MOG

When I think of Madonna I think of my ’80s childhood: a toy room exploding with Barbie’s, a Fischer Price microphone stand, and Madonna’s hits blaring from the tape deck. My neighborhood clan of girl friends and I prided ourselves on our ability to combine the hard-to-match talents of Barbie & the Rockers with the vogue-ability of Madonna. We’d spend our afternoons performing from the front yard, and using a picnic table as our stage, sing our hearts out to “Express Yourself,” “Like A Virgin,” and “Papa Don’t Preach.” Some material girls we were, all right.

Once I found out about Boyz II Men and C+C Music Factory, my devotion waned. Or maybe I was just felt it was time to retire as a rock star (alias “Roxy”). And so, hanging up my hot-pink metallic, tinsel wig for the last time, I stopped listening to Madonna altogether. Hard Candy is the first Madonna album I’ve listened to since then, but it’s got me seriously considering bringing Roxy back.

The fun, club sexiness, and pent-up energy of her lead single “4 Minutes,” carries through the majority of the album. Madonna co-produced this album with the likes of dance floor hit-makers The Neptunes, who are responsible for over half of Hard Candy’s yummy goodness, as well as Danja, Timbaland, Kanye West, and Justin Timberlake.

“Candy Shop,” opens the album with the a pleasing enough Pharrell-styled beat, but the real anticlimactic aspect is Madonna’s voice. Reflecting the electronic elements of the beat, her voice lies in between sounding robotic and sounding utterly unenthused. However, it’s refreshing to hear hip hop producers create a sound to fit Madge’s musical sound palette, which is currently bent towards, what I can only loosely classify as Euro dance-club music. One example is “Beat Goes On,” which has Kanye West throwing in a verse or two. Even with his larger than life hip hop presence, the deep, house-y bass, echo effects, and synthesized electronic bits manage to eat him alive.

“Give It 2 Me,” has follow-up single written all over it. “Don’t stop me now/Don’t need to catch my breath/I can go on and on and on/When the lights go down and there’s no one left/I can go on and on and on.” Madonna, approaching the big 5-0 later this year, hasn’t had enough, and all the up-tempo songs that fill up the album, are clear proof of that. The song’s breakdown is evidence of the fun she’s still having in her career, as Pharrell’s got her calling out, “Get stupid, get stupid!” In “Heartbeat,” she trades her faux British accent for a more appropriate American accent, with a little bit of street attitude. “See my booty get down!” she repeats.

Of course I should’ve expected Madonna and The Neptunes to be a good pairing, and although Timbaland produced the lead single “4 Minutes,” it could’ve been an even better decision to have only worked with The Neptunes. Regardless, the result is Hard Candy, an album teeming with spaced-out club songs and just enough ’80s appeal to satisfy my inner “Roxy.”