There’s a fun moment at the end of the video to the first single Give Me All Your Luvin’, when Madonna flings a baby doll off camera and away from her breast. It isn’t a subtle marker of starting anew with her loyal audience of gays and good-time girls, but it is comically satisfying nonetheless. Party Madonna is back and she wants us to know it. Teaming up with producers Martin Solveig, Benny Benassi, The Demolition Crew and old hand William Orbit, MDNA is a dose of what she does best. While that may seem like just dance music, there is more to Madonna’s oeuvre than that. Girls Gone Wild, the biggest pop stomper on the album, kicks off with a reference to Act of Contrition from Like a Prayer. The production might sound like she¹s been listening to a fair bit of Rihanna, but who’s counting. Madonna brings her own authority, creating the kind of anthemic party song that she does best, the kind where everyone from your three-year-old niece to your 60-year-old mother gets up on the dancefloor. Much of MDNA is about having fun, but despite that, this is a dark album. If Like a Prayer was her divorce record and Hard Candy suffered, one senses, from being put together as her relationship with Guy Ritchie was falling apart, then MDNA is a fuck you to her marriage, the life that came with it, and partly to herself for losing her identity in a partnership.
She’s out to recapture who she is, and she has demons to slay … The Solveig-produced I Don¹t Give A…, is one of the album¹s tour-de-force moments. Beginning by recounting a typical day, it becomes intensely honest, and is, as is her way, a telling-off of her critics. Love her or loathe her, Madonna has made her name by raising a middle finger to, well, just about everyone. ‘Wake up, this is your life, children on your own, gotta plan on the phone, meet the press, buy a dress, do all this to impress…do ten things at once and if you don¹t like it I don¹t give a….’ It’s here that she makes specific reference to her ex-husband. ‘I tried to be the perfect wife…I diminished myself…it swallowed me…if I was a failure then I don’t give a…’. The track builds to a genius, choral, almost Tim Burton-esque conclusion … One of the later highlights is Superstar, surely the sweetest song Madonna has released since Cherish. It twirls along, an open-top summer anthem, serenading a new lover with a hypnotic chorus. It¹s simple and pretty and a perfect song to sing on her summer concerts and should definitely be a single … Overall, this might not have the serious pop intensity of Confessions, it’s not as drastically new or experimental as music critics might like, but it’s fun, fucked up, dancey and full of drama. It’s what her fans have been waiting for: a wallop enough of an album to put her back up there … Is Madonna still ‘the Queen’ as Nicki Minaj gabs at one point? On the strength of MDNA, it’s hard to argue against.
OMG...only days left and I simply can not wait!!! Dear Grilled Chessus....please let the album be leaked as soon as your holy cheesiness sees fit to do so. Amen
William Orbit is 60 years old + Madonna 53 years old= 113 years old farts!
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