This past Friday night, I sat contently in an alcohol-aided, smoke-induced haze while some friends DJ'ed. I kept intending to get up and dance, but somehow never got around to it. That's OK, I guess, but I felt a little bad about it when they dropped "Hung Up". Girls seemed to appear out of nowhere, packing the dancefloor. It's possible that I was gushing about M83 at the time.
Madonna's new single is spectacular, it's easily her best since "Ray of Light", and before that ... I don't know, "Justify My Love"? Powered by a tremendous, unrelenting beat and the best use of an ABBA sample, well, ever (are there even any other deserving nominees?), it feels destined to be timeless much like Kylie's "Can't Get You Out of My Head" is timeless, as opposed to the "electronica sure seemed like the hot new thing"-quaintness of the "Ray of Light"-era singles.
Suddenly, scores of people chime in and exclaim that Madonna's music hasn't been this deeply soaked in club culture since her earliest records (um, "Vogue"? "Express Yourself"?), which are then held up as the best of her career ("Holiday" wasn't that great a record. And the singing on early Madonna singles is atrocious).
I'm suspicious of the album in the same way that I'm suspicious of almost every 60-minute album (so many of them could stand to lose a few tracks and 15-20 minutes). It's supposed to ressemble a pumping DJ set, a concept which leaves little room (for such a disco-fied style, anyhow) for the types of balladry that typically appear on Madonna's albums. The album is frontloaded with corkers, but the second half comes down from a massive high, the vocals become lusher and more drawn out, and the lyrics become more introspective. It feels like some of these songs were conceived as ballads but the overriding album concept didn't allow them to end up sounding that way.
But at least half of this album KILLS, and that half certainly provides an incredible rush.
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