new introductory bit here.

This is a reviews page based on my own collection, which just keeps growing despite itself. If it isn't listed here, it's because I don't own it yet, or I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Also, bother your local "new rock" radio station and make sure they are playing "new rock" and not "Rock the Casbah," which is not new.

note: entries in red text indicate my pick for the artist's best available album. A gold numeral indicates the POPocalypse winner of the year's best album; second- and third-place winners are in blue. Green lettering indicates an obviously exploitative record company compilation without apparent artist input.

OK... media whore, pop chameleon, deliberately controversial manipulator, singer of questionable talent and enormous luck, rotten actress, fabulous dancer, uncompromising artist, most identifiable celebrity of the 1980s, nymphomaniac and hot mama, it's sometimes easy to forget, between all the fawning commentary on VH-1 which talks glowingly about her impact and her ambitions, that Madonna actually recorded albums to go along with her two decade-long attack on the media. Yes, she's great looking, and her frequent nudity always welcome, but can she sing?

Madonna started in the industry in the late 1970s in various New York garage bands, usually playing drums. She was also working with various dance troupes like a lot of Broadway wannabes looking for some big break or other, and paying the rent, like a lot of starving artists, by posing for various NYC photographers; nude photos from this period would surface in 1985. Thirty years before, that sort of scandal rocked the devil out of Marilyn Monroe's career. In Madonna's case it barely hiccuped.

By 1982, she was being asked by DJs to sing on a variety of quick-n-nasty records made for nightclub play. Her (mostly anonymous) experience here led her to cut "Everybody" and "Physical Attraction," which were picked up by Sire for national distribution and made it to the Billboard dance charts. Like a number of those singers, a follow-up album came as part of the contract, but something very unexpected happened here. Normally, the dance album in this model would chart mildly around #150 and the artist, who never really reached public identification, would never be seen again. Here, the album was supported by videos for "Burning Up" and "Lucky Star," which is one of the most simple, iconic and perfect videos ever shot. MTV, only a year old and looking for new talent with striking visual flair, played "Lucky Star" to death, bringing the single and album to the top 20. In early 1984, Sire and Madonna gave the network a video for "Borderline," which became an even more massive hit, and Madonna was back in the studio to quickly record a follow-up while the iron was hot.

While her first album remains a perfect capsule of 1983 club action and NYC grooves (quite dated, though still respectable), the follow-up Like a Virgin just stinks of hastily-recorded crap which executives threw at her, screaming "we need hits!" The Madonna press machine says otherwise, but the production and arrangements, all hideously simple synths, speak of no time spent working on anything lasting. Three of the five singles were bought in from outside songwriting teams, and all of them, especially Kelly/Steinberg's "Like a Virgin," reek of material that anyone might have sung. Luckily, hitting just the right radio mood, delivering another pair of striking videos (for the title track and the equally awful "Material Girl"), and capturing the vital teen girl market with her sassy interviews and disheveled lace-jewelery-sunglasses-underwear combo ensured the album was a huge hit. She somehow managed to film a movie, Desperately Seeking Susan, which wasn't at all bad. Admittedly, she was only playing an extension of her own 1985 persona, but she was convincing and entertaining.

In the mid-80s, there was a media-concocted rivalry between Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. Of their 1986 releases, Madonna wins handily since none of the songs on True Blue are as lame as the LP filler on Cyndi's True Colors. Some of them ("White Heat," "Jimmy Jimmy") are certainly pretty stupid, but the singles, including "Live to Tell" and "Open Your Heart," are mostly outstanding. None of them are as good as Cyndi's "Change Your Heart," but none are as bad as "911" or "The Faraway Nearby," either. Madonna, who had been courting controversy from some quarters for her dress and exhibitionism for two years, took it full on the chin and didn't flinch with the teen pregnancy song "Papa Don't Preach." Some months later, she was infuriating the moral minority again and making headlines with the video for "Open Your Heart," in which she plays a stripper in a peep show. True Blue is aging well, and is the strongest of her first three albums.

Following contributions to the various artists soundtrack to her film Who's That Girl? and a remix project in 1987, she took '88 out of the public eye and returned with Like a Prayer, her fourth studio album, and the one which might be judged her best in the long run. Prayer has none of the silly dance filler that tended to surround the singles on earlier releases. Focussed and passionate, some of the best songs here, like "Spanish Eyes," "Promise to Try" and "Dear Jessie," were never American singles. (Sire pulled "Jessie" for the UK market, a smarter move than pulling "Oh Father" or "Keep it Together" here.) Madonna had always outraged sexual puritans (with the best yet to come), but by tackling religion on the title track and video, she assured herself many pages in the pop history books.

Ever experimenting, her next album, I'm Breathless, was music from and inspired by Warren Beatty's great Dick Tracy movie. She totally failed, however, to adopt the look or sound of a 1930s torch singer and the result is her worst set of songs, with "I'm Going Bananas" and "Hanky Panky" just embarassing. Oddly, her current single, the magnificent (if instantly dated) "Vogue," was stuck at the end of the record. It has nothing to do with the rest of this turkey. "Vogue" is better sampled in the remixed version included on 1990's Immaculate Collection, which sold truckloads. The compilation also included a pair of new songs pulled as singles: "Rescue Me" and the notorious "Justify My Love." This video was banned by MTV for its depiction of sexual hijinks in a motel room, which just caused even more headlines.

She spent 1991 touring, with the resulting Truth or Dare documentary pushing new buttons in public acceptance of sexuality. After detouring with the sugary and awful soundtrack hit "This Used to be My Playground," she released the heavily-hyped Erotica in late 1992, an album savaged by both puritans and even some of her champions. It features overtly sexual language which was censored on some releases through chains like Wal-Mart and Columbia House. Only two of the four singles went US top 10, but it really has some great stuff. The underperforming singles, "Bad Girl" and "Rain" are both beautiful, and the quite uncommercial "Bye Bye Baby" is stunning. Some of the innuendo-and-entendre laden LP tracks are a little much though. Many pundits, who have apparently never listened to Like a Virgin, consider Erotica the weak link in her career. The album was released alongside the rotten film Body of Evidence (wherein her character is accused of screwing an old man to death and then spends 90 minutes topless pouring candle wax on Willem Defoe) and her extremely expensive, metalbound stroke book Sex (which featured a fully nude Madonna cavorting in the buff with men, women, dogs and cars). This certainly made it easy for the media to lump all three together as one calculated three-part project to get naked, talk about sex and cause headlines with a minimum of effort on her part. Regardless of the timing or her intent, Erotica deserves to be judged on its own; it is a very good record.

The follow-up took one step forward and two steps back. Two of the singles from the weird effort Bedtime Stories missed the US top 40, indicating the rapid decline in interest in this album after the successful ballads "Secret" and "Take a Bow." A lot of this feels like material she'd worked with before (the terrible "Don't Stop" is like the late 70s dance pap she did before she was signed, only slower), and "Human Nature" is strictly a response to her Erotica critics. The title track, written by Bjork, hints at a very uncommercial new direction.

Following the 1995 promotion of this, Madonna took a low-key couple of chart years. There were a few soundtrack songs, including songs from Evita, in which she starred as Eva Peron, and a new compilation which included the new track "You'll See" her only releases. Re-emerging in 1998, she went electronica on the decidedly uneven Ray of Light. The best songs are the slower ones; "The Power of Goodbye" and "Frozen" are in fact some of the best things she's done. The title track is nicely furious. On the other hand, "Shanti/Ashtangi" is annoying and some of the non-singles sound like trip-hop versions of the LP filler from her first three albums. "Little Star" is one of those mawkish bore-fests artists frequently record after they have their first baby. Soundtrack pieces, such as "Beautiful Stranger" and "American Pie," kept her on the charts in 1999 and early 2000 before the release that October of her ninth album, Music. While without the omnipresent radio support of her early days (some of the singles from Light and Music only dented the lowest rungs of the charts), it was still a successful media event, and a sold out tour followed in 2001. (7/02)

MADONNA: The Immaculate Collection (1990, UK #1, US #5, ***)
"Immaculate" means "perfect," which, as collections go, this isn't. It is a fine selection of very good singles and the new tracks "Justify My Love" and "Rescue Me." Some of them are remixed specially for this collection. However, it's not totally inclusive (the Who's That Girl material is totally absent), and while a "greatest hits" album is a good idea, more mood-specific collections (like 1996's Something to Remember) would probably work better in capturing her.

MADONNA: ...in the family (Nice 8/5/90, Dorian Graey)
A single-disc collection sourced from a longer commercial laserdisc of this concert. Not bad, and with a weird, Middle Eastern-flavored "Like a Virgin."