FEATURE:
Second Spin
Madonna - MDNA
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I have included Madonna’s music…
in Second Spin before. I have written loads of features about her. Oner reason is because she is such a compelling and long-running artist. Many think that her golden period ran until 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor. In terms of her albums post-2005, most would say that Madame X (released in 2019) would be the best album of her more recent career. There are a few albums or hers that did not get great reviews and, as such, are not seen as valid by many. Following 2008’s Hardy Candy (perhaps her weakest album), MDNA had a different look and feel. I think that it is an underrated album that is well worth another spin. As the album turns ten in March, I wanted to spotlight one of her overlooked works. Whilst there are a couple of filler tracks on MDNA, cuts such as Turn Up the Radio and Superstar are worthy of a place in her top forty songs. Madonna started the recording of MDNA in July 2011 and worked with a variety of producers such as Alle Benassi, Benny Benassi, Demolition Crew, Free School, Michael Malih, Indiigo, William Orbit, and Martin Solveig (the last two serving as primary producers of the record). A few of Madonna’s albums have featured a range of guests. MDNA features, among others, M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj. Selling huge numbers and going to the top of the album charts in the U.S. and U.K., MDNA was definitely a success.
It is an album that was hugely successfully commercial, though it did not do that well with critics. Many felt that, whilst her sense of invention and ambition was high, the results were a little spotty. I think, in the case of Madonna, all of her albums get compared to her classic work. In 2015, she released Rebel Heart. Again, it was a commercial success, though it did get a mix of positive reviews and more mixed one. There is no doubting how busy Madonna was in the run-up to MDNA’s recording! After Hard Candy came out, Madonna her third greatest-hits album, Celebration (2009). She rolled out introduced her Material Girl clothing line. She also opened Hard Candy Fitness centres across the world, unveiled fashion brand, Truth or Dare by Madonna (which included perfumes, footwear, underclothing, and accessories). If that was not enough, Madonna directed her second feature film, W.E., a biographical piece about the affair between King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. I think all of her ventures and projects culminated in this creative energy that is MDNA. I love a lot of the songs on the album, and I feel that more of the songs should be played on the radio. Maybe one of the problems with MDNA is that it is quite top-heavy. I think the range of producers help Madonna explore multiple sounds and genres, though I am not sure how effective it was having multiple writers. The lyrics are not as strong on MDNA as previous albums.
I want to bring together a couple of reviews that point to positives, yet they seem to echo sentiments from a lot of critical reviews: there are promising aspects and songs, but there are some weaknesses and room for improvement. This is what SPIN offered when they reviewed MDNA:
“One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small. And the pill Madonna wants you to associate with her 12th studio album, MDNA — the imaginary, Ecstasy-like drug that Beverly Hills, 90210 adorably called “Euphoria” — will make you feel just that… until it doesn’t. The comedown is a teeth-gnashing, serotonin-sloughing, damn-the-daylight free-fall. It sucks. So does going through an ugly public divorce, seeing your efforts to build schools in Africa go to shit, and watching pop stars half your age strip-mine your career for inspiration.
Staring down the unique triad of crapitude that’s been her reality since releasing 2008’s Hard Candy and finishing its record-breaking Sticky & Sweet support tour, Madonna kicks off MDNA guzzling from the Fountain of Youth, cooing about how “girls, they just wanna have some fun” over a four-on-the-floor Eurodisco tsunami from Italian electro-house maestro Benny Benassi. For five additional tracks, Madonna twirls around the club with her face in the bottom of a glass, and it’s all good. She bops back to the ’60s, fashioning herself a Nancy Sinatra-esque revenge fantasy on thumper “Gang Bang,” and partying with M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj on bouncy hip-swiveler “Give Me All Your Luvin’.” She channels the gooey pleasure of cranking up the radio and hitting the road on the playful, Martin Solveig-produced “Turn Up the Radio.” She tumbles well past the rabbit hole on swirling synth concoction “I’m Addicted.” And she bobs and weaves over crunchy banger “Some Girls,” helmed by longtime collaborator William Orbit and Robyn’s secret weapon Klas Åhlund.
Then the real dance-floor confessions arrive. MDNA isn’t Madonna’s true breakup album — she did most of her emotional heavy lifting on Hard Candy‘s “Miles Away” and “She’s Not Me,” as her relationship with British filmmaker Guy Ritchie fizzled before our eyes. But the second half of this album is far more earnest; and in related news, far less fun. She breaks out her cache of clichés to gush about a new man on “Superstar,” and fills “Love Spent” with painful comparisons between marriage and money. She goes into Evita mode for “Masterpiece,” the orchestrated ballad that appeared in her feature-length directorial debut, W.E. She slips into an “American Life” flashback for “I Don’t Give A,” a breathless bitch-fest about her hectic life, only rescued by another Minaj cameo and some glitchy production work by Solveig.
But if there’s one producer who knows how to pluck Madonna’s heartstrings, it’s Ray of Light‘s Orbit. He lifts up this sagging second half with “I’m a Sinner,” a mod, “Beautiful Stranger”-like romp that combines two of Madonna’s most reliable tropes — Catholic guilt and hedonistic glee — and gives her a pretty outlet for her woe on mournful closer “Falling Free.” Singing in a vulnerable, resigned soprano, Madonna sinks into the tune’s soothingly repetitive melody like a warm bath and admits there’s a chink in her armor: “Deep and pure our hearts align / And then I’m free, I’m free of mine.”
Beneath the fishnets and chiseled arms, Madonna is a 53-year-old divorced mother of four, and despite what you think you saw in her “Girl Gone Wild” video, this is the most naked she’s been in years. Love, like club anthems, public opinion, and luck, does cycle through your system like a drug. Whatever Madonna was on has worn off by now, but a star this ferociously focused on what’s next can always pop another”.
One has to commend Madonna’s endurance, constant sense of energy and innovation. Not many of her 1980s peers were able to boast records in 2012! MDNA is a solid album that has some incredible songs to enjoy. SLANT explored different observations and findings in their review:
“In the past three years, two of the three biggest pop superstars of the ‘80s have died tragically. But unlike Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston, Madonna wasn’t thrust into the spotlight by way of an enterprising family or the kind of prodigious talent that, with or without its owner’s consent, begs to be hoisted up and exalted by the masses. That Madonna was forced to compensate for her perceived lack of natural “talent” with, in addition to unbridled creativity, supreme self-control and focus is probably what’s helped keep her from succumbing to the demons that have plagued many of her contemporaries. It’s also, perhaps, the thing that makes her a somewhat unsympathetic character, an attractive target for ridicule among even those who claim to love her.
Everyone is afraid of death. But how that fear manifests itself when you’re one of the most famous women on the planet and how it’s compounded when you reach middle age in an industry that increasingly values youth and beauty were revealed, respectively, in Madonna’s largely graceful quest for answers to life’s most universal questions on Ray of Light and her often awkward, misguided attempts to reconcile those lessons with a habitual desire to preserve her status in the years that have followed. Social, cultural, and political impact aside, Madonna’s career has been a demonstration of endurance.
To that end, while Madonna was accused of running out of ideas long before she actually did, her recent propensity to rehash her own canon seems deliberate—not to mention cynical. Last month, she told The Advocate that while she “never left” her gay audience, she’s “back.” (Back from where is unclear, though her estranged brother’s claim that ex-hubby Guy Ritchie is a homophobe offers a clue.) The video for “Girl Gone Wild,” the second single from her first album in four years, MDNA, is like “Human Nature” redux, seemingly tailor-made to snatch the title of Most Played Video Artist at Gay Bars from Lady Gaga.
But while “Human Nature” was an intentional sendup of Madonna’s Erotica period, the seemingly straight-faced Catholic Girl Gone Bad shtick of “Girl Gone Wild” is just—you guessed it—reductive. Even though Madonna’s dressed up like her, the feisty pop singer who went on Nightline in 1990 and clumsily but zealously called out the media for its hypocrisy and sexism is missing here. Madonna pilfers the title of one of her earliest rivals’ songs during the hook of “Girl Gone Wild,” only to defang it of its feminist bent: Just like Madonna’s own “Material Girl” was meant to be ironic, the point of Cyndi Lauper’s signature anthem is that girls want to have fun, but that’s not all they want to do.
The song’s intro, during which Madonna recites an act of contrition over canned disco strings, is just a ruse; the rest of MDNA is reminiscent of neither Like a Prayer nor Confessions on a Dance Floor. It’s unclear what Madonna’s motivations were for reuniting with William Orbit after more than a decade; a smarter move would have been to call on longtime collaborator Patrick Leonard to help her excavate and examine the remains of her second marriage. But while the album is no Ray of Light either, MDNA is surprisingly cohesive despite its seven-plus producers (most notably, Martin Solveig, the man behind the regrettable lead single “Give Me All Your Luvin’”), and it’s obvious Madge and Billy Bubbles can still create magic together. “I’m a Sinner” harks back to the pair’s most ecstatically joyous work—not just sonically, but vocally. Something about recording with Orbit again has inspired Madonna to abandon her recent insistence on singing like she’s wearing a clothespin on her nose.
Likewise, her performance on “Love Spent” is confident enough to transcend Orbit’s superfluous vocal effects. It’s not just the most melodically sophisticated song on the album, it’s also the most revealing, rather poignantly alluding to the tens of millions Ritchie received in the couple’s divorce settlement: “I want you to take me like you took your money,” she longs. What makes the lyrical faux pas of songs like “Girl Gone Wild” and “Superstar” so frustrating is the pop mastery of tracks like this and the Italo-disco “I’m Addicted,” a meditation on the power of language that’s both profound (“All of the letters push to the front of my mouth/And saying your name is somewhere between a prayer and a shout”) and tongue-in-cheek (“I’m a dick-, I’m a dick-, I’m addicted to your love”). When she’s not rapping about child custody and prenups on “I Don’t Give A,” she admits: “I tried to be a good girl/I tried to be your wife/Diminished myself/And I swallowed my light.”
But in case the title of that song didn’t tip you off, the Madonna of MDNA is more defiant than heartbroken. Ritchie’s impact on the singer’s personal life is obvious, but his influence on her work is just as apparent: He bought her a guitar when they met, changing her approach to songwriting, and he was responsible for the introduction of violence, often seemingly gratuitous, into her videos and stage performances, starting with his clip for her 2001 single “What It Feels Like for a Girl.” So, in that sense, it’s disappointing to see guns and violence continue to play such a prominent role here. But the twisted “Gang Bang,” a standout cut in which Madonna quite convincingly portrays a jilted bride turned femme fatale in the vein of Beatrix Kiddo, plays more like a piss take of Ritchie’s gangster fetish than a glorification of it”.
If you are going to listen to MDNA, I would suggest the Deluxe Edition. It is more expansive and does not suffer from being quite long. Even if some consider Madonna’s albums post-Music (2000) or Confessions on a Dance Floor to be weak compared to her earliest music, then I think we need to re-evaluate and reconsider. MDNA, despite some flaws and slight tracks, packs plenty of punch and promise. It is an album that everyone should…
SPEND some more time with.