Like A Virgin - Madonna (CD 2001)

(Disclaimer: Those looking for a brief description of the album will find what their looking for in the "Album Overview" section. The section titled "Detailed Track Discussion" is meant only for those who want to read detailed descriptions of the songs, and they do not constitute the essence of this review. Lastly and most importantly, this review is not necessarily written by the point of view of a Madonna fan.)

Introduction:

This is where Madonna gets all serious. Why don't you just shoot me?

Track Listing:

Material Girl B+
Angel B+
Like a Virgin A-
Over & Over D
Love Don't Live Here Anymore D+
Dress You Up (In My Love) D+
Shoo-Bee-Doo D
Pretender F
Stay D
Like a Virgin (re-mix)
Materian Girl (re-mix)

Overall Score: 2/5

Review Body:

Saying that I'm not a Madonna fan is an understatement. I loathe Madonna. This is coming from the same person who claims ABBA to be one of his favorite bands and thinks that Kylie Minogue's SAW albums have some merit. This is how much I hate Madonna.

Basically all this album is good for is the three hits. Luckily, they're the first three songs on the album, so this give you a convenient time and place to turn off the album! David Bowie did a similar thing a year earlier with his mammoth pop hit Let's Dance... pretty much everything after the third track wasn't worth listening to. So the question is, are Madonna's three mammoth pop hits worth the price of this album? If you can find this album for $1.99, then I'd say yes. Otherwise, don't waste your hard earned cash.

I used to like "Material Girls" a lot, but there's a problem with a track when it drags on for six minutes and there's only enough inertia for three. I mean, it wouldn't even have made a great three minute track! It has a nice, bubble-gum-pop melody, but that's basically it. The instrumentation is hella boring ... how they make an '80s synth-heavy song boring when I find the genre personally irresistible is worthy of Evil.

This also marks the period in Madonna's career when she's getting serious about her work. Her self-titled debut album was full of great, happy-go-lucky moods, and Madonna delivered carefree and charmingly imperfect vocal performances. Here, she's really trying hard to cement her serious image ... as if her work was worth getting serious over ...

All of that said, this is one of her career highlights.

Track Reviews:

And Madonna's kitsch classic "Material Girl" starts things off on the, um, right foot. The hooks are alright although the chord changes are awfully boring. I guess that we come to expect that sort of thing from studio songwriters! The hooks are fairly solid, and the melody is pretty memorable. The instrumentation is surprisingly sparse for such a pop hit although, that groove gets quite old after awhile. Madonna's yelps are kind of cute at least ... cute like that dress she's wearing on the cover. Those robotic choruses repeating "Liv-ing-in-a-material-world" is also cute, but it's just another novelty that gets overused here.

"Angel" is one minute too long. This track really isn't that bad other than Madonna doesn't change the tone of it AT ALL. There's one groove and doesn't change at all from fade-in to fade-out. It's just another one of those faceless '80s tracks that's in-one-ear-out-the-other. The melody is alright, though, so it deserves some credit. The instrumentation is dated in a bad way, but still fun for all the boring '80s awesomeness anybody ever cared about during that stupid decade.

"Like a Virgin" is basically a rip off of "Billie Jean" (does anyone else think so?). Anyway, this is the best song on the album by far, really. The melody is easily the catchiest and the groove is their nicest. They're so freaking unambitious, though --- they continue to keep that boring old tone throughout the track. But at least this melody and groove had enough inertia to keep it going for that long. Nice job for once. Be sure you thank Michael Jackson.

Now we're traversing into real banal territory. She already has three hits. Why write anything else of value? "Over & Over" doesn't have a catchy melody whatsoever, which renders it effectively useless. The groove grows boring after 10 seconds, and I want to beat my head in through my neckhole after awhile.

As if it couldn't get any worse, Madonna follows that up with "Love Don't Live Here Anymore." It begins rather promisingly, with a quiet groove that sounds like it's being played by a Commodore 64. But what emerges is a completely boring and toneless ballad. The stringed instrumentation and a small choir seemed to try to give the effort some body, but the choir is clumsy, and the strings don't do nearly enough to make up for any of that. Whoever composed this was boring!!! It gets a little better when the drums pipe up, but that seemed more like an afterthought ---- like the composer new that the arrangement was boring, so he/she just threw some drums in there. Boring, boring, boring... I am giving a boost in the points, though, because the development is quite a bit more advanced than other Madonna tracks.

"Dress You Up (In My Love)" is poppier and somehow better because of that. There's a few nice points in the melody, but it really didn't have much to begin with. To prove these guys had no ideas, they strip everything down bare in the middle of the track to just the drums. The drums continue to play what it was always playing. They didn't put an instrumental solo in there or anything. The half-wits!! There's another section with a guitar solo, but they didn't take it too far. This track loses even more points for being the longest on the album when it only had enough ideas for two minutes.

More of that '80s blandness is here with "Shoo-Bee-Doo," which has to (for some reason) exist. The chord changes are boring and have probably been done about 8 billion times before. The melody is fine the first five times she repeats it, but there's only so much you can repeat a mediocre hook before it starts to eat at you like battery acid. This song has a brief sax solo in it ... well that's worth something.

Ah, my braaaaaaaaaaain!!!!!! "Pretender" is so boring that it drives me crazy. It all starts with that stupid riff that we hear on those vibe-type instruments. The bass-line is so regular and boring ... it's eating right into me ....... Madonna certainly doesn't sing a melody worth much of anything. You'd think they would do something like ... I don't know ... CREATIVE. But that's too much to ask. Why do people buy Madonna albums? How can they settle for this mediocrity? It probably only took 30 minutes for them to write this stupid song.

Nope. Madonna doesn't end her crapperpiece with anything worth remembering. "Stay" is another faceless '80s track. You'd at least hope that she would get some consistently nice melodies to work with, but I guess that's not important if you have an unmatchable PR department. Who needs melodies if everyone's going to buy your stuff because of your image? This is why Madonna sucks. She doesn't care about her music --- she just cares about the money she makes from it. Case closed.

BONUS TRACKS:

Other versions of "Like a Virgin" and "Material Girls" ... they're quite a bit worse than the original versions because they're so lengthy. Just stick with the single versions.

Concluding Remarks:

Madonna was/is able to squeeze quite a lot of money out of consumers. The consumers must think they're buying great music, but really they're buying a great image. Take the woman away from the music and you get a couple good hits and a whole lotta banal filler. Even the hits were laced with unnecessary filler.