Madonna Celebration Review
From Like a Prayer, Vogue & La Isla Bonita: 30 Years of Song & Video
Oct 2, 2009
As the last album for her record company, Madonna closes a chapter in her career. Over two discs, Celebration highlights the hits alongside several odd choices plus a DVD spanning 41 of her image-making videos.
Unlike her previous two greatest hits collections, The Immaculate Collection and GHV2, Celebration jumps around instead of playing the hits in chronological order, juxtaposing her monster tracks alongside rarities and three new cuts.
Madonna in the 1980’s – Holiday, Burning Up, and La Isla Bonita
Madonna took her first hit “Holiday” into the charts in 1983 and probably thanked her lucky stars that subsequent hits got bigger and bigger.
The world couldn’t get enough of this gum-chewing dancer from Detroit who made rolling on the floor and wearing bras on the outside as fashionable as her trashy rubber bangles. With subsequent releases “Borderline”, “Like a Virgin” and “Material Girl” accompanied by an ever-evolving media presence on MTV, Madonna became a star.
More than any other of her 80’s contemporaries, Madonna owned the decade of decadence. Courting controversy with each release, she dissed the boys on “Open Your Heart”, swore to keep her baby on “Papa Don’t Preach”, counted her man’s pennies on “Material Girl” and made out with a black Jesus on "Like a Prayer".
But it was 1984’s “Like a Virgin” that gave her the biggest hit of her career, and remains one of her best known and performed tracks even if two divorces, scores of lovers and a brood of kids later, Madonna is anything but virginal.
Madonna in the 1990’s – Justify My Love, Secret and Beautiful Stranger
In the 90’s Madonna flirted with “Erotica” and Electronica, and checked in briefly at hotel R&B. The decade proved more difficult for the “Material Girl” who shed the bra-on-the-outside look for no bra, or anything else, at all.
After the release of The Immaculate Collection, which included new track “Justify My Love” – a controversial song co-credited to Lenny Kravitz, Madonna bared it all in a nudie book called Sex, used as a tie-in to her latest reincarnation, Dita, an S&M dominatrix persona she inhabited for Erotica, single and album.
Critics panned her harder than before, but ever the chameleon, Madonna returned a few years later with “Take a Bow” a gentle Babyface-produced R&B ballad which skyrocketed to number one, giving her another number one smash, her biggest since “Like a Virgin”.
Dropping Dita for Evita, Madonna took singing lessons and brought “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” back to the pop charts. From there she teamed up with chilly electronica producer William Orbit and released arguably the best record of her career, Ray of Light. The singles “Frozen”, “The Power of Goodbye” and the title track, brought a renewed interest in Madonna and thrust electronica into the forefront of mainstream radio.
Capping off the decade, Madonna covered “American Pie” a huge hit surprisingly absent from Celebration, and played coy with the bouncy “Beautiful Stranger”.
Madonna in the 2000’s – Music, Hung Up and 4 Minutes
While the average shelf-life of a pop star equals “4 Minutes”, in 2000, after conquering two decades, Madonna brought her Music - a hard-hitting electronic album produced by French knob-turner Mirwais along with William Orbit.
At 40, she released one of her best singles to date “Don’t Tell Me” and proved that even a newly married mother of two can kick it on the dancefloor and have a number one album.
After the huge success of Music, however, Madonna found a rough patch with American Life, but returned to her dancefloor roots with Confessions on a Dancefloor. By this time though, American radio had turned its back on the Queen, and her songs fared better in European markets.
In 2008 Madonna released Hard Candy, a Timbaland-produced neo-hip hop album spliced with dance and redundant raps from the likes of Kanye West. To fans it was a disappointment and besides the Justin Timberlake duet “4 Minutes”, and the near-perfect “Give it to Me”, it didn’t contain many hits.
Die Another Day
There’s a scene in the 1990 documentary Truth or Dare where Madonna’s back up singers joke about how she would still be singing “Like A Virgin” in her middle age.
And now that time has come.
For the better part of her impressive career Madonna didn’t chase styles – she created them. Her cutting edge dance/pop fused with eyebrow-raising lyrics made her the talk of the pop culture world.
Her latest collaborations, including the Paul Oakenfold-produced title track and new song “Revolver” show that while she’s still able to make great dance records, she’ll never recapture the spirit of naughtiness and controversy she did on most of the songs found on this greatest hits package.
Celebration closes a chapter and a decade – what Madonna does next is anyone’s guess.
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