Madonna's Hard Candy

A half-centenarian provides more porny pop excellence

A A A Comments (1) By Miles Marshall Lewis Tuesday, May 6 2008

On the cover of her 11th studio album (and point finale for her longtime label), Madonna's got her legs spread again. Remember Cher in her fishnet body-stocking/G-string swimsuit from the aptly titled "If I Could Turn Back Time" video? She was 43. When I was in junior high, virginal B-boys used to talk about sexing Tina Turner (older than our moms, sure, but those legs!) back when Private Dancer was new. She was 45. Now Madonna's back, gyrating her crotch in our faces like she has for the past 26 years, with so much swagger that we still don't mind. This summer, Madonna Louise Ciccone Ritchie turns 50.

What with Nate "Danja" Hills, Pharrell Williams, Justin Timberlake, and Timbaland producing, Hard Candy sounds like a hiphop-flavored sayonara album to Madonna's youth: With more adultish records like Music and American Life already to her credit, it's hard (but not impossible) to imagine her trying to deliver any more danceable pop albums into her fifties. Hiphop is so omnipresent a sound in general that this album is arguably no more rapper-oriented than her club-fest last album, Confessions on a Dance Floor; Kanye West tosses in some playfully tepid lines on "Beat Goes On," but he's the only MC to be found around these parts.

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Madonna
Hard Candy
Warner Bros.

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Pharrell and Timbaland grew up with the old-school mind-set that producing for Madonna or Michael Jackson would be the epitome of their careers—they're '80s kids in spirit if not actual age—and so Hard Candy gets their A-game material: synthy, propulsive tracks made to stand alongside "Borderline," "Lucky Star," and whatnot. "Give It 2 Me" sports snare-drum effects straight outta "Material Girl," and sonic allusions to Nile Rodgers are definitely in the mix. Snarkier fans will read digs galore at wannabe Madonnas from Stacey Q all the way to, yes, Britney Spears into "She's Not Me" ("She'll never have what I have/It won't be the same"), but the song's really about the girl who's stolen Madge's man. And "Miles Away" ("You always have the biggest heart/When we're 6,000 miles apart") is the closest she comes to reflecting on her married-with-children bliss (or lack thereof). All in all, Hard Candy could be the greatest swan song to a pop career this side of Let It Be, if you wanna get all hyperbolic about it. Now will we finally hear what happens when Madonna stops having sex?

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Come on Laura, let's nuke Tora 07/22/2008 2:07:00 PM

Monday, July 14, 2008 monarch butterfly whatever Please don't say you feel sorry� By C�ic Van der Hauwaert Attention whore chic: hard to pull off at 50 Madonna's reinventions have always fascinated me in a positive manner � from the DIY wardrobe post-disco starlet to the whip-carrying S & M dominatrix of the infamous Shep-Pettibone-produced Erotica album (which was universally panned by critics) and Sex book � causing a huge backlash with her vast legions of teenage girl fans � and from the sun-saluting Kabbalist of Ray of Light lure back to the infectious simplicity of seventies hedonism on Confessions. Nowadays, Madonna has unfortunately gone from clever chameleon to retrograde recycled trash and it's no pretty sight � a 50 year old mother who, in a desperate attempt to be hip and contemporary � has to resort to lip wrestling with twenty-something pop queens who themselves are struggling to make a lasting impression on today's attention-deficient MySpace/Youtube generation (and to stay sober of course!). Her new album offers nothing new and where in the past Madonna mastered a magic wand that miraculously took the focus away from her weak vocal reach and that made lack of identity a highly marketable and profitable defect, she now comes across as a needy high-class hooker soliciting not wealthy realtors and business leaders on Santa Monica Blvd. but a growingly fickle consumer market bombarded day and night with multimedia. For this ousting, she teamed up with some of today's most bankable MTV front-runners � the first single is a collaboration with Justin Timberlake who himself offers no more than a merely mediocre interpretation of 80s legends Michael Jackson and Prince. Madonna always perfectly summed up the zeitgeist � portraying every fad from rampant and unapologetic coarse materialism and consumer-society-driven faux feminism in the Reagan eighties to Hollywood (post-rehab) spiritualism at the turn of the millennium. Like an empty vessel, she soaks up a given era's mood and injects a zest of Madonnaism into a mosaic of lifestyles and attitudes; she excels at imitation (flawlessly pulling of every female stereotype from the Monroe of Gentleman prefer Blondes to the Dietrich of the golden age of cabaret). Unfortunately, today's landscape of popular culture is an all too barren one and the desperation-fueled attempts of a multiple-decade icon at clinging on to her divine status as trend setter don't mesh well with the soundtrack of 2008 � a post-modern amalgamation high on technology yet devoid of any creativity; a music scene feasting on revival, endlessly chucking seventies disco melodies down the electro blender, adding rap to catchy melodies of the past and relying on cover versions of the great music that was once created. Thus, Madonna delivers a slick and perfectly produced electro pop album with no soul whatsoever. And while Britney's personal trauma spices up the manufactured beats on Blackout, Madonna's dull life of horseback riding, mothering and trying to nail a British accent fails to sex up her record.