Celebrating a Quarter-Century of Infuential Dance/Pop with Madonna
Written: Oct 01 '09
Product Rating:
Pros: Some of the best pop music of the past 25 years. Period.
Cons: Even two discs isn't enough to hold all of the hits.
The Bottom Line: The Queen to Michael Jackson's King of Pop, Madonna's "Celebration" collects some of the best-known pop music of recent times in one essential collection.
speeddemon531's Full Review: Celebration [Deluxe Edition] by Madonna
There are a lot of people who maintain that disco music died on July 12th, 1979. That was the night that a bunch of baseball fans, before the second game of a doubleheader pitting the White Sox against the Dodgers, indulged in a massive demolition of disco records at Comiskey Park, resulting in a riot and the forfeiture of the game-still the most recent Major League baseball game to be forfeited.
Anyhow, I digress. So, that event allegedly reflected the symbolic "end" to the disco movement that apparently offended the sensibilities of Joe America so much that an event was held in which records of the genre were destroyed. I would get into the obvious racial and homphobic undertones of that whole movement (seeing as disco was primarily a black/Latino, gay and metropolitan thing), but...I'd digress again.
So...my point is...if disco died thirty years ago, then how is it that arguably the most popular female singer of the past 3 decades is, when you break it all down, a disco singer? While Madonna's music may not cause people to break out their leisure suits and pull their mirrorballs out of storage, the singer certainly is a product of the New York disco underground. Most of her music is danceable (she has posted an amazing FORTY number-one hits on Billboard's Hot Dance Singles chart), and for most of her career, she has borrowed heavily from black, Latin and gay culture. Whether you call this championing the underground or being a culture-vulture, even the most hardened anti-fan has to admit: very few musicians have managed to be this successful for this long, with the only female precedents being Barbra Streisand, Cher and Tina Turner (I'd include Diana Ross in this equation, but she hasn't had a hit record in 25 years).
While her cultural relevance has waned in recent years, and she can't really pull off the provocateur role now that she's 51, she's still probably the most recognizable female singer in the world. Looking at today's Top 40 landscape, the only artist as or more influential was fellow Midwesterner Michael Jackson. Whether it's her danceable sound or her shameless publicity stunts, artists ranging from Britney Spears to Lady Gaga to Rihanna all owe a stylistic and musical debt to Madonna.
So...Madonna is leaving her longtime label Warner Brothers Records for a megabucks deal with Live Nation. What does an artist almost always do as a contract filler when they run to another label home? They issue a greatest hits collection. "Celebration" is Madonna's fourth such collection, following 1990's "The Immaculate Collection", 2001's "GHV2" and 1995's ballad-centric "Something to Remember". This is her first two-disc package, and it's filled to the brim with the hits that cemented Madonna's reputation as one of the premier singles artists of all time.
A couple years back, there was a similar compilation from Prince, called "Ultimate". While I rated it high, I also gave it a "not recommended". Why? Because I thought (and still think) that Prince is an artist who gets short shrift if you just pay attention to his singles. In order to appreciate his genius, you need to listen to albums like "Dirty Mind", "Sign O' the Times", "Purple Rain" and "1999" in their entirety. While, as I said in the last paragraph, Madonna is an excellent singles artist, there's no one Madonna album that is absolutely essential. Actually, aside from her first two albums, "Like a Prayer", and maybe "Bedtime Stories" (I'm on the fence about "Ray of Light"), not much in Madge's album catalog is even better than average. Point being that a singles collection serves Madonna well.
Casual fans can't really argue with the song selection here. "Celebration" serves as basically an Idiot's Guide to Madonna. Starting with 1982's "Everybody", the song that introduced urban New Yorkers to Madonna (everyone else caught up a year or so later), the set reels through an incredible 27-year run of hits. You get effervescent, chirpy disco such as her first hit "Holiday", "Lucky Star" and the immortal "Into the Groove", state-of-the-art attention getting Eighties pop in the form of "Like a Virgin" and "Material Girl", confident, brassy declarations like "Open Your Heart" and "Papa Don't Preach", hip-hop influenced jams like "Erotica", "Justify My Love" (a song built on top of a Public Enemy sample) and "Secret", and modern electro-pop like "Music" and "Ray of Light". Madge even gets sensitive and throws a ballad into the proceedings every once in a while, like "Live To Tell" or "Crazy for You". Of course, it wouldn't be a Madonna record without a healthy serving of smut. Madge is both loved and reviled for being very open about her sexual desires, an act that was certainly taboo of women prior to her arrival on the scene. Songs like "Erotica", "Justify My Love" and the sleazy-rock masterpiece "Burning Up" are almost explicit in their carnal overheatedness.
One thing you can say about Madonna's music is that it's always excellently produced. Starting out with genius boardmen like Reggie Lucas (who worked with Miles Davis in the mid-Seventies) and Nile Rodgers (the architect behind Chic), she gradually grew into co-producing virtually all her music since 1986, and her collaborators have been picked from a variety of genres over the years. Whether performing the majestic ballad "Take a Bow" with Babyface, singing the trippy Sixties throwback "Beautiful Stranger" with William Orbit, moaning "Justify My Love" with help from Lenny Kravitz, or strutting through the determined, purposeful "4 Minutes" with Justin Timberlake and Timbaland, there's no denying the lady's pop smarts. Although her songwriting is sometimes gratingly simplistic (particularly in her early work like "Holiday" and "Lucky Star"), she knows her way around a hook (how many Madonna songs have become complete earworms over the years?), and her lyricism has become more nuanced and meaningful over time. For proof, you can check out the aforementioned "Take a Bow" or the regretful kiss-off "Miles Away" (for my money, the best song on last year's mediocre "Hard Candy").
Despite the pop perfection, there are a couple of things that irritate about "Celebration". First off, there's the two new songs. "Celebration" is a contemporary dance-by-numbers song which sounds like something left on the studio floor during sessions from any Madonna album of the past decade, while "Revolver", even worse, sounds like a Britney Spears leftover. You know things are bad when the teacher starts following the students-and not a particularly good one at that. This song is a baldfaced attempt to compete with 2009 Top 40 radio, utilizing ever-so-trendy things like Auto-Tune (weird for Madonna, as she's never had a particularly warm voice anyway), and Lil Wayne, who delivers a perfunctory 16 bars. Something tells me he just did this one for the paycheck.
Then there's the clunkers. Hey, everyone has a hit or two that doesn't rank anywhere near their best work. I'd be OK if I never had to hear the cheezy "La Isla Bonita" again. This song was originally offered to Michael Jackson. I'm glad he had the good sense to pass on it. The frantic "Ray of Light" was always a little too dissonant for my tastes, and "Don't Tell Me" worked much better in it's original incarnation, as a country/folk/rock tune written and recorded by Joe Henry (who also happens to be Madge's brother-in-law).
One quibble some fans may have actually turns out to partially correct a beef I had with "The Immaculate Collection". On "Immaculate", many of the songs were remixed, sped up or badly edited. On "Celebration", there's a fair amount of nipping and tucking going on as well, although virtually all of it is for the better. "Into the Groove" thankfully gets included in its' full album version-the repeated "now I know you're mine" part of the song was edited out of the "Immaculate" version, and it's the best part of the song! "4 Minutes" gets the instrumental coda chopped off (perhaps to squeeze one extra song in, as Disc 1 stops just short of a CD's 80-minute capacity). "Express Yourself" is included in it's house-remixed version instead of the inferior album version, and "Holiday"'s single edit (shorter intro) is used.
While I think "Celebration" contains a pretty good representation of Madonna's work, it's almost astonishing to consider that so much of her popular (if not all good) material was left OFF this set. Most people wouldn't have minded seeing the bouncy-but-boring "Sorry", the wretched "Hollywood" (from the forgettable "American Life" project) and the relatively unknown (though, again, it's one of Madonna's best-written songs) "Miles Away" voted off. Wanna know what could been included in those songs' place? How about...
"Angel" "True Blue" "Causing a Commotion" "Oh Father" "Keep it Together" "Hanky Panky" "Rescue Me" "Deeper & Deeper" "Rain" "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" "You'll See" "You Must Love Me" "The Power of Goodbye" "I'll Remember" "This Used to Be My Playground"
Wanna know something crazy? These were ALL Top 20 pop hits! How many artists can make a double-CD hits package, with very little chaff, and leave off FIFTEEN Top 20 hits? That alone should prove Madonna's absolute mastery of the pop single. Face it, whether you like her or hate her (and even I'll admit that I've been disgusted by some of her publicity stunts like the Britney/Christina kiss, which I felt was unnecessary and exploitative), you've gotta give the chick props. Anyone can be a flash in the pan, but if you're gonna stick around for a quarter-century, you've gotta have pretty sizable talent. Good marketing can only last for so long.
Anyway, "Celebration" encapsulates everything great about Madonna. Whether it's the immense joy that emanates from her earliest music, the ballsiness and brassiness of some of her most daring work, or just her tantalizing mixture of pop, R&B, and various forms of dance music (electronica, trance, house, freestyle), this album is a virtual primer on how pop music has been made in the past three decades. While it's nice to have but not essential if you're a die-hard (because you probably have all the good albums and can buy the stray good singles a la carte), anyone who even has an inkling of checking out the best of American pop music should have this album in their collections.
Wonder how many of those disco demolishers turned out to be Madonna fans?
"Celebration" by Madonna (note: this is the 2-disc version. There is also a single-disc distillation which is ridiculously incomplete and thus not recommended) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Track Listing: Disc One: Hung Up/Music/Vogue/4 Minutes/Holiday/Everybody/Like a Virgin/Into the Groove/Like a Prayer/Ray of Light/Sorry/Express Yourself/Open Your Heart/Borderline/Secret/Erotica/Justify My Love/Revolver
Disc Two: Dress You Up/Material Girl/La Isla Bonita/Papa Don't Preach/Lucky Star/Burning Up/Crazy for You/Who's That Girl/Frozen/Miles Away/Take a Bow/Live to Tell/Beautiful Stranger/Hollywood/Die Another Day/Don't Tell Me/Cherish/Celebration
Disc-1 Track Listing1. Hung Up2. Music3. Vogue4. 4 Minutes5. Holiday6. Everybody7. Like A Virgin8. Into The Groove9. Like A Prayer10. Ray Of Light11. ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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