Don't go for second best, baby. Put your ILM ARTIST POLL #31: MADONNA to the test.

I just don't like people telling me to "come on" anything.

i dunno, i followed the instructions of "Come On Eileen" and was pretty happy with the results

unless it's a husband, wife, or Quiet Riot.

I like how Shep basically took all of the things that made "Vogue" worked and then beat them into a bloody, misshapen pulp, almost like he was parodying himself

was he one of main innovators of that pumped up robotic dance sound of the C+C Music Factory era or did it all kind of just happen without too much influence from any one individual?

see also "get to it"

was he one of main innovators of that pumped up robotic dance sound of the C+C Music Factory era or did it all kind of just happen without too much influence from any one individual?

He was one of the main players at the time; I don't know if I would necessarily call him an innovator of that sound just because I don't know the trajectories of all of the producers of that era. He definitely was one of the first "multiple remixes on the single" people.

I mean, C+C themselves were produced by C+C: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clivill%C3%A9s_and_Cole_production_discography

before Madonna he was known for New Order-Pet Shop Boys remixes

C+C were definite innovators! shep not so much.

Steve "Silk" Hurley above all.

why do all these guys have dumb nicknames

you mean dance producers or everyone on ilx

Mutt Petitbone

everyone on ilx, you in particular :P

xpost

i mean there are a ton of new york dance people i would have liked madonna to work with other than shep but its obvious that she liked him and liked working with him so there you go. it worked for THEM. and her. she felt comfortable with him.

the big problem I have with Shep is that he is Satan

lol

i love so much of what C+C did in the 80's it isn't even funny. and it should be noted that they - as new york guys - produced the greatest track on one of the earliest and most influential albums devoted to the chicago house sound.

C+C in the 80s POX, pls?

fab remix of Natalie Cole's "Pink Cadillac" and love "Just a Touch" and Aretha's "A Deeper Love."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k2d6ZEzpdI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUg6ATxY2Ks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFBwYam4-Q8

The unnamed secret track on Gonna Make You Sweat is all-time awesome

oh don't get me started i gotta go clean rekkerds!!

brat pack 12 inch is one of my favorite things on earth. that's them and omar santana and others. original do it properly obviously one of the ur-texts of nyc latin house/freestyle and a work of genius. but they really did so much. before their genius chicago/euro formula took them to the top.

well, genius in the sense that they took an already distilled and perfected formula and made it into some sort of international juggernaut of inescapability. there is a genius to that.

they introduced the masses to house music and belgian new beat anyway. even if people grew weary of the jock jam aspects.

Suffice it to say, I'm on the Shep end of this particular spectrum.

"Just a Touch of Love" is a monster, though.

^^^ best of the singles

oh man: forgot Seduction.

C+C's masterpiece:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zxcU4Yxj-w

well them and black box. who were chicago by way of italy via belgium. or something.

let us not forget: Mariah's "Emotions" and "Make It Happen."

Now we're talking!

I know a disco poll is coming up, but I really want Tuomas to sidepoll dance music c. 1986-1994.

And then make that a main poll.

Superb Tom Ewing review of "Frozen."

In this case, what makes “Frozen” such a good record isn’t picking William Orbit to produce it or Craig Armstrong to do the string arrangements, it’s realising how magnificent those elements might sound together. Orbit’s drum and electronic programming on “Frozen” is extraordinarily abstract for a global smash – a kind of cold, bassless dub approach, where the gaps, echoes and drop-outs matter as much as the beats, which spread sharply, like sudden cracks on a frozen surface. They need Armstrong’s strings to hold the song together. And those strings in turn – a dark, Arctic sea of swells and crests – need the beats to sound more perilous than comforting.

The overall effect is stunning, especially when all three parts – the drums, the strings, Madonna’s imploring voice – peak together for the chorus. The sea beats against walls of ice, the song rises to its full, imperious force, and you feel it must be working – the lover must be hearing. But each time it dies away, and by the end of the song she gives the fight up. Some people refuse to change. But Madonna is not among them.

The bugging out at "Deeper and Deeper"s #3 placement still fills me with joy.

you only see what your eyes want to see

after all these years i only just noticed last month that after the kiss-off "the next time you want pussy/just look in the mirror baby" in "waiting", she murmurs "here kitty kitty kitty". amazing <3

The bugging out at "Deeper and Deeper"s #3 placement still fills me with joy.

― Cronk's Not Cronk (Eric H.), Wednesday, April 30, 2014 8:03 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

homophobes iirc

confessions works despite madonna in one sense - you can already hear the stiffness in her voice that wrecks all her work since, and lyrically she really doesn't say much of interest - even "hung up" is just a standard scenario lyrically. JLC is the reason it's a monster, and the reason the rest of the album is worth much at all.

on the other hand i can't really imagine anyone else singing those songs, or how i'd have preferred them to be performed.

― r&b morcilla (lex pretend), Monday, March 11, 2013

well see the stiffness started on ROL! I said at the time that Confessions is where she finally learned how to adapt the post-opera chops for pop ends before her vocal imagination and songwriting deteriorated.

No, it's a different kind of stiffness.

The stiffness of the Evita - ROL - Music era is a stiffness born of studied oversinging. My sister - who only ever sang regularly in a school choir - sings pop songs like this at karaoke. It's notable that Madonna typically adopts a higher range during this period.

The nadir of this era (from a vocal perspective) is "Beautiful Stranger", because it's the song to which this style was least suited.

The stiffness which begins to emerge on Confessions is almost the opposite: a deliberate reduction of both effort and range (in both senses of the word), the melodies as straightforward as possible, and nearly everything sung within a very narrow mid-range.

The nadir of this period is "Celebration", which has to have involved the least effort (on the part of anyone involved) of any single Madonna has ever released. Unlike "Beautiful Stranger", it's less that it jars with Madonna's chosen vocal style and more that it suits it too well, making clear what was there but not readily apparent beforehand - namely, that Madonna wasn't so much adapting her vocals to pop ends as relying on pop to excuse her vocal disinterest.

These eras are not cleanly divided, of course: stiffness mark 2 is foreshadowed in the more vocoder-ish tracks on Music and American Life, for example, but in that context can at least nominally be presented as motivated by artistic ends.

yeah tim otm, the main complaint about her evita/ROL period is that she was trying too hard to be a conventionally "good" or "proper" singer as opposed to the scrappy, hungry chancer everyone knew and loved. imo this is true but it was also fully appropriate to the aesthetic of ROL so it didn't matter. from confessions on the problem is simultaneously over-effortful diction, as if that's the one thing she retained from her singing lessons, combined with almost no effort elsewhere.

'Dear Jessie' fucking rules.

yes it fucking does.

It's one of two songs in human history that is actually guaranteed to make me cry (the other being 'This Woman's Work' by Kate Bush). I don't quite know what that says about me!

1989 must have been one tear-jerkin' year for you!

I like to think Patrick Leonard said "OK, we're done" and Madonna saying, "No, wait -- I have an idea. 'If I ran away...'" and Leonard losing his shit.

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, March 11, 2013 3:43 PM

^^^^^^^^