At 48, Madonna Ciccone has returned to her first love: catchy, uncontroversial dance numbers, the sort she might have heard early in her career as a dancer with French Disco King Patrick Hernandez. Confessions samples disco classics (“Hung” samples ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!”) and with the help of a number of talented collaborators, attempts to create what may just be some future classic pop-disco dance numbers. On her tenth studio album, Madonna has enrolled the services of France’s DJ Stuart Price and multi-talented electronic-music artist Mirwais Ahmadzai, as well as Sweden’s pop-music producers Bloodshy & Avant and Bagge & Peer. The result is surprisingly good: “Get Together”, “Hung” and “Sorry” are brilliant. And we’re not sorry Madonna has given up the pompous, political pose and prose of her previous album American Life. The CD’s facile lyrics are easy to remember, even for non-English speakers (“I Like New York”). What’s more, Madonna seems to have rediscovered her sense of humor. On “Like it or Not” she sings: ‘You can love me or leave me cause I never gonna stop.’ Yes, the Material Girl is back. And still fit. She literally and figuratively does the splits: from retro to neo, from disco’s glory days to futuristic electronica/pop music.
WEA international

(c) that's Shanghai Magazine
Chief editor: Steven Crane
May 2006 issue



(c) that's Guangzhou
Guanzhou Chief editor: Christopher Cottrell
May 2006 issue