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Review: Madonna - ‘Hard Candy’ CD
Madonna
“Hard Candy”
(Warner Bros.)
Justin Timberlake gets the best line on Madonna’s “Four Minutes:” “We only got four minutes to save the world!”
Is there a better definition of pop as the music of possibility? Give us four minutes, we’ll give you the inspiration to do anything. The punchline, of course, is that without Timbaland’s indulgent introductory yammering, the world could have been saved in three minutes, which is closer to the classic pop-song goal.
But this is Madonna we’re talking about, and Madonna has never done anything in half measures, all but embodying pop music several times in the past 20+ years. But she’s approaching AARP status (OK, OK, she’s only 50 - and in much, much better shape than I am). She’s returned to her first love: The dancefloor. She may flirt with limpid rock (“American Pie,” anyone?). She may sing like Eva Peron (“I kept my promiiiiiise!”). She may keep acting in movies where there’s little evidence that she can, you know, act (not that that’s ever stopped anyone). But Madonna returns to clubs the way the homing pigeon come back to the coop - she will always have a home there and when an image shift doesn’t work, that’s where she goes.
So it’s fitting that she end up back there for this, her final album for Warner Brothers Records, her home roughly forever. She celebrates the transition by embracing hip-hop, or rather, the bits of hip-hop beat science that she can translate to the au-courant disco that she specializes in.
To that end, she bypasses the Eurotrash techno-fluff of “Music” and “Confessions on the Dancefloor” for the Tims (Timberlake and Timbaland), Timbaland protege Nate “Danja” Hills and Pharrell Williams for their way with a sequencer. Williams seems the most sympathetic collaborator. The opener “Candy Shop” stacks up the entendres on a subtly rolling thump - her spoken “sticky and sweet” mumble is so ghost-in-the-machine perfect that you wonder why she doesn’t do the spoken thing more often. (Man, “Justify My Love” was just the best, huh? Good times.) Kanye West barely makes a ripple on “Beat Goes On.” “Spanish Lesson” is a mess, but the funky-throbbing“She’s Not Me” is about the second best she’s-gotta-be-talking-about-Britney song ever. (“Cry Me A River” will own that category forever.)
But it’s Timbaland who seems in the driver’s seat, for good and dull. “4 Minutes” can’t match earlier triumphs, but it can equal, say, “Secret” or “Frozen.” “Miles Away,” the she’s-gotta-be-talking-about-Guy-Richie song, mixes acoustic strum with a restrained Timbaland thud. In fact, there’s something altogether restrained here. There are highs on even the most unmentionable Madonna collections. She can’t quite save the world, but she gets as close as any 50-year-old pop lifer has any right to.
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