like a light

Like a prayer's chorus melody is a variation of Love makes the world go round's one.
 

Ghosttown was the song of the year for Rolling Stone's readers,  with just a little airplay in Italy it was big there,  the same for Miles Away in Japan  and GGW and others in South America.  Albums sales are more than notorious and amazing, considering the lack of support for the league that Madonna is in....
Come on, let's stop underrating the best music just because teenagers are streaming all that trash and alienated against older artists.
The hit is not being the teens and sheeps trend for some years.  The HIT is being a music legend forever, and above it all, making that quality music that any good listener can enjoy.

The same  musical quality. The same  intelligence. The same joy for a good listener. The same Madonna.
So much more sticky melody. So much more a pop lesson getting gold from a style that was giving very bad or mediocre things.
 
Less  mediatic popularity.  If people wants to just keep with that, it's their problem.

Rescue Me just had the typical treatment for compilations second singles. I don't know why, but second singles of any artist compilations use to  have no videos, no huge promotion, so no huge popularity.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           We all should care less about numbers and insignificant rubbish and treat songs, albums artists as they fairly deserve.                                                                                                                                                                          
Rescue Me, Like A Prayer, Candy Shop, I Rise...  they are just the same in terms of quality and  "madonnism" .   Only different popularity conditions.

Hopefully it makes it into the Celebration tour finally maybe mixed with Holiday and Celebration. The perfect trio.

Just saying You Can Dance is the  reminder of what a 80's disco DJ session was. So much more creative, arty and playfull.  A real work with all the hits of the moment, remixed and served with the author touch. Not just simple "chunda chunda".

Beyoncé is so boring.
🎵If she were a president she’d be Martin Van Buren. 
 

She dedicated it  to Rocco when they were in a hard time,  that doesn't mean it's written for him.  It's just a love song with an empowering message.
 
This reminds me of when some say  Inside Of Me  is dedicated to her mother.  Maybe it started thinking about the loss of her,  but oh my, who dedicates to a mother a song so sexy and orgasmic?  

She dedicated it  to Rocco when they were in a hard time,  that doesn't mean it's written for him.  It's just a love song with an empowering message.
 
This reminds me of when some say  Inside Of Me  is dedicated to her mother.  Maybe it started thinking about the loss of her,  but oh my, who dedicates to a mother a song so sexy and orgasmic?  

She doesn't need Patrick Leonard for great melodies , she always had it, before and after,  and  the less catchy melodies are some of Leonard's  (LAP album)
And Stuart Price seems like the  guy the legends use to make some simplier music for a commercial appeal.  With a Confessions it's enough, as it's enough of him for Pet Shop Boys.  
But everything is pointing to an accesible funny dance music, anyway.

Very commercial and catchy?   More than 30 years later I'm still  "fighting"  with the melodies of some chorus (Like a prayer, Express, Cherish, Oh father)  and many parts in Love song.  It doesn't happen to me with any other album of hers, I always use to get the melodies without any problem.  And I guess it's the same for many people:  just see how they sing that songs in karaokes or even official covers like Sia's.  No one gets the melodies.
If it was really commercial and catchy would be her best seller, 'cause it was the right time for it. 

I’m glad that Body Shop, Superstar, Holy Water, X-static Process, Forbidden Love 94, Don't Stop, Living for Love, She's Not Me, Bitch I'm Madonna, I Love New York were included and given good reviews.

BILLBOARD TODAY (MAR 8TH, 2023):
 
Madonna’s 100 Greatest Songs (Critics’ Picks)
The best songs from the inarguable Queen of Pop.
By  Joe Lynch, Andrew Unterberger, Bianca Gracie, Nolan Feeney, Katie Atkinson
 
The history of pop music can essentially be divided into two eras: pre-Madonna and post-Madonna. Michael Jackson sold more albums and Prince was more prolific, but of the three singular musical icons born in 1958, Madonna is still the one who most set the template for what a pop star could and should be: bold, brilliant, ambitious, consistently innovative and constantly evolving.    
Madonna’s rise to galactic superpower status in the ’80s mirrored the rise of MTV as a cultural force, and hardly by coincidence: no figure since David Bowie married sound and vision so expertly. Before Madonna, artists could be considered daring if they reinvented themselves with each new album; she sped up the pace to where she was doing so practically with each music video, defining “iconic” so many times over she eventually had to make a song about it. Unlike many of her superstar predecessors and peers, there is no one true definitive Madonna sound or album — rather, there are a couple dozen definitive Madonna eras, which could last as long as four years or as short as, well, four minutes.   
Starting with her 1983 self-titled debut, the hits (and controversies) came quickly for the woman who boldly declared she wanted “to rule the world” during her North American network TV debut appearance on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. Since then, she’s delivered on that promise, reigning as the undeniable Queen of Pop.
Her four decades of culture-shifting hits — including 12 Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s — will take center stage during her 2023 Celebration Tour. And there’s a lot to celebrate. For years, Madonna wasn’t ahead of the curve so much as consistently bending its angle with her gravity. She talked (and sang, and wrote, and performed) frankly about sex and desire at a time when doing so largely inspired mockery at best and condemnation at worst. She loudly championed her LGBT fanbase while many pop stars were still avoiding their existence altogether. She confronted misogyny, abuse and gender double standards inside and outside of the music industry for decades before there was any kind of nationwide #MeToo movement to support her.
While many of her peers struggled to adapt or openly railed against new trends in popular music, she successfully incorporated elements of house, trip-hop, techno, drum and bass, G-funk and Auto-Tune into her music at various points in her career, working with everyone from Nile Rodgers to Lenny Kravitz to Björk to Andrew Lloyd Webber to Pharrell to SOPHIE — scoring Billboard Hot 100 hits with all of them — without ever losing her center. She’s spent so much of her career dragging pop music into the future that it’s not surprising to see today’s pop stars continuing to call back to her, whether it’s Drake invoking her name as the ultimate superstar presence, or Ariana Grande casting her as the no-credit-needed voice of biblical female vengeance, or Rihanna simply using her entire career arc as the pace-setter for her own. 
But for all her innovation, iconicity and activism, what really endure are the songs. So many, many songs: well over 200 officially released tracks over the course of her career, a stunning percentage of which should remain familiar to even casual pop fans of her lifetime. Madonna scored her first Hot 100 top ten hit with “Borderline” in 1984, and her (to date) last with “Give Me All Your Luvin'” in 2012. In between, she’s amassed a total of 38 top ten hits — most of any artist in Billboard history, a record that stands tall even in this robust era of streaming-powered single-artist chart dominance. And the range of those hits is similarly unimpeachable, encompassing euphoric dance floor slayers, heartbreaking big ballads, bubblegum pop perfection, edgy electro-funk and the most vital radio-ready sounds in between.
We here at Billboard wanted to celebrate the living legend with a list of our 100 favorite tracks from her incredible career. See our picks below, and be sure to take one day out of life to celebrate your own favorites by the artist who remains the dictionary definition of pop stardom. 
 
Check the rankin on this link: 
Hidden Content
Give reaction to this post to see the hidden content.  
spoiler:
96 - "Sooner or Later" (I'm Breathless, 1990)
91 - "You'll See" (Something to Remember, 1995)
73 - "Rain" (Erotica, 1992)
55 - "Love Song" (Like a Prayer, 1989)
50 - "Living for Love" (Rebel Heart, 2015)
23 - "Get Together" (Confessions on a Dance Floor, 2005)
9 - "Deeper and Deeper" (Erotica, 1992)
4 - "Ray of Light" (Ray of Light, 1998)

She's not me ending is one of the biggest musical orgasms  in music history!!!

She's not me ending is one of the biggest musical orgasms  in music history!!!

Vince Aletti seems to be a very good critic and interviwer.
Please, let's share more articles of him  (or others like that).

I'm not sure if I buy that she's seeing him on serious level.  But then again, like @kesiakstated, it's none of our business.  Whether he's "arm candy" or not, it doesn't entitle us to assume what she is or she isn't looking for in a relationship.  And anyone thinking she's going to leave this world "alone" doesn't know Madonna. The woman is surrounded by people all the time, even in her down time.  She has a close inner circle of friends/family that most of us don't even know.  Her children are quite close to her and I'm sure until the day she drops, she's always going to have guys coming and going, unless she decides to settle down with one guy finally.  But that's up to her and no one has the right to assume she's being immature or what not because she's dating such a man.  You only live once.  You live it your way, and let Madonna live it her way.  She seems to be doing quite okay for herself. 

That is super interesting. And explains that when one of her favorite club haunts, the Roxy, closed down, the last song ever played there was …
This Used to Be My Playground

The jacket in Desperately Seeking Susan was red in the original script

Yes, it's this one. David Collins, one of Madonna's best friend in London who was also a very high profile decorator (he did the Met Bar actually and co-wrote Substitute for love) was good friend with Richard Curtis, the director. To think that this very low profile relationship she had, almost off the radar, ended up being a movie (the Guy Ritchie saga regarding how they met and how their relationship started became a song "She's Madonna") is proof a simple biopic is not enough. It's like every  month of her whole life (even before fame)  could be a film.

She's a terrible driver and has no sense of direction according to Andy Bird
"We chatted for a bit, and then we got into her car and she drove us to a dinner party she'd been invited to.' Madonna, it appeared, was nervous, too.
She reversed into a wall as she was turning round. She was screaming: "Aah, I hit something!" I think I probably swore - but it was only surface damage,' he adds wryly.
He rented a Dodge pickup and often would meet Madonna and follow her in his car. It was a rapid introduction to one of his new girlfriend's surprising quirks - her terrible sense of direction.
'I'd only been there a short time, but I'd still work out we were going completely the wrong way,' he remembers.
'Following her was a nightmare. You'd be at traffic lights, and out of nowhere she'd edge her way across the lanes and be in the lane for turning left, and there was no way you could follow her.
'It's ironic really: somebody with so much direction in their life not to have a clue where they were going.' While he struggled with her driving"
source 
(there's a lot more there and it's a good read if you have the time. Madonna"s and Andy story famously inspired the movie Notting Hill"

In a previous post i said as i was told by acquaintances i had, who worked on the movie, that half way through shooting Evita she lost interest in it because after meeting a lot of Eva Peron friends and relatives in Argentina she thought that the musical was not doing her justice. I was wondering if in the years following the release of the movie, she publicly talked about it. Well turns out she did and not years after the movie was released but right after shooting and even before seeing a cut of it, in an interview for the LA Times (i had never read before)
“But the more I learned of Peronism and Eva’s life, the more I realized how unfair Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical was,” Madonna said. “So here I was, working in a movie I didn’t agree with.” Her voice becomes cold when she refers to Lloyd Webber; she joins a line of theatrical leading ladies who have clashed with him, notably Faye Dunaway, Patti LuPone and Glenn Close.
“Lloyd Webber’s point of view was that of the [Argentine] aristocracy at the time Eva was married to the president,” she continued. “They were against her [and viewed her] as an opportunistic whore.
“I thought it was a male chauvinist point of view--that any woman who’s powerful is a whore or slept her way to the top. There’s that implication right through the [musical] and it’s ludicrous. You can’t sleep your way to the top. Well, in Hollywood, maybe, but she influenced an entire nation.”
Madonna thinks she convinced Parker with her findings, and that he modified the film’s tone: “Alan read a lot about Peronism. He’s intelligent, politically astute, and he understood the musical was one-sided against her. He wanted to be fair too.”
source

Okay, not sure if this is true, but so cool if it is:
I read somewhere that when Madonna shot the video Express Yourself, she listened to Tanita Tikaram's debut album Ancient Heart between takes.
I makes sense. Madonna's life was a whirlwind at that point, and Tanita's calming voice was probably a welcome "brain rest" for Madonna.
 
 

For me, OPY Extended Remix introduced me to Madonna remixes.  Before the 12 Inch Maxi was released, I had no idea of her remixes.  At this time, most remixes were just extended versions of the original.  But over the next few years, her and few other artists took remixes to the next level.  I'm always partial to the extended remixes of the 80's songs.  They never strayed from the original and always was a nice extension to the original.

Well,  album versions are supossed to be the standard, original, normal versions, so they are definitive, even tough there are reworked  single versions, that are definitive too.  Both album and single versions are  definitive and standard   That's the case of Open your heart, La isla, Deeper and deeper, Bad girl,  Like a prayer, Express yourself.  In the case of  Keep it together and Fever these are  remixes,  album version remains the only standard.  If some people likes the remix better, ok, but they are not "the definitive" , they're remixes.  And the main version of Vogue will always be the album and single ones,  Immaculate is all remixes.  Let's call the things by their name.