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Thursday, November 17, 2005
Madonna disco diva
By Edna Gundersen
MADONNA’s career, as multifaceted as a mirror ball, gets a fresh shine and a retro spin with a dense and dizzying return to the club culture that hatched her 20 years ago.
The 47-year-old Kabbalah student, yoga pretzel, kiddie-book author and lady of the English manor rediscovers her inner disco diva in the feverish Confessions on a Dance Floor (* * * ½ out of four).
Out this week, it’s a giddy rebound from the stern political and spiritual turn she took on 2003’s American Life. At the moment, she isn’t protesting or proselytizing. Her aim is to entertain. And maybe mop the dance floor with a few pop ingénues trespassing into her groove.
The ballad-free Confessions opens with the smashing Hung Up, cleverly built around a sample from ABBA’s Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight). The song is an exceedingly rare instance of the Swedish supergroup granting access to its pop goldmine, and the track sets the tone for an electronic dance-pop bonanza.
Let It Will Be has a radiant psychedelic vibe reminiscent of Ray of Light. The synth-heavy Future Lovers is a trippy delight, and Kraftwerk knockoff Forbidden Love is a knockout.
Isaac, splicing a Hebrew chant to sonic shimmer, succeeds as global-pop exotica despite fuzzy lyrics and a clunky spoken-word coda. (Madonna denies the charge of some kabbalists who say the song exploits one of the Jewish sect’s ancient mystics.)
The music is passed off as “future disco,” but it really is a vibrant flashback spiked with the contemporary precision-tooled wizardry of co-producer Stuart “Les Rhythmes Digitales” Price, the musical director on Madonna’s Drowned World and Reinvention tours.
Madonna isn’t so much reinventing herself as reinforcing her royal status in pop as the Queen of Clubs. Her voice, vastly improved since that ‘80s squeak, sounds pretty and unfettered (even when computerized) as it rides over tense waves of blip-whoosh-thrum technoise and blissful snap-crackle beats.
Like an extended club mix, each song segues into the next, creating a shifting hypnotic pulse.
The music is so heady and charged that the lean melodies, which can get trampled under throbbing rhythms, are forgivable.
There’s no excuse, however, for clichés, nursery-rhyme simplicity and tired topics, such as the price of fame in How High. Surely Madonna is capable of wittier couplets than “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but your names will never hurt.”
Yet such missteps scarcely impede the furious momentum, and it’s unlikely listeners will be pondering Madonna’s self-empowerment mantras as she’s causing a commotion on the dance floor.
Again.
(November 17, 2005 issue)
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