adds, Don't want this thing to end.
And for the moment it shouldn't. “Hard Candy” is a retrenchment, but it's a typically savvy one. The dance floor – not the pulpit, not the art gallery – is Madonna's truest home, and it's a good place to shake off pretensions and excesses. Her grand statement on “Hard Candy” is nothing more than that she's still around and can still deliver neat, calculated pop songs. Madonna has had more profound moments – “Like a Prayer,” “Ray of Light” – but not every pop star is cut out for full-time profundity. This time around, concocting new ditties that will have her arena audiences singing along, she was smart to stay shallow.
She's just as blunt on her 11th studio album, “Hard Candy,”. There's no question that this album aims to please – and it does. See which flavor you like and I'll have it for you, she promises as the album starts with “Candy Shop,” and she follows through: Come on into my store / I got candy galore.
That's a come-on, of course, but it's also a statement of purpose. “Hard Candy” is devoted to the instant gratification of a musical sweet tooth – it's candy, not tofu – and, equally important, to the continuing commercial potency of “my store.”
Madonna turns 50 this summer. The onetime club-hopping Boy Toy is now a married mother of three who's making a midlife job change. She's leaving behind her career-long major-label contract for a deal with the concert promotion giant Live Nation that will keep her on the road and making albums over the next decade.
“Hard Candy” is Madonna's last album of new material for Warner Brothers Records, which says she has sold more than 200 million albums worldwide (via the Sire label and later her own Maverick) since her career began in 1982. It doesn't burn bridges with her major label – just the opposite. It's the kind of album a record company longs for in the current embattled market: a set of catchy, easily digestible, mass-appeal songs by a star who's not taking chances.
Madonna sets aside her avant-pop and do-gooder impulses on “Hard Candy.” Instead of introducing little-known dance-world producers into the mainstream, she is working with thoroughly established hit makers. Instead of arty provocations, she's polishing the basics of verse-chorus-verse. And instead of another full-scale reinvention, she's looking back, deliberately echoing the sound of her early years, with a ProTools face-lift.
When she's not urging a listener to dance or undress me, Madonna uses “Hard Candy” to renew her brand and defy skeptics, yet again. Sometimes she gets defensive, and her best defense, as always, is a sleek dance beat. “Hard Candy,” despite some filler, has plenty of them.
Alongside whatever she has offered her audience through the years – sex, glamour, dancing, defiance, blasphemy, spirituality – Madonna has never pretended to be anything but diligent. She's disciplined, hard-working and determined to sell. For Madonna as a pop archetype, the truest pleasure isn't momentary physical ecstasy or divine rapture but success. She labeled that impulse too in an early tour: “Blonde Ambition.”
Presenting herself not only as an object of desire but as a material girl with her eye on the profits was one of the many smart moves she made from the beginning. By flaunting her control and her triumphs, Madonna gave fans a stake in her long-term prospects, something that loyalists should be able to appreciate as her sex appeal inevitably fades – although Madonna is still svelte, toned and dressing in lingerie as often as she pleases. On another of the new album's little manifestoes, “Give It 2 Me,” she insists, Don't need to catch my breath / I can go on and on and on.
Madonna's financial future is by no means precarious now that she's on her own. In a so-called “360 deal” reportedly worth as much as $120 million, Live Nation will handle her entire output, encompassing albums, ticket sales, licensing and merchandising. I'll be your one-stop candy shop / Everything that I got, she sings, appropriately.
Well, not everything. Madonna was getting mighty serious on her 21st-century albums “American Life” and “Confessions on a Dance Floor.” It's something that happens to songwriters in their 40s. Their perspective changes as they settle into home life, raise families and start worrying about the news. During last year's “Confessions” tour, Madonna melded her longtime hobby of Christianity baiting with her newer charitable cause. She sang “Live to Tell” from a crucifix with disco-ball mirrors, wearing a crown of thorns, while video images of suffering Africans were shown. Last year at the Live Earth concert she introduced a would-be environmental anthem, “Hey You,” that tried and failed to be her equivalent of John Lennon's “Imagine.” The song came and went, raising some corporate donations, but does not appear on the new album.
For “Hard Candy” Madonna is more compartmentalized. The album arrives quite separately from, although simultaneous with, a documentary Madonna worked on and narrates: “I Am Because We Are,” about orphans and AIDS in Malawi, where she adopted her son David. Meanwhile, the closest the album gets to social consciousness is “4 Minutes,” which has a clock ticking and Justin Timberlake singing, We only got four minutes to save the world! in his best Michael Jackson imitation. But the rest of the song's lyrics just make those four minutes sound like they're time for a quickie, or perhaps the length of a pop hit.
More than ever, 21st-century pop performers live by the popularity of one four-minute song at a time, to be quickly exploited as a single before listeners move on. Madonna clearly intends to stay competitive, and her talents suit an era when staccato, electronic pop makes perfect ring tones.
The lyrics on “Hard Candy” keep things simple and poppy, and the music stays almost skeletal, the better to reveal its hooks. As on “Confessions,” the sound reaches back to Madonna's early 1980s days as a New York City club regular. Now, cannily, she combines those pumping synthesizer chords with hip-hop's digital stutters and a precise, computerized veneer. Madonna wrote the songs on “Hard Candy” with Timberlake and with Pharrell Williams of the Neptunes, and the producer Timbaland adds his touches; Kanye West drops by to rap on “Beat Goes On.” They're all established hit-makers, as well as some of the most clever hook-makers alive.
Choosing those collaborators is a change of strategy for Madonna, who apparently isn't visiting clubs quite as often. In past albums, she used her cool-hunting radar to seek out lesser-known figures – Jellybean Benitez and Patrick Leonard in the 1980s, Mirwais Ahmadzai and Stuart David Price (aka Jacques Lu Cont) in the 2000s – who could ride her pop instincts into the mainstream. Williams, Timberlake and Timbaland don't need discovering. They're pop-chart regulars who have, separately, collaborated with Nelly Furtado, Ashlee Simpson and the Pussycat Dolls, all of whom owe more than a little to Madonna.
Madonna might be singing to all her wannabes through the decades in “She's Not Me,” a branding statement – She doesn't have my name – couched as a warning to a lover. It's about a girl who tries to steal a man by copying everything from the singer's perfume to her reading list. As if to remind the guy that he and the singer have a shared past, the track reaches way back to revive disco – scrubbing guitar, canned hand claps, brief touches of (synthetic) strings – while Madonna sings, She'll never have what I have / It won't be the same.
Which is true. No one since Madonna (including the Neptunes' client Britney Spears, whom Madonna once smooched as an equal) has come close to achieving the same alchemy of flirtation, pop proficiency, concert spectacle and self-guided tenacity. But she still has to watch her back.
Although choosing familiar producers is a defensive move, Madonna rarely sounds like a producer's puppet. In most of the songs the collaborators apply their timing and technology to spiff up the Madonna brand: the spirit of the bangle-wearing MTV fixture of the 1980s.
The sound of “Hard Candy” is partly the sound of an era when New York dance clubs were an experiment in improbable social interactions – gays, socialites, breakdancers, artists – that became a pipeline to pop radio. Pulling such mixed audiences onto the dance floor was a good pretest for wider pop appeal. Like Moby on his new album, “Last Night,” Madonna can't help looking back fondly on her younger days.
Yet along with the nostalgia that won't alienate older fans – and who else can afford golden-circle tickets for arena tours? – “Hard Candy” also taps into exactly the sounds that current hip-hop reclaims from the disco era: electro keyboard riffs, filtered voices and bits of Latin percussion. “Hard Candy” has echoes of songs like Rick James' “Super Freak” (in “Give It 2 Me”) and Madonna's own “Everybody” (in “Heartbeat,” where she sings, It may be old to you but to me it feels new).
The most structurally unconventional song on “Hard Candy” is “Incredible.” Madonna sings, once again, about happy memories – I wanna go back to then / gotta figure out how gotta remember when – in a production that's close to what Williams does in his other Neptunes songs: voices interrupting one another and switching in and out of double time, sudden key changes and style shifts from electro to rock to stark percussion, from declaiming to crooning to chanting as new bits of melody keep appearing. And right at the peak of the song Madonna sings the word “incredible” to the same hook as “material” in “Material Girl” – a happy memory in four indelible notes. Soon she adds, Don't want this thing to end.
And for the moment it shouldn't. “Hard Candy” is a retrenchment, but it's a typically savvy one. The dance floor – not the pulpit, not the art gallery – is Madonna's truest home, and it's a good place to shake off pretensions and excesses. Her grand statement on “Hard Candy” is nothing more than that she's still around and can still deliver neat, calculated pop songs. Madonna has had more profound moments – “Like a Prayer,” “Ray of Light” – but not every pop star is cut out for full-time profundity. This time around, concocting new ditties that will have her arena audiences singing along, she was smart to stay shallow.
Source: The New York Times
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