The album is the legitimisation of a type of dance music that until recently lived in the dance clubs sphere, which Madonna today reinterprets in a pop production, although the pop element in some tracks is completely distorted.
Even though I’m no music journalist, thanks to the invitation of a music producer friend who thought to include me in this exciting pre release, I was given the privilege to listen to the most anticipated album of the year MDNA by Madonna. Here I am sharing some of my impressions, avoiding those nuggets which you can find anywhere on collaborations, gossip and rumours.
Firstly, I would like to say that MDNA is a real album, once again Lady Ciccone built a compact and unique art work and does not give into the temptation to use iTunes and the internet as distributors of single radio hits. This work is like a novel, made up of many chapters, written in conjunction with William Orbit, Benny Benassi e Martin Solveig which tell a story of which Madonna is the director, clearly with the intention of leading us in a new era of her musical career. She does it with a real musical manifesto, with her usual self assuredness, believing to the end in herself and in her pride of being the queen of the frontier, aware and sometimes even arrogant: Madge, you afford to be.
MDNA is a universe of dance music, but never banal. Are the dance floors in crisis? Ciccone creates a dance album (mainly techno-house) because dance music has become listening music. The Queen of Pop today has sealed this evolution of dance music. I want to set into your minds that a portion of tracks from MDNA will become food for DJs the world over to devour, but especially its going to be music for billions of people to listen to and for kids who to dance to it into a web cam in their bedrooms. It’s the legitimisation of a type of dance music that until today lived in the dance club sphere, which Madonna today reinterprets in a pop production, although the pop element in some tracks is completely distorted. MDNA starts with a bang and is totally experimental, then it reassuringly melts into pop whirls, many of the tracks in the first portion of the album are destructured , in a true demolition of the pop rules and rather contain within the same track inflated changes of direction of sound, arrangement and melody. I was caught off guard many times during the first time I listened to the album when songs completely changed face in the middle or three quarters of the way through. its pure folly, which no artist who wants to sell albums would dream to do, but you are Madge, and you can do whatever you wish.
In what I believe are her best and most avant-garde tracks, the ear’s attention is kidnapped by the facets of dark sounds mixed with heavy house rhythms, sometimes bloated and lengthened synthetically with a sound aesthetic from the nineties, with rough scratches which lash the heart, which open to brief, intense breaths of pop melodies, doled out as though they were deep breaths of pure oxygen of a nostalgia for a past that will no longer return, and therefore they’re immediately chocked by avalanches of dance floor hammers.
Although I have listened to the album only twice, I feel that I may declare my preference for two tracks: “Girl Gone Wild” and “Gang Bang. On another note, I heard in the whole album an almost obsessive care for the sound design, almost as though it was the new sound track for a mega video game.
Finally, I want to tell you all, provided you trust me, that this is without a doubt one of the most important albums of Madonna’s career.
Giuliano Federico
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