{"id":39661,"date":"2006-02-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-02-24T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/confessions-on-a-dance-floor\/"},"modified":"2006-02-24T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2006-02-24T00:00:00","slug":"confessions-on-a-dance-floor","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/confessions-on-a-dance-floor\/","title":{"rendered":"Confessions On A Dance Floor"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Remember when dance clubs used to be for, I don’t
\nknow, young working people who live in the city and have to pack in
\nx-number of bacchanal hours before going back to work on Monday ad
\nnauseum until finding someone to marry and settle down in the
\nsuburbs?<\/p>\n

Sometime in the last decade, the world’s population
\nchanged from being mostly rural to mostly urban, women began to
\nhave babies later and later, and the speed of information
\naccelerated to the point where moving images could be cheaply
\ntransported to the most remote communities on Earth. The city life
\nbecame de rigeur and all you could see on MTV were people going to
\nclubs, going to clubs, going to clubs ad nauseum until… well,
\nthat generation is still going to clubs so we don’t know what’s
\ngoing to happen when their eardrums (or existential bubbles)
\nexplode.<\/p>\n

Madonna has claimed to have “moved on” (to having a
\nhusband, raising children in the countryside, falling off horses
\nand being on the cover of Good Housekeeping<\/i>), so this return
\nto dance is unexpected; I thought she’d be doing edgy British stuff
\nfrom now on and eventually slide into Yoko Ono territory. Nobody
\nwould listen to her, but her children’s friends at school would
\nreassuringly be unaware of who she was, she’d win Grammys for said
\nedgy British stuff and make millions on tour until her 70’s, and
\neveryone would be happy.<\/p>\n

Of course, Madonna hasn’t really changed, and this
\nmeans she won’t be truly happy outside of the spotlight, playground
\ntaunts about your-mama-putting-out-a-book-called-Sex<\/i> be
\ndamned.<\/p>\n

Confessions On A Dance Floor<\/i> is of course not
\nconfessional at all, and the title is probably an example of
\nMadonna’s ironic brand of humor (“Sigmund Freud!”). This is very
\nmuch a dance album, but not the kind of made-for-radio dance you
\nheard from her in the 80’s; this stuff is for the clubs. Meaning
\neverything is in repetition, the beats are fairly monotone and even
\nthe album’s tracks are fused together like they would be on a DJ
\nmixtape, a stylistic allusion that won’t be lost on club-goers the
\nworld over. Unlike most dance compilations, however, it is an
\nextremely well-crafted album that gets better and better with every
\nspin, a characteristic that is now a hard-earned hallmark of
\nMadonna albums.<\/p>\n

The first single was awesomely disappointing for me
\nat first, as the ABBA song it samples from is a constant presence
\nthat threatens to take over but doesn’t in the end (this is the
\nreason why many people don’t like heavily sampled songs). Madonna’s
\nversion claims the sample as its own after repetitive listens but
\nthis song is definitely not for the ABBA generation, which is
\ntelling as many of her older fans are exactly from that era.<\/p>\n

Standout tracks include “I Love New York,” which
\nMadonna pointed out in several interviews that she doesn’t really
\nmean to slag London and L.A. and Paris, she just loves New York,
\nand we all know that part of loving New York is to constantly
\nassert its own superiority over the other major cities of the
\nwestern world. “Get Together” is a softly sung, almost ballad-like
\ntrack that exemplifies the kind of emotive dance song that Madonna
\nis excellent at (witness the success of the Ray Of Light<\/i> LP)
\nand it’s in this dance space where she cranks out some very good
\nmaterial such as “Sorry” and “Jump.”<\/p>\n

Her call-outs to the dance floor are also sure to
\nfire up the clubs once their more harder remixes hit the night
\nscene (the way they’re mixed now is more of a soft, in-home preview
\nof the experience to come) like “Future Loves,” of which I hope
\nthey keep the intro in whatever dancier reincarnation of itself,
\n“Let It Will Be” (no that’s not a typo) where someone had to tell
\nme that she sampled “Papa Don’t Preach” (I guess you know you’ve
\nbeen around when your own fans do that), and “Jump,” which uses
\nretro elements from the 80’s in a very Gwen Stefani kind of way, a
\nstatement that will probably anger Madonna. It’s interesting to
\nthink that while Stefani is sampling the past, Madonna has lived it
\nand yet is knowingly sampling it as something past. It is a
\ntestament to her powers of innovation; Madonna’s greatest talent is
\nher ability to be just a little bit ahead of “current.”<\/p>\n

There’s only one song I don’t like: “Issac,”
\nsupposedly something to do with Kabbalah, the usual religious
\ncontroversy that is creating lots of free publicity for the album.
\nMust every Madonna album have some kind of religious song on it?
\nAfter perhaps two or three more albums, she will probably become
\nher own religion and just scandalize herself.<\/p>\n

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