Let’s talk about MDNA...

[Scottyx 8,757]

I love MDNA. I guess the rest of ya who hate it might as well toss it in the trash rather than have it cause such anxiety in your houses hahah

[Fighter 28,797]

I don't listen to it anymore but tbh I just don't like music from late 2000s early 2010s very much so...  when a song from it does come on, I do get very nostalgic tho.

 

[steady75 9,566]

There’s a genuinely brilliant album in MDNA but it needs another few months work on it. The Russ Meyers theme about a Femme Fatale is brilliant for a post divorce album. 
So many of the takes sound like demo of guide versions. Solveig was her worst producer ever though I genuinely love GMAYL I think it should have been a one off super bowl song and the album should have led with Lovespent which is thematically representative of the albums theme. 
 

Turn Up The Radio is so cringe. She really thought she did something there but that Chorus needed such a rewrite. The verses are great. 

Bday song and Superstar? What was she thinking? 

The pieces just don’t fit and she has an album of two halves in style. Something she said she never wanted to repeat again... and then did. 
 

Im Addicted and Girl Gone Wild sound like they were recorded in a tin can. I actually really want the Girl Gone Wilds stems to leak so someone can make a version with some dynamics that isn’t so compressed and flat. The Justin Cognito remix is a million times better.

It was just rushed and sloppy. 

 

[Nahual 599]

Because it's genuinely bad. I mean, aside from maybe 5 or 6 tracks; the rest is filler. The production didn't age well; it seemed like Madonna set out to make a  dance-pop album to compete with the other pop girls at the time, but she went to the most obscure and forgettable producers ever. I know that Hard Candy got flack for being produced by popular hit makers at the time and for not being innovative, but that album was still miles better exactly because it was produced by people who knew how to create catchy melodies and hooks. MDNA is just a mess and I especially hate the collaborations with Nicki and M.I.A.

[Fernando 423]

Love Mdna álbum and tour ..one of the Best ever!?

[DiegoLCL 5,039]

I don't think the songs are that bad besides the awful mixing and production choices. The major problem for me is that she couldn't decide if the album was a happy-poppy-fun or a divorceé's revenge. The Tour is great though, even with questionable musical direction. 

[Bobo 1,218]

For me, the best track actually sums up the album, "I Fucked Up" and even that was horrendously produced.

[MDRA 4,222]

Sad to see the pile on...

[steady75 9,566]

MDNA is the Artificial Intelligence version of a Madonna album. M-Bot. It scourged the internet for relevant gossip  articles and song titles relating to Madonna and printed the CD.

 

Basically:

 

 

 

 

[kesiak 3,033]

It's the one Madonna child I find difficult to love. 

[RUADJAI 14,908]

40 minutes ago, steady75 said:

MDNA is the Artificial Intelligence version of a Madonna album. M-Bot. It scourged the internet for relevant gossip  articles and song titles relating to Madonna and printed the CD.

 

Basically:

 

 

 

 

How do people watch this crap? Im like trying to listen to the computer voice with a British accent saying words wrong while trying to read wrong spellings ... and pay attention to the story... like... my brain hurts. 

[RUADJAI 14,908]

20 hours ago, thelioncourtheart_ said:

 She had M.I.A. of all people and passed on a possible political or social song versus GMAYL and B-Day Song 

Yeah... like.... how do you get M.I.A. and manage to get no M.I.A. out of her. No Electro craziness, no political fuck you message... 

That was weird. 

 

Also, that GGW demo that someone recorded outside her apartment sounded way more "wild" and unique and different. And we got a tamed down version of it. 

[gafuller 1,653]

I still love this era. I haven’t enjoyed your I’ll be honest. At the time I only invested GGW, LS, and GMAYL. When I came back after Rebel Heart I just ate it up. I love her 2010s works. I do agree that this album suffered because of the circumstances with M so distracted and the willy billy grabbing of demos and slapping of vocals. I do however love Superstar, I’m Addicted and Beautiful Killer. Masterpiece I wish had received a proper music video. I think it could’ve been an appropriate 2011 single ahead of everything coming. Honeslty, I wished it’d been a 2010 album. That four year music gap between albums left her out of the fam while others were burning up the Billboards.   But I loved the looks and design of a lot of it all. That whole glass, shuttering look was ?

[madgefan 10,137]

Album review: Madonna, 'MDNA'

By Greg Kot

3stars (out of 4)

On her 2008 album, “Hard Candy,” Madonna let her A-list producers steer. Timbaland and the Neptunes were hired to give her some club-banging hits, but all they really did was bury her personality. It continued a decade-long string of relatively uneventful Madonna releases, as Rihanna, Katy Perry, Beyonce and Lady Gaga surpassed her on the charts.

“MDNA” (Interscope), her first studio album since then, is a different story. It finds Madonna once again in charge and apparently motivated, cowriting and coproducing every track – and this time, the cocredits aren’t just cosmetic.  It’s her best album since “Ray of Light” in 1998, an album that balanced introspection and pop dazzle in collaboration with U.K. electronic artist William Orbit. Not coincidentally, Orbit returns for the first time in a decade to play a key role on the new album.

Orbit splits most of the production with Italian DJ Marco "Benny" Benassi and French techno maven Martin Solveig. Benassi and Solveig focus on the dancefloor, and they service the machine while recycling Madonna-isms from decades past.

Benassi’s “Girl Gone Wild” starts with a confession: “I detest all my sins… I want so badly to be good.” The singer was flirting with the naughty Catholic girl imagery in the ‘80s, and she doesn’t take it anywhere new here, unless the vocoder-soaked vocals count as progress. The disappointing Solveig-produced single “Give Me All Your Luvin’ ” turns on a silly cheerleader-style chorus (Toni Basil got there first, 30 years ago), and brief cameos from Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. “Every record sounds the same, you got to step into my world,” Madonna sings, without giving us a single compelling reason why.

The Madonna-by-numbers up-tempo romps (“Addicted,” “Turn up the Radio”) dominate the first half of the album, but she excels on the Orbit tracks. “Gang Bang” is a slice of Tarantino-like Grind House spectacle, with Madonna as an abused lover-turned-avenger. The ominous, minimalist soundscape, flavored by whipcracks and screeching tires, makes for top-tier club drama. On “I’m a Sinner,” which blurs Saturday night grime and Sunday morning grace, her voice projects both vulnerability and defiance.

Like few Madonna albums in the last decade, the album has an emotional center, informed by the latest upheaval in her personal life. In 1998 for “Ray of Light,” it was the birth of her first child that colored that album’s more open tone. On “MDNA,” it’s the dissolution of her marriage to movie director Guy Ritchie. 

“Love Spent” – the rare disco track to prominently feature a banjo -- addresses the divorce: “Love me like your money … I want you to take me like you took your money.” The Spanish-flavored ballad “Masterpiece” meditates on what might have been. Madonna takes some shots at her ex, but the overall tone set by the last quarter of the album is one of sadness – and when was the last time we could say that about Madonna’s music?

“Falling Free” ends the album on a bereft note. “We’re both free to go,” Madonna sings. Unlike anything in her catalog, it’s a woozy, almost psychedelic slice of chamber pop. At points, Madonna sounds like she’s channeling the ‘60s Brit-folk ballads of Sandy Denny or Anne Briggs. It’s a contemplative wind-up to an album that starts in the disco and finishes at home, in solitude.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-xpm-2012-03-24-chi-20120324-story.html

[Nahual 599]

3 hours ago, kesiak said:

It's the one Madonna child I find difficult to love. 

Rocco sweetie I'm so sorry.

[OhBabyReadyOrNot 659]

For me, it's just an average album - there's really nothing too spectacular about it. It has a few good tracks on it (Gang Bang, Love Spent, Masterpiece, and Beautiful Killer), but basically it's a phoned-in album. The tour, though, managed to very good, despite the mess that was this album.

[thegoldencalf 12,573]

I think the main issue with it is that she went hard on the EDM trend and failed to reinterpret it and  make it her own. Also William Orbit said she rushed it and at least some of his songs needed more work. 
Overall I think it’s a pretty solid album. And very popular with non fans (the very few that heard it). Several vinyl collector friends ask me regularly if there’s a repress coming up. 

[Prayer 14,279]

12 hours ago, thegoldencalf said:

Also William Orbit said she rushed it and at least some of his songs needed more work.

I found Orbit's comments very disrespectul at the time, just one month after the release of the album.

http://www.noise11.com/news/william-orbit-explains-madonna-mdna-sales-disaster-20120527

He was entitled to his opinion, of course, but he basically threw her under the bus and distanced himself from the project like "hey, it wasn't my fault!". She was the one calling the shots, she was the one deciding it was done when it was done. It was her vision, not his. And yeah, she was the one doing a million projects at the same time. But it was her decision.

Also, Orbit expecting they were gonna record analog and not digital in FUCKING 2011 is extremely delusional. My God.

Like many fans, he seemed to expect another "Ray Of Light" album and campaign, but 2012 Madonna was never gonna be 1998 Madonna. I love and respect Orbit's work but I think that was wrong.

About the "no soul" comments... I get some people question the production or some songs, but I always found this album extremely personal. The album is all over the place, just like you are after a nasty divorce or breakup.  We got the angry songs, we got the reflective songs, we got the "I'm free again and I want to have fun" songs, we got the silly songs... all the post divorce moods. Even "Superstar", as silly as it is, it's her "I just love my new French boyfriend" song. Those lyrics are quintessentially Madonna.

About getting songs from others... she's always done that. Always. "Like A Virgin", "Material Girl", "Open Your Heart", "Justify My Love"... even on her "masterpiece" "Ray Of Light", "Candy Perfume Girl" and "Swim" were not hers. It's just at this time (2010-2012) with this album and the "Hard Candy" demos leaking we were more aware of that.

She's always done that: writing from instrumentals or from scratch with producers, yes, but also taking songs she likes if she thinks they fit the project she's working on. And then changing minor stuff, like "Girl Gone Wild" or "Some Girls" or completely taking a different approach, like "Gang Bang".

I respect people don't like "MDNA", but I get the impression it's just cool to not like this album between Madonna fans, I don't know. 

[MDRA 4,222]

52 minutes ago, Prayer said:

Orbit expecting they were gonna record analog and not digital in FUCKING 2011 is extremely delusional. My God.

That's certainly one reading of what he said. Another would be that he explained that time was wasted on something that only works on tape, not on digital (which they were using).

[Guest Nobody Knows Me]

I also found Orbit's comments foolish, and I don't think it's fair to use Madonna's schedule as the reason why the album wasn't another Ray of Light. His production work wasn't up there either, and I can think of many other producers who worked with Madonna when she had other commitments at the same time and came out with much better songs.

[MDRA 4,222]

If Zack Snyder got his cut of Justice League, wouldn't it be awesome if William Orbit got to make his version of MDNA? 

[kesiak 3,033]

3 hours ago, Prayer said:

I found Orbit's comments very disrespectul at the time, just one month after the release of the album.

http://www.noise11.com/news/william-orbit-explains-madonna-mdna-sales-disaster-20120527

He was entitled to his opinion, of course, but he basically threw her under the bus and distanced himself from the project like "hey, it wasn't my fault!". She was the one calling the shots, she was the one deciding it was done when it was done. It was her vision, not his. And yeah, she was the one doing a million projects at the same time. But it was her decision.

Also, Orbit expecting they were gonna record analog and not digital in FUCKING 2011 is extremely delusional. My God.

Nowhere, NOWHERE does he say he wanted/was planning to record analog.

"But alas, the time wasn’t there. Great swathes of it taken up by the engineer and his assistant bouncing reverb tracks for hour after hour, night after night. Not to real tape or anything, where you could posit that there would be an advantageous sonic dividend (real tape can be magic) but all in the digital domain. A purely procedural thing. Although not a procedure I or any of my own colleagues in this game would want to squander time with."

[Prayer 14,279]

Thank you guys. My mistake about the analog comment, I'm sorry. 

[Loki 227]

I'll try to be kind: I don't like it, above all I can't stand this kind of EDM. The production is anaemic: I mean, in most of her songs we can feel her blood coursing through them, we can feel her unique touch, but this time the outcome is quite impersonal, generic, aseptic. Banal 2010s EDM. Thematically, it's not so generic as it could seem; if we erase all those 'silly' songs, which are, IMHO, out of context, the rest of them is a good description of her feelings about divorce: it's full of anger, disappointment, frustration, a little bit of revenge, an overdose of sadness, a sense of paradise lost. You can start trying to forget about your problems on a dancefloor, but irreparably you'll finish with a tissue in your hand. 

I wouldn't compare it with Like A Prayer: this little old masterpiece doesn't contain so much anger and the only song which speaks directly about her divorce, 'Till Death do us part, is just more a reminescence of the past, a bitter acceptance of the lost of the love of your life than a declaration of hate. For me, it's quite astonishing that the same woman who wrote True Blue (baby I love you) can write also Gang Bang (shot my lover in the head). I call it versatility. 

To be short, I don't manage to appreciate it, I detest the production, except from Love Spent and Falling Free. It's annoying, too pulp and unnecessarily violent. But in some way, it receives too hate: it's not perfect, but I listened to something worse.

[Bjonkers 1,570]

There's a passable album in there for sure, even if all of these aren't brilliantly produced, at least the removal of the utterly dreadful songs make it less of a chore...

1. Girl Gone Wild / 2. I'm Addicted / 3. Beutiful Killer / 4. Love Spent / 5. Gang Bang / 6. I Fucked Up / 7. Best Friend / 8. GMAYL /  9. Masterpiece / 10. Falling Free

I generally never listen to anything from this album though...