MUSIC REVIEWS
Madonna - Confessions on a Dance Floor
David Allun Jones
Being the shrewd and tactful businesswoman she is, it’s no surprise that Madonna would put damage control in effect to help right her suddenly middling career. The public had tolerated her strange journey into electronica mysticism for Ray of Light and Music, as long as she remembered how to make great pop songs along with the more adventurous material. Both the title tracks of those albums plus a few other choice cuts kept her a chart contender while retaining her status as one of pop’s grandest trendsetters and most noteworthy of icons. But all the applause came to a screeching halt on 2003’s American Life. Though it’s attempts at political depth were commendable, creatively she seemed at a standstill, once again re-working the same acoustic/ electronic blend that had fueled the previous two albums. Suddenly, the forty-year old entertainer seemed past her prime, no longer leading the public as much as she was struggling to stay relevant alongside her sharper and younger peers.
Confessions On A Dance Floor is an obvious effort to revisit Madonna’s dance roots, in effect, reminding audiences of why they liked her in the first place while trying to pretend like American Life never ever occurred. Helmed mostly by producer Stuart Price, it’s an alluring space-age take on dance music, cleverly embedded with buried impressions of the past. It unfolds like a disco album with all the tracks weaved together seamlessly, leaving no break from it’s pulsating synthesizers and glittery grooves. It’s a calculated tactic that helps aid the ambience of exuberance and ecstasy with Madonna offering an icy cold, distant performance, elements of a typical oeuvre of the genre.
The first half of the album is the clincher, with Madonna holding back on her preachy convictions for more simple-minded fare that stresses her independent thinking. On “Hung Up”, she’s fed up with the hesitations of a man (“Tick tick tock it’s a quarter to two/ And I’m done/ I’m hanging up on you”) while a regal Abba sample swirls around her. “Sorry” gloriously steals a bit from The Jackson’s “Can You Feel It” as she dismisses another lover’s multilingual apologies (“Don’t explain yourself cause talk is cheap/ There’s more important things than hearing you speak/ You stayed because I made it so convenient”). It’s two sharp moments that prove Madonna hasn’t lost her touch, while the deliberate song ripping expresses her very little seen music fan side. Other semi-veiled samples are found throughout the album with tongue-in-cheek riffs on her own past catalogue (be it the orchestra opening of “Papa Don’t Preach”, hummed chorus of “Frozen” or vocal melody of “Like A Prayer”) also included.
Towards the end of the album, the focus is placed solely on Madonna and we’re forced to listen all the lessons she’s learned throughout her life. It’s a revealing look into her current state of mind as she questions the fame she so ambitiously aimed for and comments on other people’s perception of her (“It’s funny how everybody mentions my name but they’re never very nice”, she states on “How High”). Anywhere else such revelations would’ve been warranted, but after setting us up for the mindless dance-pop that leads the album off, it’s a little dispiriting to hear her break away from that winning mold in order to confess her inner thoughts. Such a move is what ultimately keeps Madonna from re-living the perfectly giddy moments of her early years. She’s older, and unfortunately wiser, and that maturity has brought a annoying desire to teach rather than entertain.
Confessions… confirms that the Material Girl will probably never be as she once was, a once-exhilarating thought that fueled her constant re-invention; still, it’s one of her better albums, holding a consistency and sense of adventure, in a pure dance context, that’s rarely mastered in the above-ground US pop world.
